In a Campbell novel or story, one seems to view the world through the thin and shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that is just ending. . . . or just beginning." Gary William Crawford also found a drug-like element in Campbell's prose. "Campbell remains most sensitive," Crawford wrote in
Horror Literature, "to a culture obsessed with alienation, Dharma psychology, strange states of consciousness, and sexual and moral anarchy. He renders this world in some of the most effective prose of modern terror fiction: As in a 'bummer,' minute elements of the environment convey a potent, terrifying meaning; news headlines of mass murder, suicide, and rape, snatches of radio dialogue, and flashes of television images are pregnant with subversive meaning; statues, automobiles, neon signs collude as in a psychotic state; and the images that Campbell creates can be labeled quite simply those of paranoia."
T. E. D. Klein also found Campbell's style unsettling. Campbell's world, Klein wrote in Nyctalops, is "a world in which anything can happen. Expect anything. Expect the worst. What this leads to, of course, is a kind of dreamlike paranoia that affects his characters' perceptions--not a new thing for horror stories, it's true, except that Campbell does it so much better." The contributor to St.
This is a free page. This page contains 196 words. This
biography contains 2,783 words (approx. 9 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Ramsey Campbell Access Pass.
