SOURCE: "Rustlings and Slitherings in the Shadows," in Book World—The Washington Post, April 25, 1982, p. 9.

Ryan is the author of short stories and a horror novel. The Kill (1982). In the following excerpt, he praises Campbell's Dark Companions.

Stand in a bookstore, near a display of horror fiction, and you're very likely to hear readers exercising the single most compelling literary criterion for the genre. "Is it scary?" they want to know. There are other, and perhaps more dignified, standards to be applied, but "Is it scary?" is the bottom line.

Ramsey Campbell's stories are scary. He has been writing them, and building his reputation on them—the highlypraised fantasy magazine Whispers has just devoted a special issue to his work—for 20 years now, and his latest collection, Dark Companions, is both more accessible and more frightening than the earlier volumes. His recent novels, The Parasite and The Nameless...