The height of the scream

by Ramsey Campbell

With publication of The Height of the Scream, Ramsey Campbell assumes his rightful position as one of the modern masters in the genre. This young writer from Liverpool, England who began his career as a literary acolyte of H. P. Lovecraft has now fashioned his own uniquely arresting vision of reality. The world of Ramsey Campbell is centered in the tenebrous interior of the human mind and from there proceeds through a haunted landscape in which surreal specters and libidinous phantasms arise to confound mortal existence. In stories such as Missing or The Words that Count, Campbell presents his characters in apparently ordinary surroundings, while other tales in this collection incorporate explicitly spectral manifestations which serve to intensify the author's searing conception of human behavior. Thus the doppelganger motif is introduced into The Scar not from the conscious attempt to compose a ghostly tale, but because the relationship between the two protagonists has become so inten