Ramsey Campbell emerged at a critical juncture in the history of horror fiction. The distinguishing feature of horror, fantasy, and supernatural fiction, as opposed to mainstream fiction, is the freedom it allows an author to refashion the universe in accordance with his or her philosophical, moral, and political aims. The result, as Rosemary Jackson has pointed out, is a kind of ‘subversion’ whereby the laws of Nature as we understand them are shown to be suspended, invalid, or inoperable; and this violation of natural law (embodied in such conceptions as the vampire, the haunted house, or less conventional tropes such as incursions of alien entities or forces from the depths of space) often serves as a symbol for the philosophical message the author is attempting to convey. Unlike science fiction, however, the horror story often foregoes any attempt at a scientific justification of the supernatural phenomena; and the degree to which an author can convince the sceptical reader of the momentary existence of the unreal is frequently an index to his or her skill as a practitioner of the form.

In the fifty-year heyday of the ‘Gothic’ novel—from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and including the work of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory (‘Monk’) Lewis, Charles Brockden Brown, and an endless array of their largely mediocre imitators and disciples—many of the basic themes, tropes, and elements still used by modern horror writers found literary expression. The ghost, the vampire (as in John William Polidori's ‘The Vampyre’ [1819]), the haunted house or castle, the artificial man (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein [1818]), and many other devices were exhumed over and over again in the hundreds of Gothic novels of the period, to such monotonous effect as to incur Jane Austen's well-deserved parody, Northanger Abbey (1818). Indeed, the amount of scholarly attention devoted to the Gothic novel—from Edith Birkhead's seminal study, The Tale of Terror (1921), to the present day—is far out of proportion to the actual literary merits of this body of work.

It was Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) who definitively established the horror tale as a viable literary form.