At the age of fourteen Ramsey Campbell found a paperback collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft in a Liverpool sweet shop. The discovery of the collection, Campbell has gone on record as saying, ‘made me a writer’, providing a template which he would at first imitate and then explore creatively to develop a series of award-winning short stories and novels, such as The Parasite (1980), Incarnate (1983), The Hungry Moon (1986), Ancient Images (1989), The Long Lost (1993) and most recently Secret Stories (2005).

Lovecraft, as Campbell would only later discover, was, like himself, someone whose weird fiction was partly an attempt to deal with profound personal difficulties. In the introduction to The Face That Must Die (1983), Campbell described his own upbringing in what some would call a severely dysfunctional family and others something like an extract from his own fiction. There are, however, other resonances between the two as writers whose fictions map the tensions between geography, topography and consciousness. In other words, each writer uses setting to express both a series of personal and social anxieties and a more existential response to Pascal's terrifying ‘infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing’. Or, to put it even more into words which could also have been written by a horror writer, ‘If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

At the age of four Campbell had himself encountered the abyss staring back at him from a children's annual featuring the popular cartoon character Rupert Bear and a story involving a macabre Christmas tree. A chance glimpse a few years later in a Southport shop of a copy of Weird Tales (the magazine with which, as he was to learn, Lovecraft was most closely associated) left him with an image of horror which grew more exaggerated over the years. His obsession with it may also have been fed by the fact that his mother had forbidden him to buy the magazine. (When he was seventeen Campbell found the Weird Tales issue which had terrified and attracted him ten years earlier, only to discover the cover was much less horrific than he'd remembered.)