SOURCE: "Ramsey Campbell: Dark Feasts," in Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1988, pp. 216-18.

An American educator and critic, Sullivan is the author of Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (1978) and has edited Lost Souls: A Collection of English Ghost Stories ( 1983) and The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986). In the following essay, he states that Campbell's strength as a writer lies in the suggestive quality of his fiction, which creates in the reader the realization that "something lurks in the corner of the page even more chilling than what is vividly shown."

A dozen years ago, in a little piece for Harper's on neglected spook masters, I sang the praises of an unknown named Ramsey Campbell, 'a young British writer who is probably the best living creator of supernatural horror'. Robert Aickman was...