Years later, Campbell's mother degenerated into paranoia and schizophrenia, rendering his life a living hell—an experience he has discussed in detail in the introduction and afterword to the restored text of The Face That Must Die.

[7] Growing up in the blitzed landscape of post-war Liverpool, Campbell avidly consumed the work of Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Franz Kafka, Fritz Leiber, Graham Greene, and the cinema of film noir.

Campbell intended to submit these to Phantom, but his mother, who regarded literary success as a possible way of financing her escape from her disastrous marriage, persuaded him to wait until he had a whole book to show to publishers.

In December 1961, Campbell completed the story "The Church in High Street" (previously titled "The Tomb-Herd") which he sent to August Derleth at Arkham House,[14] an imprint singlehandedly responsible for preserving the legacy of H P Lovecraft.

"[16] The title story of the collection introduces Campbell's invention of a tome of occult lore similar to Lovecraft's forbidden Necronomicon, The Revelations of Gla'aki (see Books of the Cthulhu Mythos).

Having discovered writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Aickman, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, William Burroughs and Henry Miller, and such influences as the French 'new novel', he became interested in expanding the stylistic possibilities of his work.

Other tales, such as The End of a Summer's Day and Concussion, show the emergence of Campbell's highly distinctive mature style, of which S. T. Joshi has written: Certainly much of the power of his work derives purely from his prose style, one of the most fluid, dense and evocative in all modern literature [...] His eye for the details and resonances of even the most mundane objects, and his ability to express them crisply and almost prose-poetically, give to his work at once a clarity and a dreamlike nebulousness that is difficult to describe but easy to sense.

[26][27] The book's appearance induced T. E. D. Klein to write an extensive and highly positive review, Ramsey Campbell: An Appreciation in Nyctalops magazine, and critic S. T. Joshi has stated[28] that: its [...] allusiveness of narration; careful, at times even obsessive focusing on the fleeting sensations and psychological processes of characters; an aggressively modern setting that allows commentary on social, cultural and political issues—all conjoin to make Demons by Daylight perhaps the most important book of horror fiction since Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others.Campbell has written that "Having completed Demons by Daylight in 1968, I felt directionless, and it shows in quite a few of the subsequent tales.

In this and The Face that Must Die (1979), Campbell began to fully explore the enigma of evil, touching on the psychological themes of possession, madness and alienation which feature in many of his subsequent novels.

[34] UK editions followed—in 1978, Universal Books (a paperback division of W. H. Allen Ltd) published The Bride of Frankenstein (by Campbell) together with Harris's The Werewolf of London and the (unknown author) The Mummy under the 'Carl Dreadstone' house name, with similar packaging under the title 'The Classic Library of Horror'.

I wanted to achieve that sense of supernatural terror which derives from the everyday urban landscape rather than invading it, and I greatly admired—still do—how Fritz wrote thoroughly contemporary weird tales which were nevertheless rooted in the best traditions of the field, and which drew some of their strength from uniting British and American influences.

In a chapter focusing on 20th century practitioners, King devoted a section to Campbell's fiction, alongside that of Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney and others.

"[38] This story appeared in Campbell's 1982 collection, Dark Companions, alongside other tales from that period commonly cited as early classics: "The Chimney", "Mackintosh Willy", and "Call First".

In characteristically honest and self-critical afterwords,[39] Campbell has claimed that, despite its popularity, The Hungry Moon, along with the similarly commercial The Parasite and, to a lesser degree, The Claw, are among the least successful of his works from this period, by turns awkwardly structured, containing too many ideas, and/or tending towards explicit violence.

In contrast Campbell has stated his pride that The Influence (1988) and Ancient Images (1989) are subtler, tightly plotted novels of supernatural menace, each with (predominantly) female central characters and generating unease through the author's trademark suggestiveness and surreal imagery.

A sympathetic serial murderer appears in the black comedy The Count of Eleven (1991), which displays Campbell's gift for word play, and which the author has said is disturbing "because it doesn't stop being funny when you think it should".

Campbell had earlier published a non-supernatural novel called The One Safe Place (1995), which uses a highly charged thriller narrative to examine social problems such as the deprivation and abuse of children, and in 1998 he turned away for a more sustained period from the supernatural work with which he was associated.

The first, The Last Voice They Hear (1998), is a tightly plotted thriller which ranges back and forth in time as two brothers become engaged in a cat-and-mouse game redolent of earlier events in their lives.

The Grin of the Dark (2007) draws on Campbell's interest in the history of cinema, as a character seeks material relating to a silent film comedian by the name of Tubby Thackeray.

Ghosts Know (2011), one of the author's few latter-day non-supernatural excursions (on the surface, at least), explores the mendacity of stage mediums/psychics in the context of a missing person story; it also showcases a later development in the Campbell's work, social comedy and confusions inherent in everyday communication.

2015 saw the release of Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, one of Campbell's few novels set outside the UK; a family holiday on a Greek island involves communion with a familiar supernatural character from literature.

Described by the author as his "Brichester Mythos trilogy", the three-book series, including Born to the Dark (2017) and The Way of the Worm (2018), documents a character's engagement with a nefarious organisation over three time periods (1950s, 1980s, 2010s) and evokes a cosmic entity by the name of Daoloth.

In July 2021, Flame Tree Press released Somebody's Voice, a non-supernatural thriller novel which focuses on themes of identity, memory, and mental disintegration; after an author ghost-writes a memoir, his grip on reality slides when the truth turns out to be less assured than he was led to believe.

Campbell's 2025 novel, The Incubations, focuses on post-WWII Anglo-German relations as young man who had a childhood penfriend in Germany gets involved in a myth that infects his homecoming after a trip abroad.

Such an approach prompted Peter Straub to write in a blurb for one of Campbell's early novels: "Horrors in his fiction are never merely invented, they are felt and experienced, and affect the reader for days afterward."

Campbell himself has cited the following themes as recurrent in his work: "the vulnerability of children, the willingness of people to espouse a belief system that denies them the right to question, and the growing tendency to create scapegoats for the ills of the world.

In Spain, a further tribute anthology appeared entitled El Horror Que Vino del Sur: Un Tributo Latino a Ramsey Campbell Y Al Circulo de Lovecraft (2018, Bookbaby).

Jaume Balagueró's The Nameless (in Spanish Los Sin Nombre; in Catalan Els sense nom), based on the novel of the same name, takes some liberties with the source material's plot but captures its pungent atmosphere.

Denis Rovira van Boekholt's The Influence (La Influencia in Spanish), based on the Campbell novel of the same name and quite faithful (except for changes in the final third), was released in 2019 and was later picked up by Netflix to stream.

"[48] When asked whether he believes in the supernatural he claims to have experienced episodes that might be described as involving such activity; however, he remains noncommittal on this issue, stating that he writes about such material because he finds it "imaginatively appealing" and to "repay" the genre for many treasured reading experiences.