It showcases his best tales spanning the mid-70s to early 80s, the period in which he perfected his now unmistakable voice, shedding nearly all traces of his earlier Lovecraft pastiches, as good as many of those were/still are (esp.
I've since read quite a few of his collections, but this is the one I revisit most often.
His long-held reputation among many in the horror community as "the greatest living writer of supernatural fiction" suddenly seemed a very reasonable statement.
While reading this, a switch was flipped in my head. That same nebulous writing style that could become wearying in his longer works, has an almost mesmerizing effect at 20 pages that heightens the sense of unease and dislocation. The novels were often prone to a great deal of padding, containing several chapters devoted to detailing normal day-to-day banalities, and an excessive amount of peripheral characters with no clear purpose other than to possibly satisfy some publisher-mandated word quota.*ĭark Companions, on the other hand, revealed to me Campbell's absolute mastery of slow-burn terror that subtly sneaks up on the reader after bubbling under the surface and biding its time until the right moment. The hazy/cryptic nature of his prose could be a bit exhausting over the course of 300-plus pages, but in the short stories I'd constantly come across around that time (it seemed every horror antho published during the 70s-90s was legally required to include a Campbell entry) this opaque style was much more palatable and effective. Before experiencing this for the first time in the mid-90s, I had only read a handful of his novels and, while laced with some uniquely nightmarish imagery, they usually left me slightly underwhelmed despite the well-executed hallucinatory intrusions of the otherworldly. I figured it was about time I threw in my 2 cents on the collection that completely changed my tune regarding Ramsey Campbell.
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