Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction, 1961-1991

by Ramsey Campbell

“Come in and get some fire,” Jack said. “Harriet will have the coffee ready in a minute.”

I couldn’t stand hearing children called kids. The recurring word had made me squirm: drips of slang, like water torture. And I’d never heard such a feeble punch

He resembled a child both eager to confess and afraid to do so.

My wild flight was from nothing that I’d seen. I was fleeing the knowledge, deep-rooted and undeniable, that what I perceived blotting out the sky was nothing but an acceptable metaphor. Appalling though the presence was, it was only my mind’s version of what was there—a way of letting me glimpse it without going mad at once.

Yet in a way I am resigned. After all, even if I managed to flee the beach, I could never escape the growth. I have understood enough to know that it would absorb me in time, when it becomes the world.

One has to call one’s fears something, if only to gain the illusion of control.

On the last night Lee had been there, the gaslights had gone out halfway through the film, and hadn’t been lit at the end. He’d heard an old man falling and crying out as though he thought the darkness had come for him,

As he’d lain there, feeling purged, an insight so powerful it was impossible to doubt had seized him. If he hadn’t written out these things they would have happened in reality.

Writing out the nightmares had drained them of power; they were just stories now.

He barely managed to find a seat on the train, which was crowded with football fans. Opened beer cans spat; the air grew rusty with the smell of beer.

Angela wondered if there was any experience they wouldn’t reduce to banality.

the mime looked doubly incongruous because of the plain suit the man was wearing. Perhaps all this was some kind of street theatre, some anarchist nonsense of the kind that tried to make the world a stage for its slogans, yet Bowring had a sudden disconcerting impression that the mime was meant just for him.