Editing Ramsey Campbell (section)

===The 1990s: ''Midnight Sun'' to ''The Last Voice They Hear''===

The 1990s again saw Campbell publish eight novels, though in the second half of this decade he moved away from traditional horror to explore crime and tales of social alienation. Four of this decade's novels won awards.

In ''Midnight Sun'' (1990), an alien entity apparently seeks entry to the world through the mind of a children's writer. In its fusion of horror with awe, ''Midnight Sun'' shows the influence of [[Algernon Blackwood]] and [[Arthur Machen]] as well as Lovecraft. It is one that many enthusiasts single out as a highlight of this stage of his career. ''Needing Ghosts'' (1990), a novella, is a nightmarish work that blends the horrific and the comic; Campbell himself has described the composition of this piece as unique among his work in that it "felt like dreaming on the page" and was written relatively quickly without technical or structural challenges.

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".<ref>Campbell, Ramsey, interviewed in ''The Count of Thirty'' (1994).</ref>{{Incomplete short citation|date=January 2025}} A review at the time suggested that the central character might be played in a film by Stan Laurel, an observation that delighted Campbell, who is a great admirer of Laurel and Hardy. Other novels of this decade include ''The Long Lost'' (1993), in which a [[sin-eater]] is discovered by a couple holidaying in Wales and brought home ostensibly as a relative, with considerable impact on a community. A haunted house novel called ''The House on Nazareth Hill'' (1996), combining the author's M R Jamesian suggestiveness with an increasingly idiosyncratic prose style, is a study of familial psychology and the unchanging nature of social processes, particularly those relating to the young's quest for independence and the threat this presents to others.

Campbell had earlier published a non-supernatural novel called ''The One Safe Place'' (1995), which uses a highly charged [[Thriller (genre)|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. By this time, horror had become commercially less successful and publishers were taking fewer chances on publishing such material, all of which encouraged Campbell to write a number of crimes novels. 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. Although written "under protest", Campbell came to think of the book, during composition, as bearing his own stamp, and his next two novels were also non-supernatural.

In this decade Campbell issued four short story collections, including, in 1993, the 30-year career retrospective ''[[Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961–1991|Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991]]'', published by Campbell's original publisher, [[Arkham House]]. This volume, illustrated by Jeff K. Potter, is not a comprehensive collection of all the stories Campbell had published in those thirty years, rather 39 tales which Campbell and his editor Jim Turner thought representative. Drawing on material across his career to that date, it is considered a good entry point for readers unfamiliar with his work. ''[[Waking Nightmares]]'' (1991), ''[[Strange Things and Stranger Places]]'' (1993), and ''[[Ghosts and Grisly Things]]'' (1998) collect much of Campbell's short fiction from this period. Two of this decade's short story collections won awards.

In 1999, Campbell was awarded both the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association.