Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death
Bram Stoker Award nominee 1987, World Fantasy Award nominee 1988.
Ramsey Campbell has won four World Fantasy Awards, ten British Fantasy Awards, and the Horror Writers' Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. Publishers Weekly calls Campbell "a horror writer's horror writer," adding, "His control of mood and atmosphere is unsurpassed." The Cleveland Plain Dealer says his horror fiction is "of consistently high quality," and The Washington Post praises Campbell for continuing "to break new ground, advancing the style and thematic content of horror fiction far beyond the works of his contemporaries."
The original publication of Scared Stiff almost created the sub-genre of erotic horror. Never had sex and death been so mesmerizingly entwined. Clive Barker, in his Introduction, says, "One of the delightfully unsettling things about these tales is the way Ramsey's brooding, utterly unique vision renders an act so familiar to us all so fretful, so strange, so chilling. Sex... is the perfect stuff for the horror writer, and there can be few artists working in the genre as capable of analyzing and dramatizing [this] as Campbell."
For this edition, Campbell has added three new stories which have never before appeared in book form.
Contents:
- The Bare Bones: An Introduction by Clive Barker
- Dolls
- Lilith's
- Loveman's Comeback
- Merry May
- Stages
- The Other Woman
- The Seductress
Ramsey Campbell
John Ramsey Campbell (born 1946) is a British horror writer.
Since Ramsey Campbell first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, critics have cited Campbell as one of the leading writers in his field: T. E. D. Klein has written that "Campbell reigns supreme in the field today", while S. T. Joshi stated, "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood."