About the Author

Ramsey Campbell has won more awards than any other living author of horror or dark fantasy, including four World Fantasy Awards, nine British Fantasy Awards, three Bram Stoker Awards, and two International Horror Guild Awards. Critically acclaimed both in the US and in England, Campbell is widely regarded as one of the genre's literary lights for both his short fiction and his novels. His classic novels, such as "The Face that Must Die, The Doll Who Ate His Mother, " and" The Influence," set new standards for horror as literature. His collection, "Scared Stiff," virtually established the subgenre of erotic horror.
Ramsey Campbell's works have been published in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and several other languages. He has been President of the British Fantasy Society and has edited critically acclaimed anthologies, including "Fine Frights." Campbell's best known works in the US are "Obsession, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, "and" Nazareth Hill."

Reviews

Since Dr. Lennox Price's discovery of a hallucinogenic moss growing nearby his family home, the Price family has been inextricably linked with the ancient forest known as Goodmanswood. As family members hear the call of the wood and answer it in their own way, the forest works its eerie spell on them, changing their lives to suit its own dark purposes. A master storyteller of horror fiction, Campbell brings his landscapes to life, imbuing them with personalities and motives that are as inhuman as they are beautiful and terrible. Eloquent and complex, this dark fantasy belongs in most horror collections. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

A forest haunted by a horror older than time and channeled by one unfortunate family is the foundation of this gripping horror extravaganza, Campbell's first novel of the supernatural in six years. Set in environs fans will recognize from his early Lovecraftian fiction, it focuses on the Price family, who have had an uneasy association with Goodmanswood since patriarch Lennox migrated to England to study its dark legends and succumbed to belief in them. With Lennox institutionalized and serving as cult leader to some of the asylum's creepier inmates, the responsibility to hold the family together has fallen to daughter Heather, a library archivist who traces her father's cryptic remarks about the woods' history to accounts of Nathaniel Selcouth, an alchemist who resided there and who schemed "to create a messenger or servant that would mediate between him and the limits of the universe, both spiritual and physical." Heather's investigations dovetail with sightings by frightened neighborhood children of a grotesque "sticky man" glimpsed among the trees, and strange events that bedevil the family. Campbell (Obsession) is at the top of his form here, infusing every scene and scrap of dialogue with a sense of inescapable menace and manipulating nature imagery in such a way as to give it a malignant supernatural character. A richly textured tale of modern horror with classic roots, it confirms Campbell's reputation as one of the most formidable dark fantasists working today. (Oct. 13) Forecast: First published in the U.K. by PS Publishing as a limited signed edition, the novel was shortlisted for the International Horror Guild award for Best Novel of 2002 and should be a contender for a World Fantasy Award. Campbell is the only major horror author consistently working in the tradition of Blackwood, Machen and Lovecraft, though he takes an entirely modern approach. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.