At the Mountains of Madness
The peak of Lovecraft's 'materialist' horror, hugely influential on SF-horror hybrids from The Thing (Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' is its sibling) to Alien and Prometheus.
Book Entry · Horror
What is Alone with the Horrors about?
The retrospective: thirty-nine stories from 1961 to 1991, charting the whole arc from teenage Lovecraft pastiche ('The Room in the Castle') to the mature Campbell of 'The Companion' (a fairground story Stephen King has called one of the best horror tales of the century), 'Mackintosh Willy', 'The Chimney' and 'In the Bag'. The collected evidence shows the constants: childhood fear handled without sentimentality, the supernatural arriving through misperception's side door, and prose in which every sentence seems to be glancing over its shoulder. The single-volume case for Campbell as the finest living writer of the short horror story.
Why it matters
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
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The Call of Cthulhu
The defining cosmic horror story and source of one of modern culture's most recognisable monsters, endlessly adapted, gamed and (regrettably) plushified.
Ghost Story
The book that, with King's early run, defined the late-70s horror boom's upper register — King has called it one of the finest horror novels of the century — and the modern model for the guilt-returns ghost narrative; filmed, reductively, in 1981.