Campbell's childhood and adolescence were marked by the rift between his parents and his mother's developing schizophrenia, an experience he has discussed in detail in the introduction and afterword to the restored text of The Face That Must Die. Although both parents lived in the same house, Campbell states, "I didn't see my father face to face for nearly twenty years, and that was when he was dying."

His early work was greatly influenced by the work of H. P. Lovecraft. His first collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, is a volume of Cthulhu Mythos stories published by Arkham House in 1964. At the suggestion of August Derleth, he rewrote many of his earliest stories, which he had originally set in the Massachusetts locales of Arkham, Dunwich and Innsmouth, and relocated them to English settings in and around the fictional Gloucestershire city of Brichester, near the River Severn, creating his own Severn Valley milieu for Lovecraftian horrors. Brichester was deeply influenced by Campbell's native Liverpool, and much of his later work is set in the real locales of Liverpool and Merseyside. In particular, his 2005 novel Secret Stories (published in the U.S. in an abridged edition as Secret Story (2006)) both exemplifies and satirizes Liverpudlian speech, characters, humor, and culture.

With the collection Demons by Daylight (1973), Campbell set out to be as unlike Lovecraft as possible. In 1969, he had written "Lovecraft in Retrospect", an essay for the fanzine Shadow, "condemning [Lovecraft's] work outright." However, in his 1985 book Cold Print, which collects his Lovecraftian stories, Campbell disavowed the opinions expressed in the article, stating: "I believe Lovecraft is one of the most important writers in the field" and"the first book of Lovecraft's I read made me into a writer." Demons by Daylight includes "The Franklyn Paragraphs", which uses Lovecraft's documentary narrative technique without slipping into parody of his writing style. Other tales, such as "The End of a Summer's Day" and "Concussion", show the emergence of Campbell's highly distinctive mature style, of which S. T. Joshi has written:

Certainly much of the power of his work derives purely from his prose style, one of the most fluid, dense and evocative in all modern literature.... His eye for the details and resonances of even the most mundane objects, and his ability to express them crisply and almost prose-poetically, give to his work at once a clarity and a dreamlike nebulousness that is difficult to describe but easy to sense.

Subsequently, Campbell has published a number of other collections; many of his most popular stories can be found in the 1993 collection Alone with the Horrors.

Campbell has written many novels, both supernatural and non-supernatural. They include The Face That Must Die (cut by the publisher on its first release in 1979 and issued complete in 1983), the story of a homophobic serial killer told largely from the killer's point of view. A more sympathetic serial murderer appears in the later novel 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". Other non-supernatural novels, such as The One Safe Place (1995), use a highly charged thriller narrative to examine social problems such as the deprivation and abuse of children.

Campbell's supernatural horror novels include Incarnate (1983), in which the boundaries between dream and reality are gradually broken down; and Midnight Sun (1990), in which 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. Having spent a number of months working full-time in a Borders store, he wrote The Overnight (2004), about bookshop staff trapped in their hellish workplace during an overnight shelf-filling shift. Also notable is the novella Needing Ghosts, a nightmarish work that blends the horrific and the comic.

A lifelong enthusiast of film (old movies feature prominently in two of his novels, Ancient Images and The Grin of the Dark), Campbell wrote three novelisations of Universal horror films in 1976. They were published under the house name Carl Dreadstone. Three further novelisations which appeared under this name were written by other authors. Campbell also contributed numerous articles on horror cinema to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986).

Outside the world of horror, he has written a series of fantasy stories starring Ryre the Swordsman, an original creation. Many of these stories were published in the collection Far Away & Never. In 1976 he "completed" three of Robert E. Howard's unfinished Solomon Kane stories, "Hawk of Basti", "The Castle of the Devil" and "The Children of Asshur". He has also written a few works of science fiction, such as the novella Medusa (1973) and the short story "Slow" (collected in Told by the Dead), but has stated that his science fiction "tried to deal with Themes, too consciously, I feel".

Campbell has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980), New Terrors (1980) and (with Stephen Jones) the first five volumes of the annual Best New Horror series (1990-1994). His 1992 anthology Uncanny Banquet was notable for including the first ever reprint of the obscure 1914 horror novel The Hole of the Pit by Adrian Ross.

Ramsey Campbell, Probably, a collection of Campbell's book reviews, film reviews, autobiographical writings and other nonfiction, was published in 2002. The book included reminiscences and appreciations of authors such as John Brunner, Bob Shaw and K. W. Jeter and an extensive, negative critique of Shaun Hutson's Heathen, parodying Hutson's style.

He married Jenny Chandler, daughter of A. Bertram Chandler, on 1 January 1971; has two children, Tamsin (born 1978) and Matthew (born 1981); and still lives on Merseyside. He reviewed films and DVDs weekly for BBC Radio Merseyside until 2007. He writes a monthly film column, "Ramsey´s Ramblings", for Video Watchdog magazine.

He is the Lifetime President of the British Fantasy Society.

Novels

• The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) (Revised text: 1985)
• The Bride of Frankenstein (1977) (novelisation of the 1935 film, written as Carl Dreadstone)
• Dracula's Daughter (1977) (novelisation of the 1936 film, written as Carl Dreadstone)
• The Wolf Man (1977) (novelisation of the 1941 film, written as Carl Dreadstone)
• The Face That Must Die (1979) (Restored text: 1983)
• The Parasite (1980) (published in the US with a different ending as To Wake the Dead)
• The Nameless (1981)
• The Claw (1983) (AKA Night of the Claw, Claw ) (written as Jay Ramsay)
• Incarnate (1983)
• Obsession (1985)
• The Hungry Moon (1986)
• The Influence (1988)
• Ancient Images (1989)
• Midnight Sun (1990)
• Needing Ghosts (1990)
• The Count of Eleven (1991)
• The Long Lost (1993)
• The One Safe Place (1995)
• The House on Nazareth Hill (1996) (AKA Nazareth Hill)
• The Last Voice They Hear (1998)
• Silent Children (2000)
• Pact of the Fathers (2001)
• The Darkest Part of the Woods (2003)
• The Overnight (2004)
• Secret Stories (2005) (Abridged US edition, Secret Story, 2006)
• The Grin of the Dark (2007)
• Thieving Fear (2008)
• Creatures of the Pool (2009)
• Solomon Kane (Movie novelisation, 2010)
• The Seven Days of Cain (2010)

Collections

• The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964, as J. Ramsey Campbell)
• Demons by Daylight (1973)
• The Height of the Scream (1976)
• Dark Companions (1982)
• Cold Print (1985; expanded edition 1993. Contains the stories from The Inhabitant of the Lake as well as later material in the Lovecraft vein)
• Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart (1986. Contains stories by Campbell, Clive Barker and Lisa Tuttle)
• The World of Ramsey Campbell (1987)
• Tales of Sex and Death (1987)
• Waking Nightmares (1991)
• Alone with the Horrors (1993)
• Strange Things and Stranger Places (1993)
• Ghosts and Grisly Things (1998)
• Told by the Dead (2003)
• Inconsequential Tales (2008)
• Just Behind You (2009)

Nonfiction

• Ramsey Campbell, Probably, ed. S. T. Joshi (2002)

As editor

• Superhorror (AKA The Far Reaches of Fear) (1976)
• New Terrors (Published in US as two separate volumes, New Terrors 1 and New Terrors 2) (1980)
• New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980)
• The Gruesome Book (1983)
• Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me (1988)
• Best New Horror (with Stephen Jones) (1990)
• Best New Horror 2 (with Stephen Jones) (1991)
• Best New Horror 3 (with Stephen Jones) (1992)
• Uncanny Banquet (1992)
• Best New Horror 4 (with Stephen Jones) (1993)
• Deathport (1993)
• Best New Horror 5 (with Stephen Jones) (1994)
• Meddling With Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M.R. James (2002)
• Gathering the Bones (with Jack Dann and Dennis Etchison) (2003)

Gary William Crawford's reader's guide to Campbell, Ramsey Campbell (1988), provides an overview of his work up to 1987. There is an extensive critical analysis of Campbell's work in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and an essay on his later work in Classics and Contemporaries (2009). Joshi has also written a book-length study, Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction (2001), and edited The Count of Thirty (Necronomicon Press 1994), which contains critical appreciations by various authors and a long interview with Campbell himself.

• 1976 The Doll Who Ate His Mother, World Fantasy Award nominee, Best Novel
• 1978 "The Chimney", World Fantasy Award winner, Best Short Story
• 1978 "In The Bag", British Fantasy Award winner, Best Short Story
• 1980 "Mackintosh Willy", World Fantasy Award winner, Best Short Story
• 1981 To Wake the Dead (later, the Parasite), British Fantasy Award winner, Best Novel
• 1982 The Nameless, World Fantasy Award nominee, Best Novel
• 1985 Incarnate, British Fantasy Award winner, Best Novel
• 1988 The Hungry Moon, British Fantasy Award winner, Best Novel
• 1989 The Influence, British Fantasy Award winner, Best Novel
• 1989 Ancient Images, Bram Stoker Award winner, Best Novel
• 1991 Midnight Sun, British Fantasy Award winner, Best Novel
• 1992 The Count of Eleven, British Fantasy Award nominee
• 1994 Alone with the Horrors, Stoker Award of the Horror Writers of America winner, Best Collection; World Fantasy Award winner, Best Collection
• 1994 The Long Lost, British Fantasy Award winner, Best Novel
• 1998 The House on Nazareth Hill, International Horror Guild winner, Best Novel; British Fantasy Award nominee, Best Novel
• 1999 Ghosts and Grisly Things, British Fantasy Award winner, Best Collection
• 2001 Silent Children, British Fantasy Award nominee, Best Novel
• 2003 Told by the Dead, British Fantasy Award winner, Best Collection
• 2003 The Darkest Part of the Woods, British Fantasy award nominee, Best Novel
• 2006 Secret Story, British Fantasy Award nominee, Best Novel
• 2008 Grin of the Dark, British Fantasy Society winner, Best Novel
• 2009 Thieving Fear, British Fantasy Society nominee, Best Novel

Interviews

• 2009 interview with Horror Bound Magazine
• "Ramsey Campbell: A Demon by Daylight", Interview with Cold Print
• 2007 interview with Liverpool's Nerve magazine
• 2008 interview with WritersNewsWeekly.com

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