"An interesting anthology"

This collection is a combination of a reprint of a previous anthology containing seven repeat tales plus three new short stories released in the nineties and a new afterward. Each tale is well written, cleverly designed and clearly shows why Ramsey Campbell is the father of erotic horror, as they all star a perverted individual either as a tormentor or a victim.

Not for everyone, SCARED STIFF: TALES OF SEX AND DEATH consists of ten frightening and horrifying yet erotic somewhat perverted stories at least from the mindset of this middle age female boomer who loves the macabre but is often disgusted by the plots. This anthology provides a voyeur's look into the soul of this award winning horror author great.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted September 8, 2002

Summary

Ramsey Campbell is perhaps the world's most decorated author of horror, terror, suspense, dark fantasy, and supernatural fiction. He has won four World Fantasy Awards, ten British Fantasy Awards, three Bram Stoker Awards, and the Horror Writers' Association's Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been named a Grand Master of Horror. Publishers Weekly calls Campbell "a horror writer's horror writer," adding, "His control of mood and atmosphere is unsurpassed." Doug Winter, the noted scholar and critic, says Campbell has written "some of the most original and compelling fiction of our time, [works that dare] the precipice of reason, the human dilemma of knowing and not knowing, believing and disbelieving." 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." Indeed, with the original publication of Scared Stiff, Campbell almost single-handedly created the 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 that have never before appeared in book form.