Ramsey Campbell is one of the most respected writers of horror and weird fiction. He has won more awards than any other living author of horror or dark fantasy, including the World Fantasy Award Life Award in 2015, 14 British Fantasy Awards, 4 World Fantasy Awards, 3 Bram Stoker Awards, 3 Horror Guild Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and more. Campbell's most recent novels and novellas include The Searching Dead, Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, The Booking (novella), Think Yourself Lucky, and The Pretence, and his most recent collections include Inconsequential Tales, Just Behind You, The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki, Holes for Faces, and Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal.
Many of his tales have been included in anthologies, and Campbell himself has edited or co-edited several anthologies. In recent months an anthology of stories was published, called 'The Children of Gla'aki-a Tribute to Ramsey Campbell's Old One' in which each story was inspired by Campbell's short story The Inhabitant of the Lake.

Initially influenced by Lovecraft and Machen among others, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants was published by Arkham House when he was eighteen years old. On the advice of August Derleth, he later relocated his story settings from Lovecraft country to more familiar English settings in and around the fictional city of Brichester, which he positioned near the River Severn. Much of the later work is set in or near Liverpool (See Secret Stories, Creatures of the Pool).

For many years he was the President of the British Fantasy Society, and S. T. Joshi once stated of Campbell, "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood."