Reddit reviews Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991
We found 2 Reddit comments about Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Some of these are a bit older and aren't all single-author collections, but they contain some really high-quality stuff:
Prime Evil by Douglas Winter (ed)
Dark Forces by Kirby McCauley (ed)
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti
The Dark Descent by David Hartwell (ed)
Alone with the Horrors by Ramsey Campbell
Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein
Wormwood by Poppy Z Brite
Black Evening by David Morrell
I hate to be boring, and you seem to have it covered, but Clive Barker's The Books of Blood are, for me, the best horror short story collection out there. Story for story, they've got the most hits to misses.
But, running in a strong second place is Ramsey Campbell's Alone With the Horrors. It goes in chronological order, and the later stories are better than the earlier ones, but short stories are where Campbell shines and when he's firing on all cylinders he's unbeatable. This post reviews the whole book, story by story, and picks the strongest entries. I think they're a bit too harsh on some of them, but it's a decent enough rough guide to the entire book.
But the short story collection that really changed my life when I read it was Wolf's Complete Book of Terror from 1979. The hardcover edition is really nicely done, and it's got all the classics in it: Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", LeGuin's "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas", Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman", Junichiro Tanizaki's "The Tattooer", and more by Borges, Joyce Carol Oates, Saki.