Ramsey Campbell also develops the "enjoyably creepy" atmosphere of low-key unease where darkness shifts on the landing and shapes move behind the mirror. But it takes Simon Clark to effectively up-gear the Tartarus ethos and aim it straight at the centre of your brain. In his Portrait of a Girl in a Graveyard he addresses the reader directly. You are the troubled adolescent with the Kurt Cobain poster on your wall, You swim through a mire of 300 year old coffins so tactile you feel their chill, You draw your own severed head from the deep buried black sack. Simon is less overtly concerned with literary antecedents, and more effective because of it. He switches the anthology’s centre firmly from the hungover spectres of the bookish past to the more fractured terrors of the now. From there Rhys Hughes adds an allegorical medieval fantasy in Poe’s Masque of the Red Death tradition, located in "the dusk between ecstasy and terror." Clare Johnson is trapped in a surrealist painting, Dale Nelson deals dust-bowl dust-demons with skewed Biblical subtexts, and John Preece is on a supernatural voyage into an African Heart of Darkness.

Horror should be more than mere slasher gore. If not morality, there should at least be an ironic symmetry of cause and effect. ‘Weird Fiction’ (Russell’s chosen term) ranges wide and is inhabited by many wondrous, strange and often terrifying beasts. It’s a place where owls, bats and other more nameless creatures circle and skitter, phantasms dance in darkness, monsters lurch and flinch beneath floorboards and poltergeists conspire mischief in their sad silent darkness. This book starts in whispers and culminates with monsters. A strange journey.