This one is a bit of a classic among Campbell's stories, but it took me a while to warm up to it over the years since first encountering it. At first, it just felt like haunted house trip with a sexual assault edge to it, which I suppose it is on some level. But encountering it here again, I am forced to see how fun it really is as a wonderfully well written story.
Yet another menacing dead being appears in a Campbell story, yet, this time, instead of relying on a sense of mystery alone or hints of cosmic horror, the writer relies on grimly specific and even embarrassingly uncomfortable details to slowly terrorize the main character and draw in the reader. By the end, instead of a lingering sense of fearful mystery, practically the whole of the thing is laid bare, metaphorically and literally, and there is no comfort in the revelation. The main character isn't even curious about how an apparently dead thing can be moving around and lustfully playing with his terror, as it just doesn't matter at that point.
At the same time, the story is amusingly self aware, explaining how the character is straining, as a modern person might, to take in the scene with an open mind and a lack of judgment, only to discover at every turn that his worst judgments don't do the situation justice. It would be a comedy routine about the manners and self policing we try to engage in when in awkward situations, if it wasn't so ugly. Amazing stuff.