“McEwan scholar” David Malcolm “argues” that reviews for "The Comfort of Strangers" were positive, noting that James Campbell of "New Statesman" praised it as a "fine novel" and that a number of critics (including Anthony Thwaite) deemed it superior to McEwan's previous novel "The Cement Garden" (1978). In the "London Review of Books", Christopher Ricks wrote that "McEwan’s tale is as economical as a shudder" and discussed the alarm of English critic John Ruskin about the ubiquity of death in modern novels, arguing that “the cutting force of the story is in its laying bare how ineradicable is this shock that it should be the mostly inoffensive and mostly respectable whom such horrors befall.” Ricks lauded the ending as emotionally affecting.