Ramsey Campbell's The Searching Dead: Reviewed by Gary Fry

Ramsey Campbell's new novel, The Searching Dead, is launched at Fantasycon this year by PS Publishing. It's the first book in The Three Births Of Daoloth, a planned trilogy - something of a new departure for Ramsey...

Dominic Sheldrake has never forgotten his childhood in fifties Liverpool or the talk an old boy of his grammar school gave about the First World War. When his history teacher took the class on a field trip to France it promised to be an adventure, not the first of a series of glimpses of what lay in wait for the world. Soon Dominic would learn that a neighbour was involved in practices far older and darker than spiritualism, and stumble on a secret journal that hinted at the occult nature of the universe. How could he and his friends Roberta and Jim stop what was growing under a church in the midst of the results of the blitz? Dominic used to write tales of their exploits, but what they face now could reduce any adult to less than a child...


The novel also marks a return to the 'Brichester Mythos' of Campbell's earliest stories, revisited in more recent works like The Darkest Part Of The Woods and The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki. It promises to be something pretty special, I think.

Gary Fry, certainly thinks so, anyway; he's reviewed it over at his blog, and describes it as: a novel which looks set to become one third of Campbell’s masterpiece: a trilogy about who he is as a man and what he’s always striven to achieve as an author.

You can read the full review here, and order the book there.