I received The Way Of The Worm by Ramsey Campbell to read and review thanks to random things blog tours. This is book 3 in the Three Births of Daoloth Trilogy, a fantastic modern horror that really sucks you in.
The Way Of The Worm
The present day, or something very like it. Dominic Sheldrake has retired from lecturing and lives on his own. His son Toby is married with a small daughter. The occultist Noble family are more active than ever. Their cult now openly operates as the Church of the Eternal Three,and has spread worldwide. The local branch occupies the top floors of Starview Tower, a Liverpool waterfront skyscraper.
To Dominic’s dismay, Toby and his wife Claudine are deeply involved in it, and he suspects they are involving their small daughter Macy too.
Dominic lets his son persuade him to attend a meeting of the church, where he encounters all three generations of the Nobles. Although Christian Noble is almost a century old, he’s more vigorous than ever– inhumanly so. The
family takes turns to preach an apocalyptic sermon that hints at dark secrets masked by the Bible and at the future that lies in wait.
In a bid to investigate further Dominic undergoes the rite the church offers its members, which confers the ability to travel psychically through time. Before he’s able to flee
back to the present he has a vision of the monstrous fate that’s in store for the world.
Dominic discovers a secret he’s sure the Nobles won’t want to be made public. Although he has retired from the police, Jim helps him establish the truth, and Roberta publishes it on her online blog. It’s the subject of a court
case, the results of which seem to defeat the Nobles, only for them to return in a dreadfully transformed shape.
Now Dominic and his friends are at their mercy,and is there anywhere in the world to hide? Even if they manage somehow to deal with the Nobles, there may be no escaping or preventing the alien apocalypse that all the events of the trilogy have been bringing ever closer…
Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and
now lives in Wallasey. He has received the Grand Master
Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime
Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association,
the Living Legend Award of the International Horror
Guild and the World FantasyLifetime Achievement
Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature.
His first book was published by the legendary Arkham House when he was eighteen years old. His later work draws on the British and American traditions of horror fiction. It ranges from the psychological to the ghostly,
the subtly uncanny to the cosmic, the quietly disquieting to the terrifying, the poignant to the darkly comic.
His Flame Tree books include Thirteen Days by
Sunset Beach, in which afamily on holiday encounters an ancient horror on a Greek island,and Think Yourself Lucky, where the internet lets loose the monsters lurking within people just like us. In Somebody’s Voice a writer
finds his memoryand personality threatened by trying to write the memoir of a victim of abuse. The Three Births of Daoloth trilogy– The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm – pits three childhood friends
against a terror as vast as time and space.
Three of Campbell’s novels have been filmed – The Influence (available from FLAME TREE PRESS), Pact of the Fathers and The Nameless (in development as a Netflix series). He reviewed films for the local BBC for nearly forty years, and is presently working on an appreciation of the Three Stooges, Six Stooges and Counting. A new supernatural novel, Fellstones, is in progress too.
My Thoughts
Ramsey Campbell really draws you into his world of horror, I couldn’t put The Way of The Worm down! A storyline unlike any other I’ve read, Dominic and his friends just can’t let Toby, Claudine and Macy get wrapped up in a religious cult they suspect is run by the same monster they came up against years ago. My heart was racing hoping Dominic and his friends could somehow persuade Toby to see who or what their religious leader really was before something could happen to his granddaughter.
