Look Out For … The Searching Dead by Ramsey Campbell
“The Searching Dead has all the signs of another masterpiece from Ramsey Campbell.”
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 …
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
The Searching Dead is the beginning of what might be Ramsey Campbell’s most ambitious work to date, a trilogy of connected novels known as The Three Births of Daoloth. The books build on Campbell’s Birchester mythos, first developed in his debut collection, The Inhabitant Of The Lake.
Campbell always writers well about the intersection between fiction and reality and the horrors that might be born there, and The Searching Dead looks to be another exploration of that theme. The central character, Dominic Sheldrake, is a young boy growing up in 1950s Liverpool, and learning about fiction and writing as he does so. There’s a semi-autobiographical feel–this is Campbell’s Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, perhaps. But with more cosmic horror and beings from beyond the grave.
Told in Campbell’s trademark prose, playful and unnerving in equal measure, The Searching Dead has all the signs of being another masterpiece. The trilogy will continue with Born To The Dark in 2017.
The Searching Dead is out now from P.S. Publishing.
Look Out For … The Hidden People by Alison Littlewood
“A new novel from one of the brightest stars in the horror genre.”
The bestselling author of Richard & Judy Book Club hit The Cold Season returns with a chilling mystery–where superstition and myth bleed into real life with tragic consequences
Pretty Lizzie Higgs is gone, burned to death on her own hearth–but was she really a changeling, as her husband insists? Albie Mirralls met his cousin only once, in 1851, within the grand glass arches of the Crystal Palace, but unable to countenance the rumours that surround her murder, he leaves his young wife in London and travels to Halfoak, a village steeped in superstition.
Albie begins to look into Lizzie’s death, but in this place where the old tales hold sway and the ‘Hidden People’ supposedly roam, answers are slippery and further tragedy is just a step away…
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
Alison Littlewood is one of the brightest stars in the horror genre at the moment, her reputation built from bestselling novels like A Cold Season and The Unquiet House. In 2016, she’s already released one of the year’s finest short story collections (Quieter Paths) and now she returns with a new novel, The Hidden People.
The story is set in the Victorian era and told from the point of view of Albie Mirrals: a rationalist, a believer in the science and the industrial revolution. It will come as little surprise that Mirrals’s beliefs will be challenged by events in the novel. Mirrals is trying to understand the death of his cousin and his investigation leads him to the Yorkshire countryside. It is here he encounters strange events linked to the titular ‘hidden people’… but can such beings actually be real?
The Hidden People is impeccably written, quiet, evocative horror. It’s yet another must buy from Littlewood.
The Hidden People is out now from Jo Fletcher Books.
JAMES EVERINGTON
