THE WAY OF THE WORM BY ​RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Ramsey Campbell’s most recent project has been a return to his roots in Lovecraftian horror, across a trilogy of novels. The Searching Dead (2016) followed the childhood of Dominic Sheldrake in 1950’s Liverpool, as he and his two friends, Bobby and Jim, work together to thwart their ex-teacher Christian Noble, who has started a mysterious cult that claims to allow people to speak to their deceased loved ones, and has plans to awake something even more monstrous under the remains of a bombed out church. In the sequel, Born To The Dark (2017), Dominic and his friends must reunite in the 1980’s when a clinic which claims to help Dominic’s son Toby with his epileptic fits through the power of hypnosis turns out to be a front for the Nobles’ latest scheme. The Way Of The Worm (2018) picks up another thirty years on in the 2010’s, where following his wife’s death Dominic and his friends make a last ditch attempt to rescue Toby from the clutches of the Nobles’ new church, which promises strange and terrifying revelations to its followers. The final volume in the Three Births of Daoloth brings the trilogy to an appropriately terrifying and cosmic conclusion. Returning to the Brichester Mythos of his early career with the full power of his mature talents has made for some of Campbell’s most ambitious works, and The Way Of The Worm is a powerful and satisfying novel.

The trilogy is a less common format in Horror fiction than in Science Fiction or Fantasy, perhaps because of the difficulty of maintaining an appropriate atmosphere of fear and terror over three successive novels without succumbing to diminishing returns. By setting each novel thirty years on from the last, Campbell is able to concentrate on the individual story in each book whilst building on what has come before and ratcheting up the tension and the stakes. Thus, The Way Of The Worm wastes no time throwing us into an atmosphere of dread, which only intensifies as the story builds towards the awful apocalyptic visions hinted at in the previous two novels. However, the novel starts with Dominic in the aftermath of his wife Lesley’s death, an all too human moment which anchors the novel in his raw grief. Dominic’s sense of loss and loneliness is heartbreakingly explored in some beautiful passages, which nicely set up the themes of isolation and loss which have run through the trilogy. Once the plot gets going, the novel burns through with frightening kinetic energy, and there is never any doubt that Campbell is playing hardball, as appropriately for the final novel in a trilogy, we suffer some painful character deaths and desertions as poor Dominic is increasingly left on his own.

Campbell’s approach of setting the novels across three distinct time periods allows him to explore the same characters in youth, middle age and old age. We get to know Dominic, Bobby and Jim across their whole lives, their hopes and dreams, how these are realised or thwarted, and their moments of pride and regret. Whilst the three novels take place during eruptions of the strange and uncanny, Campbell is equally adept at moulding the contours of everyday life, the hardships and small victories that shape a person as they develop and grow older. The trilogy allows Campbell to fully develop and explore the earthshattering cosmic revelations hinted at in previous books, but it also allows him to reach the core of his characters, as we see how they change but also the characteristics, both strengths and weaknesses, which only become further entrenched with time. By the time we’ve spent three books with them at various stages of their lives, Dominic, Bobby and Jim feel like real people we’ve witnessed grow up and grow old, people that we have a real invested connection with.

This is contrasted with the Nobles, who become more uncanny and horrific as the series continues. The Way Of The Worm uncovers the dark family secrets of the Nobles, as the three generations, Christian, Christina and Christopher, become less human and more the ghastly cosmic inversion of the holy trilogy, the avatar on Earth of Daoloth themselves. Dominic’s attempts to bring them to justice and expose their secrets to the world in the end only serve as a catalyst for their ghastly final transfiguration. Having the same characters as the villain for each book could lead to a case of overfamiliarity, but Campbell handles them with aplomb, making them more uncanny and unsettling with each encounter. As Dominic and his friends are revealed as more and more human to us by getting to know them, the more we see the Nobles the more they slough off their humanity. It is Dominic’s tragedy that each time he tries to defeat them, each time he is brought back into confrontation with them, it only reaffirms the massive role the Nobles have played in his life and the consuming hold they have over his thoughts.
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The series’ approach to time also extends to how it handles its setting. They are set in Campbell’s local Liverpool, a city that has seen drastic changes through the 60 years covered by the three books. As much as being a love letter to and exploration of cosmic horror, the novels are a love letter to and exploration of Liverpool itself. Campbell vividly invokes the city of his youth, and the various changes it has been through. From the ruined neighbourhoods of the blitz left to rot into the 50’s to the redeveloped waterfront of the 2010’s, Campbell’s Liverpool is vividly realised and rendered in granular detail so fine you feel you could reach out and touch it. Dominic’s relationship with the city, his nostalgia for the places of his youth that have closed down and boarded up, and his unease with the city’s latest developments, are as crucial as any of the character relationships in the books. Campbell has always had a fascination with the mundane, and his horrors frequently rise from recognisable northern British working class environments, both grounding them in the real and making the familiar uncomfortable again. This aspect is central to the trilogy, as Campbell shows both how these environments and the people who live in them have changed over the time he has been writing but also how his writing has changed and matured to reflect the environment and the people around him. It is this that makes Campbell’s return to the Brichester Mythos of his early short stories so striking and such a triumph – it underlines the themes and concerns that have haunted Campbell’s writing throughout his career, whilst illustrating just how much he has matured and developed as a writer.