This is the concluding part of Ramsey Campbell's Brichester mythos trilogy. Dominic Sheldrake, narrator of the first two books (The Searching Dead and Born to the Dark) is getting on in years. Thirty years have passed since the events of BTTD and Dominic's son Toby is married with a daughter of his own.
Toby and his wife and daughter have recently become involved with a new (old) church in the city with all too familiar management. The Nobles are back and their plans closer to completion than ever. Is there anything Dominic can do to prevent the approach of a cosmic horror?
No one writes paranoia quite the same way as Ramsey Campbell. His characters sense the horrors as often as they see them outright. They question what their own eyes and ears are telling them. The shadows contain half glimpsed visions, things that shouldn't exist.
This builds to an unsettling sense of wrongness that is far more scary than any number of descriptions of dismemberment in medical detail that pass for horror in many other books in the genre.
The final chapters of this book drop the uncertainty into a definiteness that is scarier still. The paranoia wasn't paranoia. He gives us a nightmare vision that may well be the scariest sequence he's ever written.
This is a fine conclusion to an ambitious and frightening trilogy. The build up between the three books, and escalating stakes are deftly handled. The characters develop believably between the volumes. The time gaps between the volumes mean we've met Dominic and friends (and enemies) from childhood to old age. This is an unusual gambit which adds another layer of interest to the story.
If you like your horror to be cosmic and paranoid, there are very few writers to match Ramsey and this trilogy is one of his greatest achievements.
It's available direct from The PS Publishing website if you don't want to give your money to Mr Bezos.
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