GARY FRY

Born to the Dark: an interview with Ramsey Campbell Gary Fry Gary : It’s a year since we discussed The Searching Dead , the first novel in your Brichester Mythos trilogy [ LINK ]. Now I’ve had chance to review the second entry Born to the Dark [ LINK ], it’s time we chatted again. The first thing I wanted to ask concerns readers both familiar with and new to the series. Do you consider each book indivisible from the others or rather as self-contained reads? Ramsey : Indivisible for sure. The second volume refers to quite a few events in the first, and I don’t believe it would be sufficiently comprehensible to anyone who started by reading it. I’d also say we need to see how some of the characters have changed in the intervening decades (other characters, not so much). I hope the three books accumulate power from drawing on their early developments. I will admit that in my youth I started reading Tolkien with The Two Towers , having been alerted to his work by the review column in Asto...

BORN TO THE DARK by Ramsey Campbell A review by Gary Fry    The second in Campbell’s Brichester Mythos trilogy, this novel takes up the ongoing story of Dominic Sheldrake’s engagement with nefarious Christian Noble about 30 years after the first book’s events ( for my review of THE SEARCHING DEAD, see here ). It’s now the 1980s; Dominic has a family and a job as a lecturer in film studies. He hasn’t been involved with the Noble family since the 1950s, but all that changes when his son develops a sleeping disorder in need of specialist treatment. Dominic’s wife is drawn to an organisation which, on the surface at least, purports to practice revolutionary new methods but, it soon transpires, has a less benevolent intention. That’s the basic story of BORN TO THE DARK, and Campbell spends 270 pages dredging compelling tension from such minimalist parts. While THE SEARCHING DEAD (the first of the trilogy) drew on a wide range of supernatural episodes, both suggestive and conc...