GARY FRY

THE WAY OF THE WORM: an interview with Ramsey Campbell conducted by Gary Fry Gary : It’s two years since THE SEARCHING DEAD was released, and a year since BORN TO THE DARK. Now we have THE WAY OF THE WORM, the final entry in your Daoloth trilogy, which I’ve just had the pleasure to review [ LINK ]. It strikes me that readers new to the series now have an opportunity to read the series from start to end without breaks. Is that the way you feel it might be best enjoyed? Ramsey : I do, even though it wasn’t written quite that way – new short stories intervened between each pair of volumes. I found that each later volume gained energy from what went before, and returning to the characters to find how they’d developed was an inspiration in itself. I’d written novels before where characters age decades during the narrative – Obsession and Thieving Fear , for instance – but coming back to them after a few months away from this particular narrative is rather like meeting old friends after a wh...

THE WAY OF THE WORM by Ramsey Campbell Review by Gary Fry And so we reach the finale of Campbell’s Daoloth trilogy, the author’s latest attempt to scale the peaks of Lovecraft at his finest. I reviewed the first two volumes when each was released, and links can be found here [ THE SEARCHING DEAD ] and here [ BORN TO THE DARK ]. In summary, let me say that I found the two books excellent entries in the series, both satisfying as standalone works and thrumming with anticipatory materials in advance of the last one. The simple question now is, can Campbell live up to promises he makes in those previous novels? The answer is yes. Quite triumphantly.   THE WAY OF THE WORM is relatively straightforward plot-wise. It’s 30 years on from events depicted in BORN TO THE DARK, and our hero, Dominic Sheldrake, is approaching his dotage. His son, now an adult with a family of his own, is heavily invested in the Noble family and their (nefarious) plans for the world, but Dominic won’t give up on ...