The Way of the Worm

Available in hardback, paperback and ebook editions worldwide.

*Please note this is not the final ms, it is an unedited proof copy. As a result you might expect some errors. Please keep this in mind while reviewing the title, thank you.*

The third and final novel in Ramsey Campbell's triumphant Lovecraftian trilogy, The Three Births of Daoloth, where time travel, monstrous evil and the alien apocalypse combine to create a stunning conclusion for streaming TV lovers and suspense readers alike.

"With The Way of the Worm, Campbell’s cosmic trilogy comes to a triumphant conclusion." — S.T. Joshi

Book 3 in the Three Births of Daoloth trilogy.

The present day, or something very like it. Dominic Sheldrake has retired from lecturing and lives on his own. His son Toby is married with a small daughter. The occultist Noble family are more active than ever. Their cult now openly operates as the Church of the Eternal Three, and has spread worldwide. The local branch occupies the top floors of Starview Tower, a Liverpool waterfront skyscraper. To Dominic’s dismay, Toby and his wife Claudine are deeply involved in it, and he suspects they are involving their small daughter Macy too.

Dominic lets his son persuade him to attend a meeting of the church, where he encounters all three generations of the Nobles. Although Christian Noble is almost a century old, he’s more vigorous than ever – inhumanly so. The family takes turns to preach an apocalyptic sermon that hints at dark secrets masked by the Bible and at the future that lies in wait. In a bid to investigate further Dominic undergoes the rite the church offers its members, which confers the ability to travel psychically through time. Before he’s able to flee back to the present he has a vision of the monstrous fate that’s in store for the world.

Dominic discovers a secret he’s sure the Nobles won’t want to be made public. Although he has retired from the police, Jim helps him establish the truth, and Roberta publishes it on her online blog. It’s the subject of a court case, the results of which seem to defeat the Nobles, only for them to return in a dreadfully transformed shape. Now Dominic and his friends are at their mercy, and is there anywhere in the world to hide? Even if they manage somehow to deal with the Nobles, there may be no escaping or preventing the alien apocalypse that all the events of the trilogy have been bringing ever closer...

FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing Independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices. Learn more about Flame Tree Press at www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress.

Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and now lives in Wallasey. He has received the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. 

His first book was published by the legendary Arkham House when he was eighteen years old. His later work draws on the British and American traditions of horror fiction. It ranges from the psychological to the ghostly, the subtly uncanny to the cosmic, the quietly disquieting to the terrifying, the poignant to the darkly comic. His Flame Tree books include Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, in which a family on holiday encounters an ancient horror on a Greek island, and Think Yourself Lucky, where the internet lets loose the monsters lurking within people just like us. In Somebody’s Voice a writer finds his memory and personality threatened by trying to write the memoir of a victim of abuse. The Three Births of Daoloth trilogy – The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm – pits three childhood friends against a terror as vast as time and space.

Three of Campbell’s novels have been filmed – The Influence (available from FLAME TREE PRESS), Pact of the Fathers and The Nameless (in development as a Netflix series). He reviewed films for the local BBC for nearly forty years, and is presently working on an appreciation of the Three Stooges, Six Stooges and Counting. A new supernatural novel, Fellstones, is in progress too.