After reading through the strange set of notes that Young has left behind, he eventually sets off to explore the church himself.įirst appeared in an anthology called 'Dark Mind, Dark Heart', published in 1962.Īfter reading some of the Necronomicon and some local history in a library, the narrator sets off (despite his friend's warnings) to find the remains of a castle where there is rumoured to be some kind of creature locked away in a dungeon.

A strange man who lives across the road from the now deserted house, tells him that the disappearance may have something to do with the strange church, and the unpleasant rituals that take place there. The narrator sets off to visit his friend Albert Young, who lives there - only to find that he has gone missing. surely the most sophisticated stylist in modern horror' TALES WRITTEN WITH A QUILL OF FIRE - TO MAKE YOUR BLOOD RUN COLD. THESE ARE SOME OF THE HORRIFYING VISIONS SPELLED OUT IN BLACK AND WHITE IN COLD PRINT. A wandering planet's passage through the heavens seemed irrelevant, until he stumbled on a bizarre diary and a telescope trained on the sky.

Ingels dreamed of a city that would rise from the sea, of sea-gods who would inherit the earth once more. But when his new friend June showed him a certain old book, young Michael began to wonder what had kept his parents on the move. The Carter family had parked their trailer for the last time. When Sam Strutt strode into a sleazy bookshop in search of exotic porn, a macabre many-mouthed creature made an occult proposition that cooled his blood - as he realised the deadly price of refusal. He also recalls his attempt to break all links with Lovecraft's work to find his own voice, which in the end proved unnecessary, as the later stories in the collection show. August Derleth gets an affectionate mention. In it RC takes a clear, unembarrased look at his early stories, and even quotes some really bad bits from ones not included in the collection. It is certainly pretty amazing that they were written by a teenager!

Some people, mainly devotees of HPL, take this collection to be the most interesting of Ramsey Campbell's output and I have to say that these tales of Goatswood, Brichester and Temphill do have a certain charm about them. The collection ends with 'The Voice of the Beach' which is to my mind one of RC's best stories ever. The latter half of this collection is made up of stories which are more recognisably pure Campbell, although still fixed to some degree in the work of Lovecraft. Some of the earlier tales I struggle with a bit, although many of them contain glimpses of what is to come later. This one collects together the more Lovecraftian tales, many of them dating back to his first book, 'The Inhabitant of the Lake, & other less welcome tenants'. Warning: this post contains hidden secret information.

Cold print by ramsey campbell