An Echo of Children

A slow burn, chilling horror in a gorgeous edition. Ramsey Campbell always delivers...

Coral and Allan Clarendon have just moved to the seaside town of Barnwall with their young son Dean. If an uncommon number of children have died unnaturally in Barnwall throughout history, surely Dean must be safe with his parents. Could their house be a source of peril? Allan and Coral seem to think so, since they call for an exorcism. Allan’s father Thom believes his wife is wrong to think the ceremony has left Dean in worse danger. But if she’s alone in seeing the terrors that are gathering around him, how desperate will her solution have to be?

The Ramsey Campbell Special Editions. Campbell is the greatest inheritor of a tradition that reaches back through H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the early Gothic writers. The dark, masterful work of the painter Henry Fuseli, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, is used on these special editions to invoke early literary investigations into the supernatural.

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.