Cold Print (preorder)

(preorder—to be published in July)

Cover art by Samuel Araya 

Interior illustrations by Dave Felton 

Published by Chiroptera Press.

At the tender age of fourteen, Ramsey Campbell began writing pastiches of the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. In 1961 he sent a batch of stories to August Derleth, Lovecraft’s publisher and the proprietor of Arkham House. Not knowing how young Campbell was, Derleth found merit in the stories, but he made a prescient suggestion: he urged the teenager from Liverpool to set the stories in the present day and in England. Campbell immediately took Derleth’s advice, creating a network of imaginary cities in the Severn Valley—Severnford, Brichester, Goatswood, and Temphill—that echoed Lovecraft’s constellation of fictitious New England cities.

Derleth graciously gathered these early stories as The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964). But soon thereafter, the English writer moved on to write dense, complex stories that used Lovecraft’s conceptions as a springboard for the expression of Campbell’s evolving vision of a world where social and domestic conflict, sexual trauma, and other modern concerns are at the forefront.

This volume collects stories from the two decades of Campbell’s career and display how dramatically he evolved from a competent imitator to one of the pioneering writers of weird fiction in our time.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”, and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction”. His awards include 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 latest novels are Fellstones, The Lonely Lands, The Incubations and An Echo of Children. His Brichester Mythos trilogy consists of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, By the Light of My Skull, Fearful Implications, and a two-volume retrospective roundup (Phantasmagorical Stories) as well as The Village Killings and Other Novellas. His non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably and Ramsey Campbell, Certainly, while Ramsey’s Rambles collects his video reviews, and Six Stooges and Counting is a book-length study of the Three Stooges. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks.

Standard Edition Specs:

• 6"x 9"
• 366 pages
• Smyth-sewn binding with head and tail bands
• Tipped in signature page signed by the author and interior artist
• Offset printed on acid-free archival paper
• Printed in Lithuania and bound in USA