Born To the Dark (Book Two of The Three Births of Daoloth) (2017) by Ramsey Campbell

Born To the Dark (Book Two of The Three Births of Daoloth) (2017) by Ramsey Campbell: In The Searching Dead (2016), narrator Dominick Sheldrake told of his early teen-aged years in 1952 Liverpool. Along with friends Roberta (Bobby) and Jim, Dominick encountered increasingly weird occult occurrences, though by the end of the book he alone faced the final horrors. 

Now it's 1985 and Dominick is all grown up, teaching film studies at a Liverpool college, married, with a five-year-old son. But the son has a curious sleep disorder. A nurse recommends a new clinic specializing in successful treatment of this disorder. And Dominick finds himself plunged into new iterations of the horrors of the past.

Ramsey Campbell is at the height of his multitudinous powers in this, the middle novel of The Three Births of Daoloth. Narrated again at some time after the events of the novel by Dominick, Born To the Dark is cosmic horror amplified by Sheldrake's fears for his son, his friends, and his sanity. We view much of the cosmic terror through Sheldrake's son's descriptions of his dreams and the strange things and events lurking there. Somehow, this makes it worse.

Like many protagonists of horror novels, Dominick struggles to find someone -- anyone -- who will believe his story. And he also struggles with the consequences of telling his wife and others about the cosmic threat that seemingly only he sees: paranoia, abandonment, the threat of divorce, the threat of police action, public humiliation...

But this isn't simply psychological horror about an unjustifiably paranoid narrator. Something is coming, something worse than whatever it is that's already there. The novel climaxes with a lengthy journey into a place being undermined by an invading reality. And with a third book to go, there are (as Manly Wade Wellman once observed) Worse Things Waiting.

The characterization of Dom and the other characters is sharp, the mood and description unnerving throughout. As in many of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal tales of cosmic horror, Born To the Dark gives us a protagonist who continues to attempt to stop a rising tide of horror that is almost certainly beyond his powers to stop. Yet he persists. Highly recommended.