On May 27th at 1pm the James Reckitt Reading Room at Hull Central Library will be the atmospheric surroundings for HumberSFF4.
HumberSFF is excited to be able to host Peter Crowther and Ramsey Campbell as our guests.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including 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.
The Edwardian reading room is ideal for Ramsey Campbell’s reading of the Lovcraftian inspired novel The Searching Dead. It is the first in a trilogy published by PS Publishing.
Ramsey Campbell recently returned to the Brichester Mythos for his novella The Last Revelation of Gla’aki. His new trilogy The Three Births of Daoloth further develops the cosmic horrors he invented in his first published book, The Inhabitant of the Lake. The Searching Dead is the first volume, to be followed by Born to the Dark.
SYNOPSIS (THE SEARCHING DEAD):
Dominic Sheldrake has never forgotten his childhood in fifties Liverpool or the talk an ld boy of his grammar school gave about the First World War. When his history teacher took the class on a field trip to France it promised to be an adventure, not the first of a series of glimpses of what lay in wait for the world.
Soon Dominic would learn that a neighbour was involved in practices far older and darker than spiritualism, and stumble on a secret journal that hinted at the occult nature of the universe. How could he and his friends Roberta and Jim stop what was growing under a church in the midst of the results of the blitz? Dominic used to write tales of their exploits, but what they face now could reduce any adult to less than a child…
For Science Fiction fans, Peter Crowther will be reading from his short story 
collection: Songs of Leaving.
Peter Crowther is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, his editing and, as publisher, for the hugely successful PS Publishing (now including the Stanza Press poetry subsidiary, the Drugstore Indian Press paperback line and PS Artbooks, a specialist imprint dedicated to the comics field). As well as being widely translated, his short stories have been adapted for TV on both sides of the Atlantic and collected in The Longest Single Note, Lonesome Roads, Songs of Leaving, Cold Comforts, The Spaces Between the Lines and The Land at the End of the Working Day. He is the co-author (with James Lovegrove) of Escardy Gap and The Hand That Feeds, and author of the Forever Twilight SF/horror cycle and By Wizard Oak.
He lives and works (and still reads a lot of comicbooks!) with his wife and business partner, Nicky on the Yorkshire coast of England.
REVIEWS (SONGS OF LEAVING):
“Crowther’s collection opens with a magnificent homage to Ray Bradbury, ‘Some Burial Place, vast and Dry’ (the title is one of several references to Whitman), in which the last survivor of a lost colony remembers his home and is visited by it. Despite that tough first act, the quality of what follows remains consistent. These lovely and thoughtful stories are speculative fiction at pretty much its best, conjuring self-contained worlds that for all the stories’ brevity, teem with life.”
—Booklist
“The best of the 12 mostly SF stories in this collection from British author Crowther evoke a genuine sense of wonder and offer near miraculous restoration of hope. Like Ray Bradbury, who is intentionally invoked, Crowther enchants as he tells deceptively simple tales of eternal truths.”
—Publishers Weekly
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As always there’ll be the chance to ask questions and a free raffle. Books have been provided by TorUK, and The British Fantasy Society. There will also be an after-event at The Old English Gentleman with complimentary food, places are limited both at the pub and the library, so please book!
This will be our last HumberSFF for a while, so don’t miss out!
Humber Speculative Fiction 