Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

AFTERWORD

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

RANDY BROECKER was born and lives in Chicago, Illinois. Inspired by the pulp magazines and EC comics he read as a child, his first published artwork appeared in Rich Hauser’s seminal 1960s EC fanzine, Spa-Fon.

Many years later, a meeting with acclaimed publisher Donald M. Grant at the second World Fantasy Convention eventually led in 1979 to The Black Wolf and his first hardcover illustrations. Since then his work has appeared in books produced by PS Publishing, Robinson Publishing, Carroll & Graf, Fedogan & Bremer, Cemetery Dance, Underwood-Miller, Sarob Press, Pumpkin Books, American Fantasy, Highland Press and other imprints on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was Artist Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Horror Convention and is the author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated study Fantasy of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History from Collector’s Press, which also formed part of a three-in-one omnibus entitled Art of Imagination: 20th Century Visions of Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy.

The artist has long been an admirer of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. His works have taken him to picturesque Innsmouth on more than one occasion, about which he has this to say: “The people of Innsmouth have been most kind to me over the years and I’ve enjoyed using them as models, although—and Lovecraft knew this—the ‘Innsmouth look’ as he referred to it, can be a bit hard to nail down on paper. There is, quite frankly, a tendency to over-exaggerate, which I’d like to believe I’ve avoided with my work this time around. I only hope they are as pleased with the results as I am.

“Whether embraced by the Innsmouth folk or not,” he adds, “these illustrations are dedicated to my late brother Jay—a small token for showing me the way not only to Innsmouth, but other fantastic locales as well.”

Broecker was also one of the contributing artists to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, and this new edition of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth features additional illustrations that were not included in the Fedogan & Bremer hardcover.

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RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, where he still lives with his wife Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964, since when his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Bad Thoughts, Think Yourself Lucky and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane.

His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).

PS Publishing recently published the novellas The Pretence and The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, which attempts to reconceive some of the author’s early Lovecraftian ideas and develop them, along with the definitive edition of that early Arkham collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Also available from the same publisher is a volume of all the Campbell–Derleth correspondence, edited by S. T. Joshi.

Now well into his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is also President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

“I started imitating Lovecraft more than fifty years ago,” reveals Campbell. “Soon I learned to subsume his example—his careful sense of structure, his ambition to reach for awe—and mostly did without his Mythos, which in any case was largely constructed by later writers, too often to the detriment of what he was trying to achieve. He meant his inventions to suggest more than they made explicit, but the rest of us filled in so many gaps that the whole thing became as over-explained as the Victorian occultism he wanted to leave behind. Over the decades I’ve tried to reclaim some of his original vision, not least in my novel The Darkest Part of the Woods, which took The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a model of how to do without his Mythos. I hope ‘The Winner’ also gives some sense of his vision without needing explicit references.

“I’ve been in pubs as unnerving as the one in this story, and perhaps they’ve lodged in my shadowy subconscious. The worst was in Birkenhead—a pub where as soon as you walked in you felt as if you’d announced your Jewishness at a David Irving book launch.”

Campbell’s early story ‘The Church in the High Street’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth, and the author’s ‘Raised by the Moon’ is included in Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.

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ADRIAN COLE was born in 1949 in Devon, where he still lives. He is the author of twenty-five novels and numerous short stories, writing in several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, sword & sorcery and horror.

His first books were published in the 1970s—“The Dream Lords” trilogy—and he went on to write, among others, the “Omaran Saga” and the “Star Requiem” series, as well as writing two young adult novels, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants.

More recently, he has had several books published by Wildside Press, including the “Voidal” trilogy, which collects all the original short stories from the 1970s and ’80s and adds new material to complete the saga. The same imprint has also published the novel Night of the Heroes, an affectionate celebration of the world of pulp fiction, as well as Young Thongor, which Cole has edited and which includes the previously uncollected short “Thongor” stories of Lin Carter.

The author’s latest SF novel is The Shadow Academy from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, with an audio version available from Audible. His short stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and he has written and performed a number of parodies of the genres he loves at various conventions in the past.

As the author explains: “‘You Don’t Want to Know’ is the first story I wrote about Nick Nightmare, the hard-boiled private eye, most of whose adventures pit him against various villains from Mythos terrain.

“Combining the droll style of Philip Marlowe, the shoot-’em-up no-nonsense energy of Mike Hammer and the bizarre grotesquery of H. P. Lovecraft, the Nick Nightmare stories are intended to be a celebration of the old pulps and their hyper-active, madcap world.”

A further tale, ‘Nightmare on Mad Gull Island’, was published in the fourth edition of Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos from Spectre Press, while Nick Nightmare Investigates is a new collection of tales from The Alchemy Press/Airgedlámh Publications. Both publications are illustrated by Jim Pitts.

Adrian Cole’s story ‘The Crossing’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth.

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AUGUST WILLIAM DERLETH (1909–71) was a major figure in the literary and small-press publishing world. An amazingly prolific Wisconsin regional author (known for his “Sac Prairie Saga”), essayist and poet, he is best remembered today as an author, editor and publisher of weird fiction (Lovecraftian and otherwise).

He made his debut in Weird Tales at the age of seventeen with a story entitled ‘Bat’s Belfry’, and most of his own macabre fiction has been collected by Arkham House—the imprint that Derleth founded in 1939 with Donald Wandrei to perpetuate the work of their friend and colleague H. P. Lovecraft—in such volumes as Someone in the Dark, Something Near, Not Long for This World, Lonesome Places, Mr. George and Other Odd Persons (as by “Stephen Grendon”), Colonel Markeson and Less Pleasant People (with Mark Schorer), Harrigan’s File, Dwellers in Darkness and In Lovecraft’s Shadow.

As a widely respected anthologist, he edited Sleep No More, Who Knocks?, The Night Side, The Sleeping and the Dead, Dark of the Moon, Night’s Yawning Peal: A Ghostly Company, Dark Mind Dark Heart, The Unquiet Grave, When Evil Wakes, Over the Edge, Travellers by Night, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Dark Things, amongst many other titles.

Derleth began corresponding with Lovecraft around the mid-1920s. “You have the real stuff,” the author wrote to his young protégé in 1930, “and with the progress of time it seems to me over-whelmingly probable that you will produce literature in a major calibre.”

Following Lovecraft’s untimely death, Derleth developed various fragments and outlines (reputedly) discovered amongst the author’s posthumous papers into Cthulhu Mythos-inspired pastiches, which can be found in such novels and collections as The Lurker at the Threshold, The Survivor and Others, The Mask of Cthulhu, The Trail of Cthulhu and The Watchers Out of Time and Others.

In 1962, he set out his own vision of the Mythos: “The deities of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos consisted first of the Elder Gods, which, though beyond mundane morality, beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil’, were nevertheless proponents of order and thus represented the forces of enlightenment as against the forces of evil, represented by the Ancient Ones or the Great Old Ones, who rebelled against the Elder Gods, and were thrust—like Satan—into outer darkness.”

‘Innsmouth Clay’ is a “posthumous pastiche” which first appeared in the 1971 anthology Dark Things under only Lovecraft’s byline. When reprinted three years later in The Watchers Out of Time, it was properly identified as a collaborative effort between the two authors.

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JOHN STEPHEN GLASBY (1928–2011) graduated from Nottingham University with a honours degree in Chemistry. He started his career as a research chemist for ICI in 1952 and worked for them until his retirement.

Around the same time, he began a parallel career as an extraordinarily prolific writer of novels and short stories, producing more than 300 works in all genres over the next two decades, many under such shared house pseudonyms as “Rand Le Page”, “Berl Cameron”, “Victor La Salle” and “John E. Muller”. His most noted personal pseudonym was “A. J. Merak”. He subsequently published a new collection of ghost stories, The Substance of Shade, the occult novel The Dark Destroyer, and the SF novel Mystery of the Crater.

More recently, Philip Harbottle compiled two collections of Glasby’s supernatural fiction, The Lonely Shadows and The Dark Boatman, while the author’s son, Edmund Glasby, edited The Thing in the Mist: Selected by John S. Glasby, collecting eleven of the author’s stories from Badger Books’ digest horror magazine Supernatural Stories.

Ramble House will publish a further collection of fiction selected from that magazine, along with a new volume of Glasby’s Mythos stories, Dwellers in Darkness and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Meanwhile, the author’s most ambitious Lovecraftian work, Dark Armageddon—a trilogy of novels that unify the “Cthulhu Mythos” and bring it to a climactic conclusion—is set to appear from Centipede Press.

A long-time fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, in the early 1970s the author also submitted a collection of Mythos stories to August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth suggested extensive revisions and improvements, which Glasby duly followed, but the publisher unfortunately died before the revised book could see print, and the manuscript was returned.

In his later years, Glasby returned to writing more supernatural stories in the Lovecraftian vein. ‘The Quest for Y’ha-Nthlei’—a direct sequel to Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—was written especially for Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, as was ‘Innsmouth Bane’, which first appeared in the short-lived H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, before finally being anthologised in this volume.

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BRIAN HODGE is the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical. He’s also written over 100 short stories, novelettes and novellas, plus five full-length collections.

Recent works include No Law Left Unbroken, a collection of crime fiction; The Weight of the Dead and Whom the Gods Would Destroy, both stand-alone novellas; a newly revised hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his latest novel, Leaves of Sherwood.

He lives in Colorado, where more of everything is in the works. He also dabbles in music, sound design and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga, grappling, and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.

As the author explains: “As many times as I’ve read ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, it never occurred to me, until I read it looking for ideas, that neither H. P. Lovecraft nor anyone in the prior “Innsmouth” anthologies had accounted for the prisoners taken during the 1928 raids on the town.

“I quickly became intrigued by what must have happened to them, and how they might well constitute the original precedent for the troubling, terrorism-era US policy of endless detention without due process.

“The anomalous ocean recording in ‘The Same Deep Waters as You’ was a real-world event that I’ve wanted to play with for years. In an irresistible coincidence, the Bloop was triangulated to have originated close to where Lovecraft located the sunken city of R’lyeh. A few weeks after I finished this story, NOAA announced that the sound was similar to the sonic profile of icebergs recorded in the Scotia Sea. They would know, although I’d love to learn more about how there would’ve been enough ice around Polynesia that August that its calving was heard for 3,000 miles.

“It’s more fun living in a world where this remains a mystery.”

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CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, The Red Tree and Blood Oranges. She has recently scripted a graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics, Alabaster, which continues the misadventures of her character Dancy Flammarion.

Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores, To Charles Fort with Love, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others and the retrospective volume Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). Subterranean Press has recently released The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, while Centipede Press is planning expanded and illustrated limited editions of her novels The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and The Red Tree.

About the sequence of stories the author has in this volume, she reveals: “‘Fish Bride’ has a somewhat complicated origin. In December 2005, I mentioned something in my blog about wanting to write a humorous story about a ‘whorehouse in Innsmouth, circa 1924’. I’m not very good at humour, not usually, and the idea sat fallow for a long time. A couple of years later, I wrote ‘Fish Bride’, a very different sort of tale, not the least bit humorous, but one that grew out of that concept of a ‘whorehouse in Innsmouth’. Though ‘Fish Bride’ isn’t set in Innsmouth, the locale clearly mirrors Lovecraft’s doomed seaport. It also owes a debt to R. H. Barlow’s ‘The Night Ocean’, which was one of those stories that Lovecraft ‘revised’ in an attempt to scrape by and make his meagre living.

“‘On the Reef’ came about in the autumn of 2010,” continues Kiernan, “because I was looking to write a Halloween story, and a story about masks and the role they play in mythology and religion. And because I wanted to write a story that returned to Innsmouth long after the events of Lovecraft’s story. It’s not like the town could have been completely erased. So, in essence it’s a kind of ghost story. Only the ghost isn’t the disembodied spirit of a human being, but the force that a dead town and what happened continues to exert over the present day.

“‘The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings’ is one of those stories that I wrote because I’m so often more interested in looking at a superficially ‘horrific’ situation from the point of view of the ‘Other’. Probably, John Garner’s Grendel set me on this path. In this story, I’m not interested in provoking fear from the reader, but sympathy for the protagonist, an understanding of her sense of alienation, her loneliness, and her longing for a life forever out of her reach.”

Kiernan’s story ‘From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6’, which linked Lovecraft’s Deep Ones to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, appeared in Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.

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HOWARD PHILIPS LOVECRAFT (1890–1937) is one of the twentieth century’s most important and influential authors of supernatural fiction.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he lived for much of his life there as a studious antiquarian who wrote mostly with no care for commercial reward. During his lifetime, the majority of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry and essays appeared in obscure amateur-press journals or in the pages of the struggling pulp magazine Weird Tales.

Following the author’s untimely death, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded the publishing imprint of Arkham House in 1939 with the initial idea of keeping all Lovecraft’s work in print. Beginning with The Outsider and Others, his stories were collected in such hardcover volumes as Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Marginalia, Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Dreams and Fancies, The Dunwich Horror and Others, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, 3 Tales of Horror and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, along with several volumes of “posthumous collaborations” with Derleth, including as The Lurker at the Threshold, The Survivor and Others, The Mask of Cthulhu, The Trail of Cthulhu and The Watchers Out of Time and Others.

During the decades since his death, Lovecraft himself has been acknowledged as a mainstream American writer second only to Edgar Allan Poe, while his relatively small body of work has influenced countless imitators and formed the basis of a world-wide industry of books, role-playing games, graphic novels, toys and movies based on his concepts.

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BRIAN LUMLEY started his writing career by emulating the work of H. P. Lovecraft and has ended up with his own, highly enthusiastic, fan following for his world-wide best-selling series of “Necroscope”® vampire books.

Born in the coal-mining town of Horden, County Durham, on England’s north-east coast, Lumley joined the British Army when he was twenty-one and served in the Corps of Royal Military Police for twenty-two years, until his retirement in December 1980.

After discovering Lovecraft’s stories while stationed in Berlin in the early 1960s, he decided to try his own hand at writing horror fiction, initially based around the influential Cthulhu Mythos. He sent his early efforts to editor August Derleth, and Arkham House published two collections of the author’s stories, The Caller of the Black and The Horror at Oakdene and Others, along with the short novel, Beneath the Moors.

The author then continued Lovecraft’s themes in such novels and collections as The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow, The Clock of Dreams, Spawn of the Winds, In the Moons of Borea, The Compleat Crow, Hero of Dreams, Ship of Dreams, Mad Moon of Dreams, Iced on Iran and Other Dreamquests, The House of Cthulhu and Other Tales of the Primal Land, Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (which includes the British Fantasy Award-winning title story), Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales and Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords.

As Lumley explains: “‘The Long Last Night’ in this current volume is set in the future—possibly the last, darkest and nearest future, when the stars are finally right. Firmly grounded in H. P. Lovecraft’s now world-famous ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, this story is my third offering in Titan Books’ trilogy of Lovecraftian horror: Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth and Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, though not necessarily my last connected story. For fans of HPL, especially those suffering—or with hideously developing symptoms of—the Innsmouth taint, look for ‘The Changeling’ in the same editor’s anthology Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome.”

Other recent works by Brian Lumley include The Möbius Murders, a long novella set in the Necroscope® universe, and The Compleat Crow, reprinting all the short adventures and longer novellas in the saga of Titus Crow, both volumes from William Schafer’s Subterranean Press. And here it is worth pointing out that Titus Crow himself has had more than a handful of dealings with the monsters of the Mythos…

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KIM NEWMAN is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man from the Diogenes Club, all under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil”.

His non-fiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit.

He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (supplying the latter’s popular ‘Video Dungeon’ column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television documentaries.

Newman’s stories ‘Week Woman’ and ‘Ubermensch’ have been adapted into episodes of the TV series The Hunger, and the latter tale was also turned into an Australian short film in 2009. Following his Radio 4 play Cry Babies, he wrote an episode (‘Phish Phood’) for BBC Radio 7’s series The Man in Black, and he was a main contributor to the 2012 stage play The Hallowe’en Sessions. He has also directed and written a tiny film, Missing Girl.

The author’s most recent books include expanded reissues of his acclaimed Anno Dracula series, including the long-awaited fourth volume Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard; the “Professor Moriarty” novel The Hound of the d’Urbervilles, and the stand-alone novel An English Ghost Story (all from Titan Books), along with a much-enlarged edition of Nightmare Movies (from Bloomsbury).

With Maura McHugh he scripted the comic book mini-series Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland for Dark Horse Comics. Illustrated by Tyler Crook, it is a spin-off from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series. Forthcoming fiction includes the novels Kentish Glory: The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange and Angels of Music.

About the setting for his ‘Richard Riddle’ story, Newman explains: “Lyme Regis, in the county of Dorset, is perhaps best known as the setting for John Fowles’ prematurely post-modern Victorian novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman—which makes dramatic use, as does Karel Reisz’s film, of the town’s distinctive stone harbour, the Cobb. Fowles was a famous, if mysterious local resident and lived quite near my fictional Orris Priory. In the 1970s, I spent many weekends around the little coast town, where my father had a yacht—a Mirror dinghy which I sometimes crewed on fishing trips in Lyme Bay, though Dad had someone more serious along when he took up boat-racing.

“Then and now, Lyme beach was known for its fine array of fossils: before anyone learned to leave paleontological finds in place, we brought home a huge chunk of rock with an embedded ammonite for use as a door-stop. Amazingly, the shingles still haven’t been picked entirely clean—though taking prehistoric souvenirs is now quite properly discouraged.

“This story, which was originally written for Chris Roberson’s anthology Adventure, draws on my own memories of pottering around Lyme. In America, the piece was taken as a tribute to boys’ adventures I’ve not read—Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys. I was actually thinking of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, one of Dad’s favourite books as a child (it gave him the idea of sailing in the first place), and Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (a 1929 German young adult mystery still read in my 1970s schooldays). Other elements thrown into the mix were H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, Edmund Gosse’s brilliant 1907 memoir Father and Son (Philip Gosse wrote Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, which desperately tries to explain the existence of fossils from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint), and the famous anecdote of the Hartlepool monkey.

“The story goes that, during the Napoleonic Wars, a ship sank off the coast of the Northern fishing town. The sole survivor was a monkey dressed in a miniature sailor’s uniform. The locals, having never seen a Frenchman, took the monkey for a spy, tried the unfortunate creature and hanged it, prompting citizens of rival towns to taunt Hartlepool natives to this day with a jeer of ‘Who hung the monkey?’”

Kim Newman contributed two stories—‘A Quarter to Three’ and ‘The Big Fish’ (under his “Jack Yeovil” byline)—to Shadows Over Innsmouth and, as the author admits, “I thought I wouldn’t write yet another fish story when I finished ‘Another Fish Story’ for the second ‘Innsmouth’ anthology, but then this popped out.”

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REGGIE OLIVER has been a professional playwright, actor and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorised biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and several collections of stories of supernatural terror, including Mrs Midnight, which won the Children of the Night Award for Best Work of Supernatural Fiction in 2011.

More recently, Tartarus has reissued his first and second collections, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, with illustrations by the author, along with a new collection entitled Flowers of the Sea. His novel The Dracula Papers I – The Scholar’s Tale is the first of a projected four, and an omnibus edition of the author’s stories, entitled Dramas from the Depths, is published by Centipede as part of the “Masters of the Weird Tale” series.

The Boke of the Divill is a new novella from Dark Renaissance; it is set in the cathedral town of Morchester, which has been the setting for a number of his stories (including ‘Quieta Non Movere’, which appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 23). It is also the setting of ‘The Archbishop’s Well’.

“Lovecraft’s weird mythology has been a source of fascination and inspiration to me for a long time,” admits the author. “His sense of ‘the other’ is so unique and yet so resonant to the contemporary mind. (No wonder Michel Houellebecq, the brilliant enfant terrible of modern French intellectualism, wrote a book about him!)

“Never having been to the United States, I wanted somehow to bring Lovecraft’s Innsmouth mythology (albeit with variations) to England, and so it came to the seemingly quiet West Country cathedral town of Morchester. All good weird fiction is about the collision of two worlds. In this story Lovecraft comes to the world of M. R. James (with a dash of P. G. Wodehouse thrown in).

“I like to think Lovecraft would have approved; I’m not so sure about James though.”

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ANGELA SLATTER is an Australian writer of dark fantasy and horror. She is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award short-listed Sourdough and Other Stories, and the collection/mosaic novel Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett). More recent publications include the collections The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels and (again in collaboration with Hannett) The Female Factory.

She has an MA and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, and is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award (for her story ‘The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter’ in A Book of Horrors). Her work has also appeared in Australian, British and American “Best of” anthologies, along with Fantasy Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Dreaming Again, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome and Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame.

“My first introduction to Lovecraft was an old reprint collection of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories,” reveals the author. “I was about fifteen and found it (as I found many of my books then) in the book bin at the local supermarket where I worked as a checkout chick on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings.

“What stuck with me from that collection was not only the inexorable stripping away of a mystery that ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ embodies, but also the tale of ‘The Outsider’. The images and sensations from this story have stayed with me in the subsequent thirty years—the dark, dank castle, the seemingly endless staircase going up, the awful sense of having lost one’s memories, the strangeness of mirrors, and, of course, the dreadful feeling of isolation and rejection that often comes with discovering a terrible truth—the broken, decaying baroque of it all. They are images and sensations that you find in much of Lovecraft’s work and, when I wrote ‘The Song of Sighs’, I looked back to my fifteen-year-old self and mined her memories—dug into the fear and surprise that Lovecraft’s stories brought, the delighted frisson of horror—and tried to recreate those influences while weaving them in with my own tale.

“As for ‘Rising, Not Dreaming’, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the editor of Innsmouth Free Press, asked me for a short Cthulhu story and the result was a kind of Orpheus tale that came out of a dream. It started with the idea of the kinds of things husbands do that disappoint wives and I wanted it to be something really big, not just simply a refusal to take out the garbage or mow the lawn.”

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MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH was born in Knutsford, Cheshire, and grew up in the United States, South Africa and Australia. He currently lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and son.

Smith’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and, under his full name, he has published the modern SF novels Only Forward, Spares and One of Us. He is the only person to have won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story four times—along with the August Delerth, International Horror Guild and Philip K. Dick awards.

Writing as “Michael Marshall” he has published a string of international best-selling novels of suspense, including the Straw Men series, Killer Move, We Are Here and The Intruders, the latter adapted into an eight-part mini-series for television by BBC America.

Everything You Need was a recent collection of short stories from Earthling Publications, and forthcoming are a tenth anniversary edition of The Straw Men and his next novel.

“My wife and I have been dropping into Carmel once in a while for nearly twenty years,” Smith explains about the setting for his story ‘The Chain’. “Our first visit was on the vacation when we got engaged—back when there were no mobile phones and you couldn’t Google for restaurant or hotel advice—and we have always enjoyed the experience.

“It’s a lovely little place, of course, with an interesting history and a stunning cove and tons of nice shops and galleries and a unique mishmash of cottages from modernist to Storybook. There’s also a restaurant in town that serves the very best Reuben sandwich I’ve ever encountered (rest assured that I have not stinted in my research over the years, and so this is no idle statement).

“However, the town’s always struck me as… odd, and I know I’m not alone. It’s artificial at some very deep level, too perfect to be true, somehow both the logical extension but also the antithesis of what its arty founding fathers dreamed of. Since I came to live in Santa Cruz—only an hour’s drive north—this impression has been further complicated. I’ve heard from more than one source that any misfit or homeless person who happens to wander into Carmel is quietly encouraged (with the assistance of a bus ticket) to go live in my town instead.

“This alleged practice, like the atmosphere of the town itself, cannot but help make you wonder what lies beneath the surface… and for how long it’s been there.

“And, of course, what happens next.”

* * *

SIMON KURT UNSWORTH was born in Manchester in 1972 on a night when, despite increasingly desperate research, he can find no evidence of mysterious signs or portents. He currently lives on a hill in the north of England awaiting the coming flood, where he writes essentially grumpy fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story), whilst being tall, grouchier than he should be, and owning a wide selection of garish shirts and a rather magnificent leather waistcoat. He has a cheerfully full beard and spends most of his life in need of a haircut.

His collection, Strange Gateways, recently appeared from PS Publishing, following the critically acclaimed Quiet Houses from Dark Continents Publishing (2011) and Lost Places from Ash-Tree Press (2010), which was Peter Tennant from Black Static magazine’s joint favourite collection of the year (along with Angela Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories). His fiction has been published in a large number of anthologies including the World Fantasy Award-winning Exotic Gothic 4, Terror Tales of the Cotswolds, Terror Tales of the Seaside, Where the Heart Is, At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Exotic Gothic 3, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, Hauntings, Lovecraft Unbound and Year’s Best Fantasy 2013. He has been represented in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror six times, and he was also in The Very Best of Best New Horror.

The author has a further collection due—the as-yet-unnamed collection that will launch the Spectral Press Spectral Signature Editions imprint. His novel The Devil’s Detective is due out from Doubleday in the US and Del Rey in the UK in early 2015.

You can find him on Twitter or Facebook, or in various cafés in Lancaster staring at his MacBook and muttering to himself.

“I’m not a big Lovecraft fan,” admits Unsworth. “Don’t get me wrong—I like the stories (some a great deal), but his stuff isn’t particularly what I have in my mind when I write. The stories are sometimes stuffy, a little claustrophobic (and not in a good way) and hysterical, despite a certain elemental power that the best of them contain. They’re rarely subtle, and sometimes veer dangerously close to cliché or stereotype.

“Where he comes into his own, I think, is in creating this huge world, and worlds beyond the world, in which we can play. Whether it’s the audio dramatisations of the marvellous H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society or the blood-spattered glories of Stuart Gordon’s Re-animator, there seems to be lots of space to expand on HPL’s original works, and twist and flex the things he wrote about into new and (hopefully) interesting shapes. I’ve done it, sometimes deliberately (as in ‘Into the Water’), and sometimes without really realising it until after, when I suddenly understand that I might not have actually said ‘Hey, this is one of Cthulhu’s children!’ in the text but that’s what I’ve intimated.

“The reason we can do this, that Lovecraft’s stuff lends itself to this kind of expansion is, I think, that his horrors are emphatically external, clamouring from the Outside and trying to get in. And the Outside is huge, unbelievably massive, which means we can put whatever we want into it and it never gets full.

“For an author, that kind of freedom—a framework with unlimited playground space—is too big a thing to ignore. Besides, tentacles and things moving in the abyssal blackness below us and above us and behind us seem like such good things to write about…”

* * *

CONRAD WILLIAMS was born in 1969 and currently lives in Manchester, England, with his wife, three sons and a monster Maine Coon. He is an associate lecturer at Edge Hill University.

He is the author of seven novels (Head Injuries, London Revenant, the International Horror Guild Award-winning The Unblemished, the British Fantasy Award-winning One, Decay Inevitable, Blonde on a Stick and Loss of Separation), four novellas (Nearly People, Game, the British Fantasy Award-winning The Scalding Rooms and Rain) and two collections of short stories (Use Once Then Destroy and Born with Teeth). His debut anthology, Gutshot, was short-listed for both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards.

As the author recalls: “I’d found a hag stone—a pebble with a hole bored through it by the force of water over countless years—a long time ago on a forgotten beach, but the actual story came about after a visit to Alderney last summer.

“I spent three days with my family in Fort Clonque, which has been a Landmark Trust holiday destination since 1966. It was once a naval base guarding against attack from the French and then, in 1940, it was appropriated by Nazi Germany—Hitler thought it strategically valuable—and it was re-fortified and manned in preparation for an invasion of the mainland which, of course, never came.

“The hag stone and the fort were two complementary elements that provided one of those pleasing convergences that sometimes happen for a writer from time to time. Much of what happens in the narrative is true: the outpost mentioned in the story exists, as did the poor hare, reduced to desiccated fibres on the causeway. The unfortunate incident at the beach that takes place while Adrian Stafford is trying to eat his lunch also happened (up to a point).

“It would have been a crime not to use the location in a short story, especially for an anthology such as this. The epic, rugged scenery and claustrophobic nature of the fort call to much of Lovecraft’s work that I admire—an awesomeness in the wide, open skies and the unfathomable depths; the unimaginable stretches of time over which hag stones and horrors from the ocean are formed (while the old protagonist in my story appears as a mere breath in the lungs of time); and the threat of being engulfed, of beginning to understand something vast but which is nevertheless only just observable.”