Weird 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 legendary 1960s EC fanzine, Spa-Fon.

Many years later, a meeting with 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.

“In the best of Lovecraft’s writing there is a feverish intensity not unlike that displayed in the work of Richard Upton Pickman, that painter of the perverse whose work I also happen to admire,” reveals Broecker.

“Both have the ability to convince one of the existence of the strange and wondrous horrors that they present so realistically. Horrors that I have enjoyed encountering for quite awhile now, and when given the opportunity like this to present my own interpretations, I confess that wild batrachians wouldn’t keep me away.”

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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, 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 novels Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk and a new Lovecraftian novella, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, along with the definitive edition of his early Arkham House collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Forthcoming from the author is the novel Bad Thoughts, the collection Holes for Faces, and another novella, The Pretence.

Now well in to 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.

“H. P. Lovecraft remains one of the crucial writers in the field,” Campbell explains. “He united the American tradition of weird fiction—Poe, Bierce, Chambers—with the British—Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James. He devoted his career to attempting to find the perfect form for the weird tale, and the sheer range of his work (from the documentary to the delirious) is often overlooked. Few writers in the field are more worth re-reading: certainly I find different qualities on different occasions. I recently read ‘The Outsider’ to my wife Jenny to both our pleasures. I still try to capture the Lovecraftian sense of cosmic awe in some of my tales.

“‘Raised by the Moon’ was suggested by the boating lake at West Kirby. It’s much like the area contained by the submerged wall in the story, although the town is nothing like the surroundings. Perhaps the creatures in the tale are distant cousins of the Deep Ones—we might call them the Shallowers.”

Campbell’s early story ‘The Church in the High Street’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth.

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HUGH BARNETT CAVE (1910-2004) was born in Chester, England, he emigrated to America with his family when he was five. Cave sold his first story, ‘Island Ordeal’, to Brief Stories in 1929, and went on to publish around 800 pieces of fiction (often under various bylines) to such pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories and the so-called “shudder” or “weird menace” pulps, Horror Stories and Terror Tales, amongst many other titles.

The author then left the field for almost three decades, moving to Haiti and later Jamaica, where he established a coffee plantation and wrote two highly praised travel books, Haiti: Highroad to Adventure and Four Paths to Paradise: A Book About Jamaica. He also continued to write for the “slick” magazines, such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and many other titles.

In 1977, Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa imprint published a hefty volume of Cave’s best horror tales, Murgunstrumm and Others, which won the World Fantasy Award, and he returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels (most of them involving voodoo or the walking dead): Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns and The Restless Dead.

The Horror Writers of America presented Cave with their highest honour, the Lifetime Achievement Award, in 1991, and in 1997 he was given a Special World Fantasy Award when he attended the World Fantasy Convention in London as a Guest of Honour. Milt Thomas’ biography, Cave of a Thousand Tales: The Life & Times of Hugh B. Cave, was published by Arkham House the week after the author’s death.

‘The Coming’ was originally written back in the early 1990s for Shadows Over Innsmouth. When that volume became an all-British line-up, the author took out the Lovecraftian references and later sold it to another anthology. It appears here as Cave originally intended.

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BASIL COPPER (1924-2013) was born in London, and for thirty years he worked as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time writer in 1970.

His first story in the horror field, ‘The Spider’, was published in 1964 in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, since when his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, been extensively adapted for radio, and collected in Not After Nightfall, Here Be Daemons, From Evil’s Pillow, And Afterward the Dark, Voices of Doom, When Footsteps Echo, Whispers in the Night, Cold Hand on My Shoulder and Knife in the Back.

One of the author’s most reprinted stories, ‘Camera Obscura’, was adapted for a 1971 episode of the anthology television series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

Besides publishing two non-fiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his other books include the novels The Great White Space, The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis, House of the Wolf and The Black Death. He also wrote more than fifty hardboiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, and continued the adventures of August Derleth’s Holmes-like consulting detective Solar Pons in several volumes, including the novel Solar Pons versus The Devil’s Claw.

More recently, PS Publishing has produced the non-fiction study Basil Copper: A Life in Books, and a massive two-volume set of Darkness, Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper. A restored version of Copper’s 1976 novel The Curse of the Fleers appeared from the same imprint in 2012.

“I have already paid public tribute to August Derleth on both sides of the Atlantic in my own non-fiction studies,” explained the author, “so I would prefer to paint a more intimate picture of a good-humoured, generous and loveable human being in these random recollections. I am on record as saying he was a Renaissance man. This was literally true, and his huge appetite for literature and life kept him at his desk under an incredible workload that would have consumed lesser men, for decade after decade.

“Like Lovecraft, he passed almost unnoticed except for the gigantic ripples in the small, rather esoteric world he had chosen to make his own. His reputation can only increase and appreciate as the years go by, while Arkham House itself in its prosperous and steady continuance is a living memorial to his courage and his life-work.”

Copper’s novella ‘Beyond the Reef’ originally appeared in Shadows Over Innsmouth and was subsequently reprinted as a single hardcover volume in Germany. In a reversal of Hugh B. Cave’s story in the present volume, ‘Voices in the Water’ was initially written as a non-Lovecraftian ghost story, but the Innsmouth references were added for its first appearance here.

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LES EDWARDS studied at the Hornsey College of Art from 196872. On leaving, he began to work as a freelance illustrator, and swiftly established himself as a stalwart of the UK illustration scene.

In a career spanning four decades he has painted a great number of covers, including those for such anthology series as The Mayflower Book of Black Magic, The Fontana Book of Horror, The Star Book of Horror, The Reign of Terror, The Year’s Best Horror Stories and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. More recently, he has illustrated the best-selling H. P. Lovecraft collections Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P Lovecraft and Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre, The Complete Chronicles of Conan and Conan’s Brethren by Robert E. Howard, and Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M. R. James.

In recent years the artist has also taken to painting under the pseudonym “Edward Miller” in order to produce a different kind of work in a more romantic style. This work has also become popular, and he now pursues both careers with equal enthusiasm.

In 1995 he was Artist Guest of Honour at the World Science Fiction Convention and in 2010 he was Artist Guest of Honour at the World Horror Convention. He has been voted Best Artist by the British Fantasy Society on seven occasions, and has been nominated in that category every year since 1994. He has also been nominated for five Chesley Awards and for the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist five times, with his alter-ego, “Edward Miller”, winning it in 2008.

“If you are a fan of the fantastic,” explains the artist, “then it is not possible to ignore the work of the strange author from Providence. Somehow he has become permanent. He endures. Even the word ‘Lovecraftian’ has slipped into the language, although there might be strange ambiguities as to what it actually means. For some it refers to the literary style, which, let’s face it, is a barrier which some readers never surmount. For others, it has to do with bulging gelatinous masses, the chanting of barbarous names and huge, ancient and tentacled beings.

“For me it is to do with a sense of dread; with the knowledge that the universe is, at best, indifferent and more likely, inimical, and that our grip on sanity is slight. It is to do with the feeling that if you scratch away the surface of our carefully preserved reality you will find madness staring back. And however hard Lovecraft tries, however he strives for that one elusive, perfect word, you know that he will never quite be able to convey the true and awful horror that’s in his imagination. It’s a feeling I share.

“But what sets Lovecraft, and a very few others, apart is that those feelings remain long after the story is finished. The best horror stories have this quality which sets them apart from the merely adequate, if enjoyable, chiller, and sets ‘Horror’ as a genre apart from other literature. It is why the best of Lovecraft’s stories are always worth returning to.”

* * *

BOB EGGLETON was fascinated by science fiction and fantasy at an early age, especially the monster movies featuring Godzilla and other creatures. He attended Rhode Island College and left to pursue a career in commercial illustration and fine art.

His artwork has appeared on countless book and magazine covers, comics, posters, prints, trading cards, stationary, drink coasters and jigsaw puzzles, and has been collected in such volumes as Alien Horizons: The Fantastic Art of Bob Eggleton and The Book of Sea Monsters (both with Nigel Suckling), Greetings from Earth: The Art of Bob Eggleton, Dragonhenge and The Stardragons (both with John Grant), Primal Darkness: The Gothic & Horror Art of Bob Eggleton (with Shinichi Noda) and Dragons’ Domain: The Ultimate Dragon Painting Workshop.

Best known for his spectacular dragons, depictions of Godzilla, and his artwork for Brian Lumley’s “Necroscope” series, the artist’s paintings of Cthulhu have been used, amongst other places, on the Arkham House anthology Cthulhu 2000, Best of Weird Tales, The House of Cthulhu and the premier issue of H. P Lovecraft’s Magazine.

A recipient of multiple Hugo and Chesley Awards for Best Artist, Eggleton has also worked on the conceptual design for a number of movies. An asteroid discovered in 1992 by Spacewatch at Kitt Peak has been named “13562 Bobeggleton” after the artist.

“H. P. Lovecraft has got to be the world’s greatest writer of ‘monsters’ in his terrific stories,” observes Eggleton. “His creatures are like no others in fiction, on the Earth or off it. I try to visualise them as real things, which drip with slime and shamble along. Things that, as Lovecraft himself would say, ‘Cause men to die with the screams still in their throats’.”

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JOHN STEPHEN GLASBY (1928-2011) graduated from Nottingham University with an 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, occult novel The Dark Destroyer, and the SF novel Mystery of the Crater.

More recently, Philip Harbottle compiled two collections of the 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.

A long-time fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, in the early 1970s the author also submitted a collection of Cthulhu 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, and ‘The Quest for Y’ha-Nthlei’—a direct sequel to Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—was written especially for this volume.

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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 and The Red Tree, which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards.

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, Alabaster, A is for Alien and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Subterranean Press has recently released a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One).

“‘From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6’ probably started taking shape in 1996,” recalls the author, “after David J. Schow sent me a beautiful reproduction of the Devonian-aged fossil hand shown in the opening scenes of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Dave has the most awesome collection of Creature memorabilia anywhere on earth, I suspect. I sat the model atop a bookshelf in my office, and from time to time I’d think about it’s plausibility as an actual fossil, about coming across it in some museum drawer somewhere, forgotten and dusty with an all but indecipherable label, and what implications to our ideas of vertebrate evolution such a fossil would have.

“And then, late in 2001, when I was doing research for my fourth novel, Low Red Moon, I began attempting to figure out where precisely Lovecraft had meant the town of Innsmouth to be located. I finally settled on Crane Beach and Ipswich Bay, west of Cape Ann. Anyway, the two things came together—the ‘fossil’ hand of the Creature, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—and I stopped working on the novel just long enough to write this story. I borrowed Dr. Solomon Monalisa from one of my earlier stories, ‘Onion’.”

“As for why I decided that Ipswich Bay was Lovecraft’s Innsmouth Harbour, here’s a quote from my online journal, from my entry for November 26, 2001:

Lovecraft indicates that the narrator’s bus, after leaving Newburyport, is travelling south-east, following the coast. HPL writes: “Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich.” This definitely indicates that the direction of travel is, in fact, south-east. A little father along, “At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left.” At this point the road on which the bus is travelling begins to climb to higher ground; at the crest of the rise, the passengers... beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head [another HPL invention] and veer off towards Cape Ann... but for a moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.” The narrator must, at this point, be looking to the east or south-east.

For me, the key is finding the Manuxet River. Of course, there really is no Manuxet River, per se—it’s yet another of HPL’s geographical fictions, but there are many rivers between Plum Island and Cape Ann, winding, swampy things that eventually empty into Plum Island Sound or Ipswich Bay. The river closest to Plum Island (and the bus doesn’t seem to travel very far from the point where the narrator loses sight of the island before reaching the crest of the hill from which Innsmouth is visible) is the Ipswich River. A little farther on, there’s the Castle Neck River. It’s the mouth of this river that I’m favouring at the moment as the location of Innsmouth, based on HPL’s statement that the Manuxet “...turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater’s end.” Now, as the sea lies to the north, most of the rivers along this part of the coast do not make southerly turns, but flow north and east to the Atlantic. Notably, the Castle Neck River does have a distinct south-east kink just as it enters the estuary at the north-west end of Ipswich Bay.

Of course, HPL obviously took considerable liberties with the local geography, and I suspect that he may have also shortened the distance between Cape Ann and Plum Island in his head, recalling some excursion or another and compressing or expanding distance as we all tend to do. So, blah, blah, blah, and in my story at least, Innsmouth Harbour is at the mouth of the Castle Neck River (i.e., the Manuxet).”

* * *

HOWARD PHILIPS LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) is one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors of supernatural fiction.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he lived most 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 The Lurker at the Threshold, The Survivor and Others and The Watchers Out of Time and Others.

During the decades since his death, Lovecraft 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.

Lovecraft was not adverse to testing early drafts his latest story out on friends and colleagues, as this extract from a letter written to fellow Weird Tales author Clark Ashton Smith and dated February 18, 1932, illustrates:

Glad to hear you liked ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and thanks tremendously for the suggestions concerning possible alteration. Your central idea of increasing emphasis on the narrator’s taint runs parallel with D’Erlett’s [August Derleth] main suggestion, and I shall certainly adopt it in any basic recasting I may give the tale. The notion of having the narrator captured is surely a vivid one containing vast possibilities—and if I don’t use it, it will be only because my original conception (like most of my dream-ideas) centred so largely in the physical detachment of the narrator.

As Lovecraft’s seminal story, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth, kicked off Shadows Over Innsmouth, it is his surviving discarded draft of the tale that is featured in this volume. According to Lovecraft biographer and scholar S. T. Joshi, this “may be his second or even third attempt at the story, since he announces in several letters that he is using the plot as ‘laboratory experimentation’ by writing it out successively in different styles”. The compressed and incomplete version of the story that appears in this book only survived because it was found on the reverse of pages containing the final draft.

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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.

Lumley 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. The author’s most recent book is a new collection of non-Lovecraftian horror stories, No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories, from Subterranean Press, and he has also completed a new “Necroscope”® novella for the same publisher.

The Brian Lumley Companion was published in 2002 by Tor Books, and he is the winner of a Fear Magazine Award, a Lovecraft Film Festival Association “Howie”, the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award and, most recently, a recipient of the Horror Writers’ Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and another Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention

“‘The Taint’ was written between December 2002 to January 2003, specifically for this book,” explains Lumley. “It would be impossible to deny HPL’s influence on the story, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. Because H. P. Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, those ‘batrachian dwellers of fathomless ocean’, which he employed so effectively in his story ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and hinted at in others of his stories, have always fascinated me. And not only me, but an entire generation of authors most of whom weren’t even born until long after Lovecraft’s tragically early death.

“Indeed, this present volume—and my story in it—probably wouldn’t have come to pass but for the success of editor Steve Jones’ initial foray into Deep Ones territory, Shadows Over Innsmouth. That first book—one might say the progenitor of the current volume, containing stories by Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, Basil Copper and a host of others, including my own ‘Dagon’s Bell’— was surely more than adequate proof of the popularity of Lovecraftian themes among today’s writers.

“Indeed, the urge to create something in this (but what to call it? This sub-genre?) was so powerful in me that back in 1978 I had written a 60,000-word novel, The Return of the Deep Ones, mainly to satisfy my own craving for something that was no longer available. Oh, yes, I used to write for myself in those days. So when I was approached about a tale for this companion volume... well, what could I do but write one?

“As for the novella: much like ‘Dagon’s Bell’ and The Return of the Deep Ones, it’s the result of my wondering—what if certain members of the Esoteric Order of Dagon somehow escaped and emigrated from degenerate old Innsmouth—that darkly mysterious seaport ‘town of ill repute’ inhabited by the changeling Deep Ones, those less than human, amphibious worshippers of Lord Cthulhu in his house in R’lyeh—to resurface elsewhere? For instance, in England.

“One of only a very few recent Mythos tales by my hand, apart from its unavoidable, indeed obligatory back-drop, this story escapes almost entirely from Lovecraft’s literary influence to become wholly original, and I consider it on a par with ‘Born of the Winds’, written all of thirty years earlier.

“‘The Taint’ was originally published in a limited edition of Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth in time to launch the book at the World Fantasy Convention, Madison WI, in November 2005.”

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RICHARD A. LUPOFF was born in Brooklyn, New York, and for many years has lived in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Patricia. He spent a few years in the US Army in the late 1950s, never firing a shot in anger and never had one shot at him, neither of which he regrets. He has worked as both a print and broadcast journalist from his student days onward, and for fifty years has done a books-and-authors show on local radio station KPFA.

A novelist, short story writer, critic, screenwriter and anthologist, his many books include the novels One Million Centuries, Sandworld, Sword of the Demon, The Return of Skull-Face (with Robert E. Howard), Space War Blues, Circumpolar!, Lovecraft’s Book, Galaxy’s End, Night of the Living Gator and two Buck Rogers novelisations (under the byline “Addison E. Steele”). His short fiction has been collected in The Ova Hamlet Papers, Before... 12:01... and After, Claremont Tales, Claremont Tales II and Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix.

Lupoff’s non-fiction titles include Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision, Writer at Large and The Great American Paperback, and he has edited All in Color for a Dime and The Comic Book Book (both with Don Thompson) and two volumes of What If: Stories that Should have Won the Hugo.

In 1963, he and Pat Lupoff won the Hugo Award for their fanzine Xero, and a 2004 compilation The Best of Xero was nominated for another Hugo. He is also a winner of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Lifetime Achievement Award and the Left Coast Crime Lifetime Achievement Award for mystery fiction.

A short film based on his story ‘12:01 P.M.’ was an Academy Awards nominee in 1990 and was expanded into a feature three years later.

“I discovered H. P. Lovecraft when I was eleven years old,” recalls Lupoff, “living in a small town in New Jersey, and forced to attend church services every Sunday. I wish I’d had the courage to protest this forced religiosity openly - of course, it didn’t take - but I found other ways to maintain my independence.

“I made up my own, subversive versions of familiar hymns and sang them when called upon to participate. And I sneaked secular reading matter into church, hid it in my hymnal, and read happily while the preacher railed about Mortal Sin, the Day of Judgement, and the Fires of Hell.

“One week I stumbled across a little paperback anthology called The Avon Ghost Reader. As I remember, it had a deliciously lurid cover painting - a green, claw-like hand rising menacingly in the foreground, a spooky looking old mansion in the distance - and a marvellous selection of frightening stories, including ‘The Dunwich Horror’, by H. P. Lovecraft. At age eleven I had no understanding of the publishing industry and didn’t realise that this story was a reprint and that its author had been dead for nearly twenty years.

“What I did understand was that I’d stumbled across an author of unusual merit. I vowed to watch for his byline. My next reward was a copy of another little paperback, Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth, and I was totally hooked. I’ve been a Lovecraft fan for most of my life, and I am delighted to see the Old Gentleman finally getting his due. I’m equally gratified to have made my own small contribution to the traditions of his work.”

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PAUL McAULEY was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire. A former research biologist at Oxford University and UCLA, and a former lecturer at St. Andrews University, he became a full-time writer in 1996. McAuley sold a story to the SF digest If when he was just nineteen, but the magazine folded before it could appear, and his first published story appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1984.

With his debut novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), he became the first British writer to win the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and he established his reputation as one of the best young science fiction writers in the field by winning the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1995.

His other novels include Secret Harmonies (aka Of the Fall), Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale’s’ Angel (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Long Form Alternate History fiction), the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Fairyland, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, Shrine of Stars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun and In the Mouth of the Whale. The author’s short fiction is collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country and Little Machines, while his story ‘The Temptation of Dr. Stein’ was awarded the 1995 British Fantasy Award.

“I lived in the city of Bristol, hard by the Avon river and the Severn estuary in the west of England, for seven years. It was the first place I lived after moving away from home, I studied for both my undergraduate degree and Ph.D at the university, and I had my first job there. So it was definitely an influence on my life, but like the best spring water, it has spent a long time percolating through the strata of my subconscious before becoming the source of a story.

“Not only is Bristol a port city whose port has more or less silted up, but ordinarily it rains there every other day. What better setting for a Lovecraftian homage?

“I sat my final examinations for my B.Sc (a joint degree in Botany and Zoology, if anyone is interested) during the summer of 1976, when ‘Take Me to the River’ is set, which really was as hot and as dry as any disaster imagined by J. G. Ballard. The drought mentioned in the story was real enough - reservoirs and lakes dried up, grass and trees turned brown, crops wilted, people were encouraged to ration water by sharing baths, and the sun burned every day in a pitiless sky that was either hard blue or headachy white. It ended when the government appointed a ‘Minister of Drought, which worked a lot better than any rain dance or cloud seeding, but for a little while it really did seem that the world might end, or that strange, marvellous or fearsome creatures might hatch from the drying mud and foetid rivers.”

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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 and Doctor Who.

He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (contributing 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 and the “Professor Moriarty” novel The Hound of the d’Urbervilles (all from Titan Books), along with a much-enlarged edition of Nightmare Movies (from Bloomsbury).

“For anyone following the loose interconnectedness of most of my stories, my contribution to this anthology is (obviously) a follow-up to ‘The Big Fish’ from Shadows Over Innsmouth. Returning to California twenty-six years on from the 1942 setting of the first fish story, we’re going inland this time—because I suspected seaside tales might become over-familiar in this series, and decided it would be effective counter-programming to do something set in a desert.

“‘Another Fish Story’ also fills in a gap in the life and career of Derek Leech, who appears in my novel The Quorum, and several other stories and books of mine, including ‘Seven Stars’ (the serial from Dark Detectives). Most of the people in the story are real and you can look them up in showbiz gossip and true crime books.

“I subsequently wrote a third fish story, getting back to the beach this time, and ‘Richard Riddle, Boy Detective in “The Case of the French Spy”’ will be included in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth.”

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ALLAN SERVOSS’ fascination with the works of H. P. Lovecraft began during his teenage years in Montana when he read a worn paperback copy of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. He soon started ordering all he could find by Lovecraft from a small publishing house “out east” called Arkham House.

After graduating from college, he found himself living in Madison, Wisconsin, and in due time discovered that he lived just a short distance from Arkham House and August Derleth. A visit to Derleth’s home (unannounced) led to a friendship between the two men during the editor/publisher’s final year, and Servoss being invited to illustrate Gary Myers’ Arkham volume The House of the Worm, which finally saw print in 1975. Except for also contributing to a few issues of Whispers magazine, that marked the artist’s last dealing with weird illustration for nearly twenty-five years.

The intervening period was spent raising a family and teaching art until, in 2000, he was asked to produce a cover for the Arkham House edition of In the Stone House by Barry N. Malzberg.

Servoss has had his paintings and drawings displayed in many galleries and juried art exhibitions, illustrated books outside the weird genre, and seen his work reproduced in such periodicals as American Artist Magazine, The Artist Magazine and International Artist. In His Library at R’lyeh, Dead Lovecraft Waits Dreaming... is the title of a portfolio of the illustrator’s work, he was featured in the recent Centipede Press volume Artists Inspired by H. P Lovecraft, and he has enjoyed seeing HPL finally receiving the literary place in history he deserves.

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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 six international best-selling novels of suspense, including The Straw Men and The Intruders, currently in development with the BBC. His most recent novels are Killer Move and We are Here.

“I first read H. P. Lovecraft back when I was discovering horror fiction in the late 1980s. What I admire most about him—in addition to his endlessly foetid imagination, and his richly baroque prose style—is his certainty. His vision. So many writers of the macabre struggle to communicate true darkness, falling over themselves to sell you their slant on the universe. Lovecraft always seems in possession of a secret so black—and yet so unquestionable—that you are left hurrying in his wake, possessed by an awful fascination to be told what he so obviously already knows. Take it or leave it, he says: this is how it is. There are bad things out there. I know, I’ve seen them.

“There’s another group of people with a very particular slant on the universe, one which enables them to behave as others do not. These are thieves. I’m convinced that the first profession was not prostitution, as is so often claimed, but thieving. Nicking things. Taking what belongs to others, and not caring about the consequences—somehow possessing a moral carte blanche. And in ‘Fair Exchange’ I wondered what might happen if someone of this profession got himself pulled into a world far darker than even he could comprehend.”

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STEVE RASNIC TEM was born in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains and lives with his wife, the writer Melanie Tem, in Colorado.

A prolific short story writer and poet, Tem’s work has appeared in countless magazines, anthologies and chapbooks. His first novel, Excavation, appeared in 1987 and the following year he won the British Fantasy Award for his story ‘Leaks’. His short fiction has been collected in Ombres sur la route (published in France), the International Horror Guild Award-winning City Fishing and The Far Side of the Lake.

The semi-autobiographical chapbook The Man on the Ceiling, cowritten with his wife, won the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award, while another chapbook, In These Final Days of Sales, also won the Bram Stoker Award.

Tem’s last novel was Deadfall Hotel from Solaris, to be followed by Blood Kin in 2014. His most recent collections are Ugly Behavior (New Pulp Press), Onion Songs (Chômu), and Celestial Inventories (ChiZine), a major compilation of his more recent strange fiction. Also in the pipeline is a PS Publishing novella, In the Lovecraft Museum.

As the author explains: “The seed for ‘Eggs’ came from a small sculpture I bought in Covent Garden on my first trip to England many years ago: an ugly little thing coming out of an egg-shaped stone. It sat on one of my bookcases gathering dust until one early morning, when some chance reflections brought it to my attention so that it might tell its tale.

“Although Lovecraft’s stylistic approach is not one I’d care to emulate, the notion so dramatically embodied in his fiction that the world is this mysterious place we cannot even begin to understand is one with which I’m in profound sympathy. The characters in Lovecraft’s work are alien even to their own lives—is there any theme more contemporary and vital than this?”