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 Mov
ies (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.”
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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.
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