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.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Dorothy Lumley, Randy and Sara Broecker, Bob Garcia, Philip Harbottle (Cosmos Literary Agency), Danielle Hackett (Arkham House Publishers, Inc.) and, especially, Dennis E. Weiler, Steve Saffel and Natalie Laverick, along with all the contributors.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
STEPHEN JONES was born in London, England, just across the River Thames from where his hapless namesake met a grisly fate in Hazel Heald’s story ‘The Horror in the Museum’. A Hugo Award nominee, he is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, three International Horror Guild Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, twenty-one British Fantasy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Horror Association. One of Britain’s most acclaimed horror and dark fantasy writers and editors, he has more than 130 books to his credit, including Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth and Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror (with Dave Carson), H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Hallowe’en in a Suburb & Others: The Complete Poems from Weird Tales, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft and Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre, along with such author collections as The Complete Chronicles of Conan and Conan’s Brethren by Robert E. Howard and Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M. R. James. His many anthologies include Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome, A Book of Horrors, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, the Zombie Apocalypse! series, and twenty-five volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. You can visit his website at: www.stephenjoneseditor.com
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