‘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.”
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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 publis
hed 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).”
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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
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