He also co-edited (with Stephen Jones) and illustrated H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, and his artwork was featured in the documentary film The Eldritch Influence: The Life, Vision and Phenomena of H.P Lovecraft.
Having redesigned and sculpted the statuette himself in the early 1980s, Dave Carson has received the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist on five occasions. When asked on a convention panel why he became an artist, he replied “I just like to draw monsters.” It shows.
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.
“I discovered HPL when I was sixteen,” explains Cole, “working in my school holidays in a hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, for a summer season. In the many bookshops of Newquay I picked up The Lurking Fear and found therein the wonderful ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—its impact on me was instant and long-lasting. (I’ve spent years perfecting the Innsmouth squint.)
“The image of the New England town stayed in my mind, and when I moved to North Devon in 1976, I was stunned to find myself living a few miles from what I took to be the English equivalent of Innsmouth, namely Appledore. Now, don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t dream of insulting the good people of Appledore, even when they squint at me, but its atmosphere, its close-set houses, and its setting so close to the sea (estuary, to be accurate) readily call up the feel of Innsmouth. And at certain times of night, when the tide is right and the moon rises across the water... well. But it’s no problem for me. As I said, I live a couple of miles away.
“Bideford is nothing like Appledore—bigger quayside, steeper hills, narrower side roads, more houses, older... next door is the old charnel house. But none of this has influenced me. I only swim up and down to the estuary at night to be sociable. Doesn’t everyone?”
BASIL COPPER (1914-2013) 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.
With ‘Beyond the Reef’, the author explained, he “...wanted the atmosphere to be of a ‘faded 1920s variety’ as in HPL’s original tales, but without being too much of a pastiche or derivative in any way.”
NEIL GAIMAN is only mentioned in passing in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in the Lovecraft-Derleth story ‘The Survivor’, in which it is revealed that the mysterious Dr. Charriere has a recognisable drawing of Gaiman on his wall, along with certain cabalistic charts, and pictures of large reptiles.
He has, however, a bust of Lovecraft on his windowsill (the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story), and lives in a remarkably Lovecraftian house, somewhere a long way from the sea.
Gaiman is the most critically acclaimed British graphic novel writer of his generation. He co-wrote the best-selling novel Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), is the author of Neverwhere and American Gods, and became the first person ever to win the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal for the same children’s novel, The Graveyard Book, which spent more than fifty-two consecutive weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The book has also won the Hugo Award, the Booktrust Award and many others.
During the past few years, Gaiman has co-scripted (with Roger Avary) Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture fantasy film Beowulf, while Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust and Henry Selick’s Coraline were both based on his novels. He wrote and directed Statuesque, a short film starring Bill Nighy and his wife, singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer, and he has also just written his second episode of Doctor Who for the BBC.
The story in this volume is dedicated to the late Fritz Leiber.
DAVID LANGFORD was born in Newport, Wales, in 1953, and some eleven years later discovered that he could borrow all H.P. Lovecraft’s books from the library if he assured his mother they were “nice detective stories.”
One vivid memory, of eating porridge while reading of his first Shoggoth, is best not shared.
He has since become a freelance writer, editor and critic, dividing his creative endeavours between books and science fiction fandom (winning the Hugo Award multiple times). His novels include The Leaky Establishment, The Space Eater and The Wilderness of Mirrors, along with Earthdoom! and Guts! (both co-written with John Grant), while a collection of short pastiches appeared under the title He Do the Time Police in Different Voices.
Langford helped produce the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and contributed around 80,000 words of articles to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. He is also one of the three chief editors of the third, online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The End of Harry Potter? was an unauthorised companion to the best-selling series by J.K. Rowling.
He continues to edit and publish his free monthly newsletter, Ansible, and has never really regained the taste for porridge.
D.F. LEWIS had two of his stories rejected in 1968 by August Derleth for being “pretty much pure grue,” since when he has had more than 1,500 tales published in small press magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Described variously as “the Lovecraft of this era” and “either a genius graced with madness (or) a madman cursed with genius,” he cites H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Robert Aickman and Philip K. Dick amongst his disparate literary influences.
As an editor, he has produced ten volumes of the Nemonymous “megazanthus” anthology series, along with The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies.
In 1998 the author was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s special Karl Edward Wagner Award.
HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) is one of the 20th century’s most importan
t 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.
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.
“H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythology—especially his Deep Ones, those batrachian dwellers in fathomless ocean employed so effectively in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and frequently hinted at elsewhere in HPL’s fiction—always fascinated me,” explains the author, “as it has fascinated many a writer before and after, and as it will doubtless continue to do.
“In 1978 I wrote a full-length novel based on the Deep Ones, entitled (with brilliant originality!) The Return of the Deep Ones. Looking back, it was probably an error to set the story in a locale with which I wasn’t overly familiar, but I covered as best I could.
“The story in this volume, however, makes use of a location with which I’m very familiar; in fact it’s the north-east coast of England, where I was raised. If you should find that ‘Dagon’s Bell’ rings true, that’s probably the reason.”
MARTIN McKENNA was born in London and started out in illustration with work for fantasy and horror small press magazines in the 1980s, in particular in the H.P. Lovecraft-devoted Dagon.
His first professional commissions came from Games Workshop for their magazine White Dwarf, and this began a long relationship with the company, illustrating numerous Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay publications and the very first Warhammer 40,000 book, as well as many other GW books and boardgames. He has also created game-related material for other publishers, including covers and internal illustrations for more than twenty of the Fighting Fantasy series, along with card art for Magic: The Gathering.
The British Fantasy Award-winning artist has also produced work for various publishers around the world, illustrating such popular authors as Anne McCaffrey, Raymond E. Feist and Harry Turtledove, as well as such classics as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Silver Sword. More recently, he has illustrated the children’s Christmas book The Gift by Australian writer Penny Matthews.
As an author, McKenna has written a number of books about digital art, including Digital Fantasy Painting Workshop and Digital Horror Art, and edited Fantasy Art Now. In addition to work in publishing, he also produces concept and production art for computer games and film and television productions, which have included the BAFTA-nominated The Magician of Samarkand for the BBC and, most recently, Gulliver’s Travels for Twentieth Century Fox.
“Innsmouth, with its air of wormy decay and its sinister folk with their unwholesome relationship with the sea, is particularly visually evocative,” observes the artist. “Many strong images come to mind, such as the jagged skyline of sagging gambrel roofs and rotten streets with unnaturally shaped residents loping through the gloom. It’s doing justice to it all that’s the problem.
“I particularly wanted to portray some of the Innsmouth folk at various stages of their degeneration. I also wanted to use certain ordinary marine creatures in some of the illustrations, as I find many of these can appear fairly alarming in themselves.
“When we first came up with the notion of collaborating on some Lovecraftian artwork, I knew I wanted to have a go at portraying Cthulhu. Both Jim and Dave have dealt with Him in the past, and although I’ve tackled a few fairly eldritch things I’ve never had the opportunity to approach this subject before now. The finished collaboration recently hung in a convention art show where I overheard one viewer remark that it was ‘absolutely disgusting’, which made it seem all the more worthwhile.”
BRIAN MOONEY has been contributing short stories to magazines and anthologies for more than forty years, although he has never been prolific.
His first professional appearance was in The London Mystery Selection in 1971, since when his fiction has appeared in The Pan Book of Horror Stories, Dark Voices, Dark Detectives, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, Final Shadows, Fantasy Tales, Dark Horizons and Fiesta, amongst other titles.
About his protagonist in ‘The Tomb of Priscus’, the author explains: “Like many of us, when I first started writing I toyed with Lovecraftian tales. Reuben Calloway made his first appearance as a minor character in a Mythos story which I have never bothered to rewrite. Then his name is mentioned in ‘The Guardians of the Gates, published in the second issue of Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. His first appearance in his own right, with his amanuensis, Father Roderick Shea, was in ‘The Affair at Durmamnay Hall’, published in Kadath No. 5. Calloway is by himself in a werewolf story in The Anthology of Fantasy and the Supernatural.
“I see him as being something of a scruffy Orson Welles with all the arrogance but without the charm.”
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.
Newman’s
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.
The author’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.
Newman’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).
“Like everyone in the field, I went through a period, at about thirteen, reading H.P. Lovecraft,” he reveals. “His Cthulhu Mythos (actually worked into something systematic by August Derleth) is one of the pervasive ideas of horror and science fiction.
“With a last line in the tradition of Lovecraft disciple Robert Bloch, my story is a fond homage to one of my favourite HPL stories, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’.
“‘One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)’, by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, was introduced in 1943, not by Frank Sinatra (who sang it in 1958 on the Only the Lonely album) but by Fred Astaire in the otherwise forgettable movie The Sky’s the Limit. I apologise for mutating the song.”
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