JIM PITTS made his debut as an illustrator in David A. Sutton’s Bibliotheca: H.P. Lovecraft and Jon Harvey’s Balthus in 1971. Over the subsequent four decades, his artwork has appeared extensively in British, European and American publications such as Fantasy Tales, Whispers, Shadow and numerous British Fantasy Society publications, including Dark Horizons and Chills.
He has also illustrated various hardcover and paperback collections, such as Michel Parry’s Savage Heroes and Spaced Out, and Brian Lumley’s The Compleat Khash: Volume One. Other aspects of his work include paperback covers, a record sleeve and the odd sculpture.
He was awarded the Ken McIntyre Award in the early 1970s and, after years of being nominated, he received the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist in both 1991 and 1992.
Influences he acknowledges include the Weird Tales artists such as Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye and, more importantly, Hannes Bok, without whose inspiration he admits things could have turned out very differently.
“The stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft have always been an enthusiasm of mine,” reveals the artist, “and having the opportunity to join forces with Dave Carson and Martin McKenna, two of the best illustrators working in the British fantasy scene today, to work on this book was a dream come true.
“Our first collaboration sprang independently of this project in 1993 at a convention in Scarborough on England’s north-east coast (curiously enough, a region well known for its fishing industry). Within a couple of months, Martin came up with the central figure of Cthulhu, I then took the bottom centre and left side and Dave completed the bottom right and upper right side. Hopefully our efforts to capture the wormy, crumbling buildings and degenerate fishy folk of Innsmouth will be worthy of Lovecraft’s wonderful story and so justify the long hours the three of us have spent at the drawing boards.”
NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of six novels, two novellas and two collections (the most recent being London Labyrinth). He has also published more than 100 horror short stories and has edited fifteen original anthologies, including Darklands, Darklands 2, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams, The Best British Short Stories 2011 and Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds.
Born in Manchester in 1963, Royle is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in the form of signed, limited-edition chapbooks.
His first short story collection, Mortality, was short-listed for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize, and he is a past winner of the British Fantasy Award and the Bad Sex Prize - and hopes to win both again.
About his story in this book, he recalls: “I travelled widely in Eastern Europe between 1987 and 1989, and pre-revolutionary Bucharest remains the most depressing place I have ever visited. With its tangible atmosphere of fear and paranoia it was like something out of a nightmare.
“I was not lucky enough to set eyes on the reviled dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, but then I lived in London for eight years and I never saw Margaret Thatcher either. Come the revolution.”
GUY N. SMITH was born and raised in the village of Hopwas in Staffordshire. His mother was a historical author, and she encouraged her son to write from an early age. He was first published at the age of twelve in a local newspaper.
While working as a bank manager, he wrote his first three novels— Werewolf by Moonlight, The Sucking Pit and Slime Beast—but it was the publication in 1976 of Night of the Crabs that gave him his first best-seller. A further five books in the series followed.
In addition to the 116 books he has written since 1974, the author also runs Black Hill Books, selling vintage and modern editions. The Guy N. Smith Fan Club was formed in 1992.
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 Derleth, 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.
“As regards me and Lovecraft,” admits the author, “there’s probably not much of interest. ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ is certainly up there in my favourites of his, along with ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ and ‘The Colour Out of Space’. One of my all-time favourite phrases comes from the latter: ‘... and the bloodworts grew insolent in their chromatic perversity.’ Top of the list is At the Mountains of Madness, which—and this is going to sound massively pretentious—I religiously read on transatlantic flights, timing it so that the plane is over Newfoundland or similarly bleak and arctic-looking territories for the climax of the story.
“As for ‘To See the Sea’, there’s not much to say, except that (a) it leapt full-grown into my head and (b) I’m glad to finally have got my feelings about a particular car park I know off my chest.”
BRIAN STABLEFORD was born in 1948 in the Yorkshire town of Shipley. He lectured in sociology at the University of Reading until 1988, before becoming a full-time writer, editor, critic and translator.
His more than seventy novels include Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, To Challenge Chaos, The Halcyon Drift, Swan Song, Man in a Cage, The Mind-Readers, The Realms of Tartarus, The Walking Shadow, Optiman (aka War Games), The Castaways of Tanagar, The Gates of Eden, The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, The Angel of Pain, Young Blood, Firefly, The Carnival of Destruction, Serpent’s Blood, The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires, Warhammer 4000: Pawns of Chaos (as “Brian Craig”), Salamander’s Fire, Chimera’s Cradle, Architects of Emortality, The Fountains of Youth, Year Zero, The Eleventh Hour, The Cassandra Complex, Dark Ararat, The Omega Expedition, Kiss the Goat, Streaking, The Wayward Muse, The Stones of Camelot, The Shadow of Frankenstein, Frankenstein and the Vampire Countess, Frankenstein in London and The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance in Piracy.
His short fiction is collected in a number of volumes, including Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution, Complications and Other Stories, Designer Genes and Other Stories, Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies, Sheena & Other Gothic Tales, The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution, The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions, The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution, An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales & Contes Cruels, The Gardens of Tantalus and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels, amongst many titles.
A prolific writer about the history of imaginative fiction, he was a leading contributor to the award-winning The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, and contributed a number of articles to Clute and John Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. He has also published numerous non-fiction books, several anthologies and volumes of translations relating to the French and English Decadent movements of the late 19th century.
In 1999, Stableford was awarded the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF scholarship. This completed his set of the four major awards in the field, the others being the J. Lloyd Eaton Award (1987), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1987) and the SFRA’s Pioneer Award (1996).
DAVID A. SUTTON was born and lives in Birmingham, England. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, The International Horror Guild Award and twelve British Fantasy Awards for editing magazines and anthologies.
As an editor, his first professional anthologies were New Writings in Horror & Supernatural (originally published in two volumes and recently reissued as an omnibus entitled Horror! Under the
Tombstone) and The Satyr’s Head & Other Tales of Terror. With Stephen Jones he went on to co-edit the Fantasy Tales, Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror and Dark Terrors: The Gollancz Book of Horror series while, more recently, he has edited the anthologies Phantoms of Venice and Houses on the Borderland.
Sutton has been a genre fiction writer since the 1960s. Some early stories appeared in World of Horror, Dark Horizons and Cthulhu, while respected anthology editor Hugh Lamb selected stories for two anthologies in the 1970s, The Taste of Fear and Cold Fear. Since then his fiction has been published in such magazines and anthologies as More Ghosts & Scholars, Kadath, Gothic, Skeleton Crew, The New Lovecraft Circle, Final Shadows, The Merlin Chronicles, The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men, When Graveyards Yawn, Dark Reign, Dead Ends, Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream, The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows and The Black Book of Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series.
The Fisherman was a chapbook from Gary William Crawford’s Gothic Press, while his debut short story collection, Clinically Dead & Other Tales of the Supernatural, was published in 2009 by Screaming Dreams. The author’s own imprint, Shadow Publishing, has recently produced such books as The Female of the Species & Other Terror Tales by Richard Davis, Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types by Johnny Mains, and The Whispering Horror by Eddy C. Bertin.
“When the editor told me he was putting together an anthology based around a single H.P. Lovecraft story,” recalls Sutton, “I immediately thought it might be ‘The Colour Out of Space’, or ‘The Dunwich Horror’, or ‘The Shunned House’. The story he chose is one of the author’s major yarns, but I wouldn’t have pegged it as the focus for the present book.
“However, re-reading ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ after quite a number of years, its stature for me has grown. It is a deeply disturbing story, full of ideas from which to draw another tale. Lovecraft’s blending of the Federal raid on Devil Reef, the weird religious Dagon sect, the attention to historical detail, the resonance of the Cthulhu Mythos and the grim half-humans and Deep Ones, all make this a wonderfully creepy story.”
“PETER TREMAYNE” is the pseudonym of acclaimed Celtic scholar and historian Peter Berresford Ellis. Born in Coventry, England, of Irish descent on his father’s side, he travelled widely in Ireland, studying its history, politics, language and mythology.
As “Tremayne” he made his début with the short horror novel Hound of Frankenstein in 1977, since when he has published such books as The Vengeance of She, Dracula Unborn (aka Bloodright), The Revenge of Dracula, The Ants, The Curse of Loch Ness, The Fires of Lan-Kern, Dracula My Love, Zombie!, The Morgow Rises!, The Destroyers of Lan-Kern, Snowbeast, The Buccaneers of Lan-Kern, Raven of Destiny, Kiss of the Cobra, Swamp!, Angelus!, Nicor!, Trollnight, Ravenmoon (aka Bloodmist) and Island of Shadows.
In 1994 he published Absolution of Murder, the first of his international best-selling murder mystery novels about 7th century Irish advocate Sister Fidelma, who uses the ancient Brehon Law system. There are now twenty-four titles in the series, including the collection Whispers of the Dead.
Tremayne has edited Masters of Terror: William Hope Hodgson and Irish Masters of Fantasy, his short stories are collected in My Lady of Hy-Brasil and Other Stories, Aisling and Other Irish Tales of Terror and An Ensuing Evil and Others: Fourteen Historical Mysteries, and he collaborated with Peter Haining on the 1997 non-fiction study The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula.
He has also written biographies of authors H. Rider Haggard, W.E. Johns and Talbot Mundy, and from 1983-93 he published eight adventure thrillers under another pseudonym, “Peter MacAlan.”
“The Irish language contains Europe’s third oldest literature with a mythology second to none,” explains the author. “While H.P. Lovecraft (in his seminal essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’) tended to dismiss Irish horror tales as ‘more whimsically fantastic than terrible’, he had to rely for his judgment on translators of Irish folklore such as Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, etc. who were not primarily concerned with the cosmic horror of the weird tale.
“Lovecraft made the mistake of thinking of Irish writers of the true weird, such as Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Fitzjames O’Brien and Bram Stoker, as ‘British’ and not Irish. In Irish myth there appear the ancient gods of evil known as the Fomorii (Dwellers under the Sea) and an ancient synonym for these beings is Daoine Domhain— the Deep Ones. Could the terrible clashes between the Irish deities of Light and Darkness have been carried to the New World by Irish immigrants to be picked up as Lovecraft’s tales of the Deep Ones?
“My story is inspired by some local Cork traditions about the O’Driscoll clan who dwelt on the now mainly deserted islands off the mainland Irish port of Baltimore (Baile an Tigh Moir—the town of the big house), whose name was also taken to the New World by Irish migrants.”
JACK YEOVIL is an amnesiac who took his name from the West Country town in which he was found in 1989. He has no recollection of his previous life. He has written for Empire and Good Times magazines, contributed stories to the GW Books anthologies Ignorant Armies, Wolf Riders, Red Thirst and Route 666, all edited by David Pringle, and has written the novels Drachenfels, Demon Download, Krokodil Tears, Comeback Tour, Beasts in Velvet and Genevieve Undead.
His greatest literary influences are Robert Faulcon, Harry Adam Knight, Carl Dreadstone and Jack Martin, and he describes his story in this book as “...a tribute to two great authors, awkward outsiders, who used a despised genre to make a genuine contribution to English and American letters. If you write in their genre, you must be influenced by them, and if you’re a reader who seeks a way into the genre, you could do no better than start with them: Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler.
“It occurred to me that Chandler and Lovecraft had a lot in common. Born in 1888 and 1890 respectively, they lived unhappily in America but dreamed of a lost and imaginary England. Awkward outsiders, they were often beset with financial troubles and began their writing careers in pulp magazines. Their visionary, challenging work was first presented alongside lurid dross, though they later came to be recognised as central to separate movements within their chosen genres, hard-boiled crime and weird horror.
“Married strangely to older wives, they distrusted and feared women, often presenting cruel, almost inhuman female characters. Some of their greatest work is set in seaside towns whose physical corruption has an almost philosophical dimension. Since their deaths, they have become the most imitated and influential writers in their fields and are capable of inspiring entire collections devoted to their characters and themes, not to mention many of the bestselling novelists in their categories.
“Personally, I found the love of Chandler’s prose which I developed in my late teens helped cure habits I’d picked up through an earlier interest in Lovecraft. With ‘The Big Fish’, I wanted to bring a touch of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth to Chandler’s Bay City, fusing elements from ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and Farewell, My Lovely. If its narrator isn’t quite Philip Marlowe, he certainly would like to be. I see him as more like Dick Powell than Humphrey Bogart. The stylistic tangle the story can’t resolve has something to do with the disparity between a Lovecraft protagonist, who is always overwhelmed by his hostile world, and a Chandler hero, who somehow shrugs it off.
“The other set of cross-generic twins of the period are Robert E. Howard and Cornell Woolrich, a pair of mother-dominated paranoid miseries whose vision of a hostile universe makes Lovecraft’s cosmic horror seem quite sunny; but I can’t envision a story in which Conan Wears Black, though a chance meeting in a diner with Bob and Cornell comparing photographs of their mothers has some horrific possibility.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Dorothy Lumley, Steve Saffel, Cath Trechman, Natalie Laverick, Jo Fletcher, Bob Garcia and the late James Turner of Arkham House for their help, all the contributors, and, especially, to Philip J. Rahman and Dwayne H. Olson, whose enthusiasm and
support made this book possible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEPHEN JONES is one of Britain’s most acclaimed anthologists of horror and dark fantasy. He has more than 125 books to his credit, including Shadows Over Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror (with Dave Carson), H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft and Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre. He has won numerous awards for his work, including three World Fantasy Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards. You can visit his web site at www.stephenjoneseditor.com
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WEIRD SHADOWS OVER INNSMOUTH
Edited by Stephen Jones
Including the unpublished early draft of ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth,’ by H.P. Lovecraft, this extraordinary volume features twelve stories by some of the world's most prominent Lovecraftian authors, including Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, John Glasby, Paul McAuley, Steve Rasnic Tem, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Brian Lumley, Basil Copper, Hugh B. Cave, and Richard Lupoff.
“Not just H.P. Lovecraft fans will revel in this fine follow-up to Jones's Shadows Over Innsmouth.” Publishers Weekly
TITANBOOKS.COM
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VOLUME ONE
Edited by S.T. Joshi
S.T. Joshi—the twenty-first century's preeminent expert on all things Lovecraftian—gathers twenty-one of the master's greatest modern acolytes, including Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Brian Stableford, Nicholas Royle, Darrell Schweitzer, and W.H. Pugmire, each of whom serves up a new masterpiece of cosmic terror that delves deep into the human psyche to horrify and disturb.
“[An] exceptional set of original horror tales... a breathtaking range of colorful new ideas and literary styles.” Booklist
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