Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  “‘The Taint’ was written between December 2002 to January 2003, specifically for this book,” explains Lumley. “It would be impossible to deny HPL’s influence on the story, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. Because H. P. Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, those ‘batrachian dwellers of fathomless ocean’, which he employed so effectively in his story ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and hinted at in others of his stories, have always fascinated me. And not only me, but an entire generation of authors most of whom weren’t even born until long after Lovecraft’s tragically early death.

  “Indeed, this present volume—and my story in it—probably wouldn’t have come to pass but for the success of editor Steve Jones’ initial foray into Deep Ones territory, Shadows Over Innsmouth. That first book—one might say the progenitor of the current volume, containing stories by Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, Basil Copper and a host of others, including my own ‘Dagon’s Bell’— was surely more than adequate proof of the popularity of Lovecraftian themes among today’s writers.

  “Indeed, the urge to create something in this (but what to call it? This sub-genre?) was so powerful in me that back in 1978 I had written a 60,000-word novel, The Return of the Deep Ones, mainly to satisfy my own craving for something that was no longer available. Oh, yes, I used to write for myself in those days. So when I was approached about a tale for this companion volume... well, what could I do but write one?

  “As for the novella: much like ‘Dagon’s Bell’ and The Return of the Deep Ones, it’s the result of my wondering—what if certain members of the Esoteric Order of Dagon somehow escaped and emigrated from degenerate old Innsmouth—that darkly mysterious seaport ‘town of ill repute’ inhabited by the changeling Deep Ones, those less than human, amphibious worshippers of Lord Cthulhu in his house in R’lyeh—to resurface elsewhere? For instance, in England.

  “One of only a very few recent Mythos tales by my hand, apart from its unavoidable, indeed obligatory back-drop, this story escapes almost entirely from Lovecraft’s literary influence to become wholly original, and I consider it on a par with ‘Born of the Winds’, written all of thirty years earlier.

  “‘The Taint’ was originally published in a limited edition of Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth in time to launch the book at the World Fantasy Convention, Madison WI, in November 2005.”

  * * *

  RICHARD A. LUPOFF was born in Brooklyn, New York, and for many years has lived in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Patricia. He spent a few years in the US Army in the late 1950s, never firing a shot in anger and never had one shot at him, neither of which he regrets. He has worked as both a print and broadcast journalist from his student days onward, and for fifty years has done a books-and-authors show on local radio station KPFA.

  A novelist, short story writer, critic, screenwriter and anthologist, his many books include the novels One Million Centuries, Sandworld, Sword of the Demon, The Return of Skull-Face (with Robert E. Howard), Space War Blues, Circumpolar!, Lovecraft’s Book, Galaxy’s End, Night of the Living Gator and two Buck Rogers novelisations (under the byline “Addison E. Steele”). His short fiction has been collected in The Ova Hamlet Papers, Before... 12:01... and After, Claremont Tales, Claremont Tales II and Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix.

  Lupoff’s non-fiction titles include Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision, Writer at Large and The Great American Paperback, and he has edited All in Color for a Dime and The Comic Book Book (both with Don Thompson) and two volumes of What If: Stories that Should have Won the Hugo.

  In 1963, he and Pat Lupoff won the Hugo Award for their fanzine Xero, and a 2004 compilation The Best of Xero was nominated for another Hugo. He is also a winner of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Lifetime Achievement Award and the Left Coast Crime Lifetime Achievement Award for mystery fiction.

  A short film based on his story ‘12:01 P.M.’ was an Academy Awards nominee in 1990 and was expanded into a feature three years later.

  “I discovered H. P. Lovecraft when I was eleven years old,” recalls Lupoff, “living in a small town in New Jersey, and forced to attend church services every Sunday. I wish I’d had the courage to protest this forced religiosity openly - of course, it didn’t take - but I found other ways to maintain my independence.

  “I made up my own, subversive versions of familiar hymns and sang them when called upon to participate. And I sneaked secular reading matter into church, hid it in my hymnal, and read happily while the preacher railed about Mortal Sin, the Day of Judgement, and the Fires of Hell.

  “One week I stumbled across a little paperback anthology called The Avon Ghost Reader. As I remember, it had a deliciously lurid cover painting - a green, claw-like hand rising menacingly in the foreground, a spooky looking old mansion in the distance - and a marvellous selection of frightening stories, including ‘The Dunwich Horror’, by H. P. Lovecraft. At age eleven I had no understanding of the publishing industry and didn’t realise that this story was a reprint and that its author had been dead for nearly twenty years.

  “What I did understand was that I’d stumbled across an author of unusual merit. I vowed to watch for his byline. My next reward was a copy of another little paperback, Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth, and I was totally hooked. I’ve been a Lovecraft fan for most of my life, and I am delighted to see the Old Gentleman finally getting his due. I’m equally gratified to have made my own small contribution to the traditions of his work.”

  * * *

  PAUL McAULEY was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire. A former research biologist at Oxford University and UCLA, and a former lecturer at St. Andrews University, he became a full-time writer in 1996. McAuley sold a story to the SF digest If when he was just nineteen, but the magazine folded before it could appear, and his first published story appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1984.

  With his debut novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), he became the first British writer to win the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and he established his reputation as one of the best young science fiction writers in the field by winning the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1995.

  His other novels include Secret Harmonies (aka Of the Fall), Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale’s’ Angel (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Long Form Alternate History fiction), the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Fairyland, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, Shrine of Stars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun and In the Mouth of the Whale. The author’s short fiction is collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country and Little Machines, while his story ‘The Temptation of Dr. Stein’ was awarded the 1995 British Fantasy Award.

  “I lived in the city of Bristol, hard by the Avon river and the Severn estuary in the west of England, for seven years. It was the first place I lived after moving away from home, I studied for both my undergraduate degree and Ph.D at the university, and I had my first job there. So it was definitely an influence on my life, but like the best spring water, it has spent a long time percolating through the strata of my subconscious before becoming the source of a story.

  “Not only is Bristol a port city whose port has more or less silted up, but ordinarily it rains there every other day. What better setting for a Lovecraftian homage?

  “I sat my final examinations for my B.Sc (a joint degree in Botany and Zoology, if anyone is interested) during the summer of 1976, when ‘Take Me to the River’ is set, which really was as hot and as dry as any disaster imagined by J. G. Ballard. The drought mentioned in the story was real enough - reservoirs and lakes dried up, grass and trees turned brown, crops wilted, people were encouraged to ration water by sharing baths, and the sun burned every day in a pitiless sky that was either hard blue or headachy white. It ended when the government appointed a ‘Minister of Drought, which worked a lot better than any rain dance or cloud seeding, but for a little while it really did seem that t
he world might end, or that strange, marvellous or fearsome creatures might hatch from the drying mud and foetid rivers.”

  * * *

  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 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.

  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 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).

  “For anyone following the loose interconnectedness of most of my stories, my contribution to this anthology is (obviously) a follow-up to ‘The Big Fish’ from Shadows Over Innsmouth. Returning to California twenty-six years on from the 1942 setting of the first fish story, we’re going inland this time—because I suspected seaside tales might become over-familiar in this series, and decided it would be effective counter-programming to do something set in a desert.

  “‘Another Fish Story’ also fills in a gap in the life and career of Derek Leech, who appears in my novel The Quorum, and several other stories and books of mine, including ‘Seven Stars’ (the serial from Dark Detectives). Most of the people in the story are real and you can look them up in showbiz gossip and true crime books.

  “I subsequently wrote a third fish story, getting back to the beach this time, and ‘Richard Riddle, Boy Detective in “The Case of the French Spy”’ will be included in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth.”

  * * *

  ALLAN SERVOSS’ fascination with the works of H. P. Lovecraft began during his teenage years in Montana when he read a worn paperback copy of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. He soon started ordering all he could find by Lovecraft from a small publishing house “out east” called Arkham House.

  After graduating from college, he found himself living in Madison, Wisconsin, and in due time discovered that he lived just a short distance from Arkham House and August Derleth. A visit to Derleth’s home (unannounced) led to a friendship between the two men during the editor/publisher’s final year, and Servoss being invited to illustrate Gary Myers’ Arkham volume The House of the Worm, which finally saw print in 1975. Except for also contributing to a few issues of Whispers magazine, that marked the artist’s last dealing with weird illustration for nearly twenty-five years.

  The intervening period was spent raising a family and teaching art until, in 2000, he was asked to produce a cover for the Arkham House edition of In the Stone House by Barry N. Malzberg.

  Servoss has had his paintings and drawings displayed in many galleries and juried art exhibitions, illustrated books outside the weird genre, and seen his work reproduced in such periodicals as American Artist Magazine, The Artist Magazine and International Artist. In His Library at R’lyeh, Dead Lovecraft Waits Dreaming... is the title of a portfolio of the illustrator’s work, he was featured in the recent Centipede Press volume Artists Inspired by H. P Lovecraft, and he has enjoyed seeing HPL finally receiving the literary place in history he deserves.

  * * *

  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 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.

  “I first read H. P. Lovecraft back when I was discovering horror fiction in the late 1980s. What I admire most about him—in addition to his endlessly foetid imagination, and his richly baroque prose style—is his certainty. His vision. So many writers of the macabre struggle to communicate true darkness, falling over themselves to sell you their slant on the universe. Lovecraft always seems in possession of a secret so black—and yet so unquestionable—that you are left hurrying in his wake, possessed by an awful fascination to be told what he so obviously already knows. Take it or leave it, he says: this is how it is. There are bad things out there. I know, I’ve seen them.

  “There’s another group of people with a very particular slant on the universe, one which enables them to behave as others do not. These are thieves. I’m convinced that the first profession was not prostitution, as is so often claimed, but thieving. Nicking things. Taking what belongs to others, and not caring about the consequences—somehow possessing a moral carte blanche. And in ‘Fair Exchange’ I wondered what might happen if someone of this profession got himself pulled into a world far darker than even he could comprehend.”

  * * *

  STEVE RASNIC TEM was born in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains and lives with his wife, the writer Melanie Tem, in Colorado.

  A prolific short story writer and poet, Tem’s work has appeared in countless magazines, anthologies and chapbooks. His first novel, Excavation, appeared in 1987 and the following year he won the British Fantasy Award for his story ‘Leaks’. His short fiction has been collected in Ombres sur la route (published in France), the International Horror Guild Award-winning City Fishing and The Far Side of the Lake.

  The semi-autobiographical chapbook The Man on the Ceiling, cowritten with his wife, won the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award, while another chapbook, In These Final Days of Sales, also won the Bram Stoker Award.

  Tem’s last novel was Deadfall Hotel from Solaris, to be followed by Blood Kin in 2014. His most recent collections are Ugly Behavior (New Pulp Press), Onion Songs (Chômu), and Celestial Inventories (ChiZine), a major compilation of his more recent strange fiction. Also in the pipeline is a PS Publishing novella, In the Lovecraft Museum.

  As the author explains: “The seed for ‘Eggs’ came from a small sculpture I bought in Covent Garden on my first trip to England many years ago: an ugly little thing coming out of an egg-shaped stone. It sat on one of my bookcases gathering dust until one early morning, when some chance reflections brought it to my attention so that it might tell its tale.

  “Although Lovecraft’s stylistic approach is not one I’d care to emulate, the notion so dramatically embodied in his fiction that the world is this mysterious place we cannot even begin to understand is one with which I’m in profound sympathy. The characters in Lovecraft’s work are alien even to their own lives—is there any theme more contemporary and vital than this?”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Dorothy Lumley, Steve Saffel, Cath Trechman, Natalie La
verick, Philip Harbottle (Cosmos Literary Agency), Joshua Bilmes (JABberwocky Literary Agency), April Derleth (Arkham House Publishers, Inc.), Sara Broecker, Mandy Slater, Dwayne H. Olson, Michael Waltz, Bill Schafer (Subterranean Press), Bob Garcia, Bernie Wrightson and Anthony Sapienza, all the contributors, and, especially, my late and much lamented friend Philip J. Rahman for his support and belief in this and all my books for F&B.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  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 website at www.stephenjoneseditor.com.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  SHADOWS OVER INNSMOUTH

  Edited by Stephen Jones

  Under the unblinking eye of World Fantasy Award-winning editor Stephen Jones, sixteen of the finest modern authors, including Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley contribute stories to the canon of Cthulhu. Also featuring the story that started it all, by the master of horror, H. P. Lovecraft.

  “A fine assembly of talented writers... A superb anthology for Lovecraft fans.” Science Fiction Chronicle

  “Horror abounds in Shadows Over Innsmouth.” Publishers Weekly

  “Good, slimy fun... There are a number of genuinely frightening pieces here.” San Francisco Chronicle