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).