PS Publishing recently published the novellas The Pretence and The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, which attempts to reconceive some of the author’s early Lovecraftian ideas and develop them, along with the definitive edition of that early Arkham collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Also available from the same publisher is a volume of all the Campbell–Derleth correspondence, edited by S. T. Joshi.
Now well into his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is also President of the Society of Fantastic Films.
“I started imitating Lovecraft more than fifty years ago,” reveals Campbell. “Soon I learned to subsume his example—his careful sense of structure, his ambition to reach for awe—and mostly did without his Mythos, which in any case was largely constructed by later writers, too often to the detriment of what he was trying to achieve. He meant his inventions to suggest more than they made explicit, but the rest of us filled in so many gaps that the whole thing became as over-explained as the Victorian occultism he wanted to leave behind. Over the decades I’ve tried to reclaim some of his original vision, not least in my novel The Darkest Part of the Woods, which took The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a model of how to do without his Mythos. I hope ‘The Winner’ also gives some sense of his vision without needing explicit references.
“I’ve been in pubs as unnerving as the one in this story, and perhaps they’ve lodged in my shadowy subconscious. The worst was in Birkenhead—a pub where as soon as you walked in you felt as if you’d announced your Jewishness at a David Irving book launch.”
Campbell’s early story ‘The Church in the High Street’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth, and the author’s ‘Raised by the Moon’ is included in Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.
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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.
As the author explains: “‘You Don’t Want to Know’ is the first story I wrote about Nick Nightmare, the hard-boiled private eye, most of whose adventures pit him against various villains from Mythos terrain.
“Combining the droll style of Philip Marlowe, the shoot-’em-up no-nonsense energy of Mike Hammer and the bizarre grotesquery of H. P. Lovecraft, the Nick Nightmare stories are intended to be a celebration of the old pulps and their hyper-active, madcap world.”
A further tale, ‘Nightmare on Mad Gull Island’, was published in the fourth edition of Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos from Spectre Press, while Nick Nightmare Investigates is a new collection of tales from The Alchemy Press/Airgedlámh Publications. Both publications are illustrated by Jim Pitts.
Adrian Cole’s story ‘The Crossing’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth.
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AUGUST WILLIAM DERLETH (1909–71) was a major figure in the literary and small-press publishing world. An amazingly prolific Wisconsin regional author (known for his “Sac Prairie Saga”), essayist and poet, he is best remembered today as an author, editor and publisher of weird fiction (Lovecraftian and otherwise).
He made his debut in Weird Tales at the age of seventeen with a story entitled ‘Bat’s Belfry’, and most of his own macabre fiction has been collected by Arkham House—the imprint that Derleth founded in 1939 with Donald Wandrei to perpetuate the work of their friend and colleague H. P. Lovecraft—in such volumes as Someone in the Dark, Something Near, Not Long for This World, Lonesome Places, Mr. George and Other Odd Persons (as by “Stephen Grendon”), Colonel Markeson and Less Pleasant People (with Mark Schorer), Harrigan’s File, Dwellers in Darkness and In Lovecraft’s Shadow.
As a widely respected anthologist, he edited Sleep No More, Who Knocks?, The Night Side, The Sleeping and the Dead, Dark of the Moon, Night’s Yawning Peaclass="underline" A Ghostly Company, Dark Mind Dark Heart, The Unquiet Grave, When Evil Wakes, Over the Edge, Travellers by Night, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Dark Things, amongst many other titles.
Derleth began corresponding with Lovecraft around the mid-1920s. “You have the real stuff,” the author wrote to his young protégé in 1930, “and with the progress of time it seems to me over-whelmingly probable that you will produce literature in a major calibre.”
Following Lovecraft’s untimely death, Derleth developed various fragments and outlines (reputedly) discovered amongst the author’s posthumous papers into Cthulhu Mythos-inspired pastiches, which can be found in such novels and collections as The Lurker at the Threshold, The Survivor and Others, The Mask of Cthulhu, The Trail of Cthulhu and The Watchers Out of Time and Others.
In 1962, he set out his own vision of the Mythos: “The deities of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos consisted first of the Elder Gods, which, though beyond mundane morality, beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil’, were nevertheless proponents of order and thus represented the forces of enlightenment as against the forces of evil, represented by the Ancient Ones or the Great Old Ones, who rebelled against the Elder Gods, and were thrust—like Satan—into outer darkness.”