‘Innsmouth Clay’ is a “posthumous pastiche” which first appeared in the 1971 anthology Dark Things under only Lovecraft’s byline. When reprinted three years later in The Watchers Out of Time, it was properly identified as a collaborative effort between the two authors.
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JOHN STEPHEN GLASBY (1928–2011) graduated from Nottingham University with a honours degree in Chemistry. He started his career as a research chemist for ICI in 1952 and worked for them until his retirement.
Around the same time, he began a parallel career as an extraordinarily prolific writer of novels and short stories, producing more than 300 works in all genres over the next two decades, many under such shared house pseudonyms as “Rand Le Page”, “Berl Cameron”, “Victor La Salle” and “John E. Muller”. His most noted personal pseudonym was “A. J. Merak”. He subsequently published a new collection of ghost stories, The Substance of Shade, the occult novel The Dark Destroyer, and the SF novel Mystery of the Crater.
More recently, Philip Harbottle compiled two collections of Glasby’s supernatural fiction, The Lonely Shadows and The Dark Boatman, while the author’s son, Edmund Glasby, edited The Thing in the Mist: Selected by John S. Glasby, collecting eleven of the author’s stories from Badger Books’ digest horror magazine Supernatural Stories.
Ramble House will publish a further collection of fiction selected from that magazine, along with a new volume of Glasby’s Mythos stories, Dwellers in Darkness and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Meanwhile, the author’s most ambitious Lovecraftian work, Dark Armageddon—a trilogy of novels that unify the “Cthulhu Mythos” and bring it to a climactic conclusion—is set to appear from Centipede Press.
A long-time fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, in the early 1970s the author also submitted a collection of Mythos stories to August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth suggested extensive revisions and improvements, which Glasby duly followed, but the publisher unfortunately died before the revised book could see print, and the manuscript was returned.
In his later years, Glasby returned to writing more supernatural stories in the Lovecraftian vein. ‘The Quest for Y’ha-Nthlei’—a direct sequel to Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—was written especially for Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, as was ‘Innsmouth Bane’, which first appeared in the short-lived H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, before finally being anthologised in this volume.
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BRIAN HODGE is the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical. He’s also written over 100 short stories, novelettes and novellas, plus five full-length collections.
Recent works include No Law Left Unbroken, a collection of crime fiction; The Weight of the Dead and Whom the Gods Would Destroy, both stand-alone novellas; a newly revised hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his latest novel, Leaves of Sherwood.
He lives in Colorado, where more of everything is in the works. He also dabbles in music, sound design and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga, grappling, and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
As the author explains: “As many times as I’ve read ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, it never occurred to me, until I read it looking for ideas, that neither H. P. Lovecraft nor anyone in the prior “Innsmouth” anthologies had accounted for the prisoners taken during the 1928 raids on the town.
“I quickly became intrigued by what must have happened to them, and how they might well constitute the original precedent for the troubling, terrorism-era US policy of endless detention without due process.
“The anomalous ocean recording in ‘The Same Deep Waters as You’ was a real-world event that I’ve wanted to play with for years. In an irresistible coincidence, the Bloop was triangulated to have originated close to where Lovecraft located the sunken city of R’lyeh. A few weeks after I finished this story, NOAA announced that the sound was similar to the sonic profile of icebergs recorded in the Scotia Sea. They would know, although I’d love to learn more about how there would’ve been enough ice around Polynesia that August that its calving was heard for 3,000 miles.
“It’s more fun living in a world where this remains a mystery.”
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CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, The Drowning Girclass="underline" A Memoir, The Red Tree and Blood Oranges. She has recently scripted a graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics, Alabaster, which continues the misadventures of her character Dancy Flammarion.
Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores, To Charles Fort with Love, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others and the retrospective volume Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). Subterranean Press has recently released The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, while Centipede Press is planning expanded and illustrated limited editions of her novels The Drowning Girclass="underline" A Memoir and The Red Tree.
About the sequence of stories the author has in this volume, she reveals: “‘Fish Bride’ has a somewhat complicated origin. In December 2005, I mentioned something in my blog about wanting to write a humorous story about a ‘whorehouse in Innsmouth, circa 1924’. I’m not very good at humour, not usually, and the idea sat fallow for a long time. A couple of years later, I wrote ‘Fish Bride’, a very different sort of tale, not the least bit humorous, but one that grew out of that concept of a ‘whorehouse in Innsmouth’. Though ‘Fish Bride’ isn’t set in Innsmouth, the locale clearly mirrors Lovecraft’s doomed seaport. It also owes a debt to R. H. Barlow’s ‘The Night Ocean’, which was one of those stories that Lovecraft ‘revised’ in an attempt to scrape by and make his meagre living.
“‘On the Reef’ came about in the autumn of 2010,” continues Kiernan, “because I was looking to write a Halloween story, and a story about masks and the role they play in mythology and religion. And because I wanted to write a story that returned to Innsmouth long after the events of Lovecraft’s story. It’s not like the town could have been completely erased. So, in essence it’s a kind of ghost story. Only the ghost isn’t the disembodied spirit of a human being, but the force that a dead town and what happened continues to exert over the present day.
“‘The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings’ is one of those stories that I wrote because I’m so often more interested in looking at a superficially ‘horrific’ situation from the point of view of the ‘Other’. Probably, John Garner’s Grendel set me on this path. In this story, I’m not interested in provoking fear from the reader, but sympathy for the protagonist, an understanding of her sense of alienation, her loneliness, and her longing for a life forever out of her reach.”