Kiernan’s story ‘From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6’, which linked Lovecraft’s Deep Ones to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, appeared in Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.
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HOWARD PHILIPS LOVECRAFT (1890–1937) is one of the twentieth century’s most important and influential authors of supernatural fiction.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he lived for much of his life there as a studious antiquarian who wrote mostly with no care for commercial reward. During his lifetime, the majority of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry and essays appeared in obscure amateur-press journals or in the pages of the struggling pulp magazine Weird Tales.
Following the author’s untimely death, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded the publishing imprint of Arkham House in 1939 with the initial idea of keeping all Lovecraft’s work in print. Beginning with The Outsider and Others, his stories were collected in such hardcover volumes as Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Marginalia, Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Dreams and Fancies, The Dunwich Horror and Others, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, 3 Tales of Horror and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, along with several volumes of “posthumous collaborations” with Derleth, including 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.
During the decades since his death, Lovecraft himself has been acknowledged as a mainstream American writer second only to Edgar Allan Poe, while his relatively small body of work has influenced countless imitators and formed the basis of a world-wide industry of books, role-playing games, graphic novels, toys and movies based on his concepts.
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BRIAN LUMLEY started his writing career by emulating the work of H. P. Lovecraft and has ended up with his own, highly enthusiastic, fan following for his world-wide best-selling series of “Necroscope”® vampire books.
Born in the coal-mining town of Horden, County Durham, on England’s north-east coast, Lumley joined the British Army when he was twenty-one and served in the Corps of Royal Military Police for twenty-two years, until his retirement in December 1980.
After discovering Lovecraft’s stories while stationed in Berlin in the early 1960s, he decided to try his own hand at writing horror fiction, initially based around the influential Cthulhu Mythos. He sent his early efforts to editor August Derleth, and Arkham House published two collections of the author’s stories, The Caller of the Black and The Horror at Oakdene and Others, along with the short novel, Beneath the Moors.
The author then continued Lovecraft’s themes in such novels and collections as The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow, The Clock of Dreams, Spawn of the Winds, In the Moons of Borea, The Compleat Crow, Hero of Dreams, Ship of Dreams, Mad Moon of Dreams, Iced on Iran and Other Dreamquests, The House of Cthulhu and Other Tales of the Primal Land, Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (which includes the British Fantasy Award-winning title story), Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales and Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords.
As Lumley explains: “‘The Long Last Night’ in this current volume is set in the future—possibly the last, darkest and nearest future, when the stars are finally right. Firmly grounded in H. P. Lovecraft’s now world-famous ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, this story is my third offering in Titan Books’ trilogy of Lovecraftian horror: Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth and Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, though not necessarily my last connected story. For fans of HPL, especially those suffering—or with hideously developing symptoms of—the Innsmouth taint, look for ‘The Changeling’ in the same editor’s anthology Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome.”
Other recent works by Brian Lumley include The Möbius Murders, a long novella set in the Necroscope® universe, and The Compleat Crow, reprinting all the short adventures and longer novellas in the saga of Titus Crow, both volumes from William Schafer’s Subterranean Press. And here it is worth pointing out that Titus Crow himself has had more than a handful of dealings with the monsters of the Mythos…
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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, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit.
He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (supplying 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, including the long-awaited fourth volume Anno Dracula 1976–1991: Johnny Alucard; the “Professor Moriarty” novel The Hound of the d’Urbervilles, and the stand-alone novel An English Ghost Story (all from Titan Books), along with a much-enlarged edition of Nightmare Movies (from Bloomsbury).
With Maura McHugh he scripted the comic book mini-series Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland for Dark Horse Comics. Illustrated by Tyler Crook, it is a spin-off from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series. Forthcoming fiction includes the novels Kentish Glory: The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange and Angels of Music.
About the setting for his ‘Richard Riddle’ story, Newman explains: “Lyme Regis, in the county of Dorset, is perhaps best known as the setting for John Fowles’ prematurely post-modern Victorian novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman—which makes dramatic use, as does Karel Reisz’s film, of the town’s distinctive stone harbour, the Cobb. Fowles was a famous, if mysterious local resident and lived quite near my fictional Orris Priory. In the 1970s, I spent many weekends around the little coast town, where my father had a yacht—a Mirror dinghy which I sometimes crewed on fishing trips in Lyme Bay, though Dad had someone more serious along when he took up boat-racing.