“Then and now, Lyme beach was known for its fine array of fossils: before anyone learned to leave paleontological finds in place, we brought home a huge chunk of rock with an embedded ammonite for use as a door-stop. Amazingly, the shingles still haven’t been picked entirely clean—though taking prehistoric souvenirs is now quite properly discouraged.
“This story, which was originally written for Chris Roberson’s anthology Adventure, draws on my own memories of pottering around Lyme. In America, the piece was taken as a tribute to boys’ adventures I’ve not read—Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys. I was actually thinking of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, one of Dad’s favourite books as a child (it gave him the idea of sailing in the first place), and Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (a 1929 German young adult mystery still read in my 1970s schooldays). Other elements thrown into the mix were H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, Edmund Gosse’s brilliant 1907 memoir Father and Son (Philip Gosse wrote Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, which desperately tries to explain the existence of fossils from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint), and the famous anecdote of the Hartlepool monkey.
“The story goes that, during the Napoleonic Wars, a ship sank off the coast of the Northern fishing town. The sole survivor was a monkey dressed in a miniature sailor’s uniform. The locals, having never seen a Frenchman, took the monkey for a spy, tried the unfortunate creature and hanged it, prompting citizens of rival towns to taunt Hartlepool natives to this day with a jeer of ‘Who hung the monkey?’”
Kim Newman contributed two stories—‘A Quarter to Three’ and ‘The Big Fish’ (under his “Jack Yeovil” byline)—to Shadows Over Innsmouth and, as the author admits, “I thought I wouldn’t write yet another fish story when I finished ‘Another Fish Story’ for the second ‘Innsmouth’ anthology, but then this popped out.”
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REGGIE OLIVER has been a professional playwright, actor and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorised biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and several collections of stories of supernatural terror, including Mrs Midnight, which won the Children of the Night Award for Best Work of Supernatural Fiction in 2011.
More recently, Tartarus has reissued his first and second collections, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, with illustrations by the author, along with a new collection entitled Flowers of the Sea. His novel The Dracula Papers I – The Scholar’s Tale is the first of a projected four, and an omnibus edition of the author’s stories, entitled Dramas from the Depths, is published by Centipede as part of the “Masters of the Weird Tale” series.
The Boke of the Divill is a new novella from Dark Renaissance; it is set in the cathedral town of Morchester, which has been the setting for a number of his stories (including ‘Quieta Non Movere’, which appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 23). It is also the setting of ‘The Archbishop’s Well’.
“Lovecraft’s weird mythology has been a source of fascination and inspiration to me for a long time,” admits the author. “His sense of ‘the other’ is so unique and yet so resonant to the contemporary mind. (No wonder Michel Houellebecq, the brilliant enfant terrible of modern French intellectualism, wrote a book about him!)
“Never having been to the United States, I wanted somehow to bring Lovecraft’s Innsmouth mythology (albeit with variations) to England, and so it came to the seemingly quiet West Country cathedral town of Morchester. All good weird fiction is about the collision of two worlds. In this story Lovecraft comes to the world of M. R. James (with a dash of P. G. Wodehouse thrown in).
“I like to think Lovecraft would have approved; I’m not so sure about James though.”
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ANGELA SLATTER is an Australian writer of dark fantasy and horror. She is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award short-listed Sourdough and Other Stories, and the collection/mosaic novel Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett). More recent publications include the collections The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels and (again in collaboration with Hannett) The Female Factory.
She has an MA and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, and is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award (for her story ‘The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter’ in A Book of Horrors). Her work has also appeared in Australian, British and American “Best of” anthologies, along with Fantasy Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Dreaming Again, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome and Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame.
“My first introduction to Lovecraft was an old reprint collection of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories,” reveals the author. “I was about fifteen and found it (as I found many of my books then) in the book bin at the local supermarket where I worked as a checkout chick on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings.
“What stuck with me from that collection was not only the inexorable stripping away of a mystery that ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ embodies, but also the tale of ‘The Outsider’. The images and sensations from this story have stayed with me in the subsequent thirty years—the dark, dank castle, the seemingly endless staircase going up, the awful sense of having lost one’s memories, the strangeness of mirrors, and, of course, the dreadful feeling of isolation and rejection that often comes with discovering a terrible truth—the broken, decaying baroque of it all. They are images and sensations that you find in much of Lovecraft’s work and, when I wrote ‘The Song of Sighs’, I looked back to my fifteen-year-old self and mined her memories—dug into the fear and surprise that Lovecraft’s stories brought, the delighted frisson of horror—and tried to recreate those influences while weaving them in with my own tale.
“As for ‘Rising, Not Dreaming’, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the editor of Innsmouth Free Press, asked me for a short Cthulhu story and the result was a kind of Orpheus tale that came out of a dream. It started with the idea of the kinds of things husbands do that disappoint wives and I wanted it to be something really big, not just simply a refusal to take out the garbage or mow the lawn.”
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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.