Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

“H. P. Lovecraft remains one of the crucial writers in the field,” Campbell explains. “He united the American tradition of weird fiction—Poe, Bierce, Chambers—with the British—Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James. He devoted his career to attempting to find the perfect form for the weird tale, and the sheer range of his work (from the documentary to the delirious) is often overlooked. Few writers in the field are more worth re-reading: certainly I find different qualities on different occasions. I recently read ‘The Outsider’ to my wife Jenny to both our pleasures. I still try to capture the Lovecraftian sense of cosmic awe in some of my tales.

“‘Raised by the Moon’ was suggested by the boating lake at West Kirby. It’s much like the area contained by the submerged wall in the story, although the town is nothing like the surroundings. Perhaps the creatures in the tale are distant cousins of the Deep Ones—we might call them the Shallowers.”

Campbell’s early story ‘The Church in the High Street’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth.

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HUGH BARNETT CAVE (1910-2004) was born in Chester, England, he emigrated to America with his family when he was five. Cave sold his first story, ‘Island Ordeal’, to Brief Stories in 1929, and went on to publish around 800 pieces of fiction (often under various bylines) to such pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories and the so-called “shudder” or “weird menace” pulps, Horror Stories and Terror Tales, amongst many other titles.

The author then left the field for almost three decades, moving to Haiti and later Jamaica, where he established a coffee plantation and wrote two highly praised travel books, Haiti: Highroad to Adventure and Four Paths to Paradise: A Book About Jamaica. He also continued to write for the “slick” magazines, such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and many other titles.

In 1977, Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa imprint published a hefty volume of Cave’s best horror tales, Murgunstrumm and Others, which won the World Fantasy Award, and he returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels (most of them involving voodoo or the walking dead): Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns and The Restless Dead.

The Horror Writers of America presented Cave with their highest honour, the Lifetime Achievement Award, in 1991, and in 1997 he was given a Special World Fantasy Award when he attended the World Fantasy Convention in London as a Guest of Honour. Milt Thomas’ biography, Cave of a Thousand Tales: The Life & Times of Hugh B. Cave, was published by Arkham House the week after the author’s death.

‘The Coming’ was originally written back in the early 1990s for Shadows Over Innsmouth. When that volume became an all-British line-up, the author took out the Lovecraftian references and later sold it to another anthology. It appears here as Cave originally intended.

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BASIL COPPER (1924-2013) was born in London, and for thirty years he worked as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time writer in 1970.

His first story in the horror field, ‘The Spider’, was published in 1964 in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, since when his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, been extensively adapted for radio, and collected in Not After Nightfall, Here Be Daemons, From Evil’s Pillow, And Afterward the Dark, Voices of Doom, When Footsteps Echo, Whispers in the Night, Cold Hand on My Shoulder and Knife in the Back.

One of the author’s most reprinted stories, ‘Camera Obscura’, was adapted for a 1971 episode of the anthology television series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.