Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Besides publishing two non-fiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his other books include the novels The Great White Space, The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis, House of the Wolf and The Black Death. He also wrote more than fifty hardboiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, and continued the adventures of August Derleth’s Holmes-like consulting detective Solar Pons in several volumes, including the novel Solar Pons versus The Devil’s Claw.

More recently, PS Publishing has produced the non-fiction study Basil Copper: A Life in Books, and a massive two-volume set of Darkness, Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper. A restored version of Copper’s 1976 novel The Curse of the Fleers appeared from the same imprint in 2012.

“I have already paid public tribute to August Derleth on both sides of the Atlantic in my own non-fiction studies,” explained the author, “so I would prefer to paint a more intimate picture of a good-humoured, generous and loveable human being in these random recollections. I am on record as saying he was a Renaissance man. This was literally true, and his huge appetite for literature and life kept him at his desk under an incredible workload that would have consumed lesser men, for decade after decade.

“Like Lovecraft, he passed almost unnoticed except for the gigantic ripples in the small, rather esoteric world he had chosen to make his own. His reputation can only increase and appreciate as the years go by, while Arkham House itself in its prosperous and steady continuance is a living memorial to his courage and his life-work.”

Copper’s novella ‘Beyond the Reef’ originally appeared in Shadows Over Innsmouth and was subsequently reprinted as a single hardcover volume in Germany. In a reversal of Hugh B. Cave’s story in the present volume, ‘Voices in the Water’ was initially written as a non-Lovecraftian ghost story, but the Innsmouth references were added for its first appearance here.

* * *

LES EDWARDS studied at the Hornsey College of Art from 196872. On leaving, he began to work as a freelance illustrator, and swiftly established himself as a stalwart of the UK illustration scene.

In a career spanning four decades he has painted a great number of covers, including those for such anthology series as The Mayflower Book of Black Magic, The Fontana Book of Horror, The Star Book of Horror, The Reign of Terror, The Year’s Best Horror Stories and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. More recently, he has illustrated the best-selling H. P. Lovecraft collections Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P Lovecraft and Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre, The Complete Chronicles of Conan and Conan’s Brethren by Robert E. Howard, and Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M. R. James.

In recent years the artist has also taken to painting under the pseudonym “Edward Miller” in order to produce a different kind of work in a more romantic style. This work has also become popular, and he now pursues both careers with equal enthusiasm.

In 1995 he was Artist Guest of Honour at the World Science Fiction Convention and in 2010 he was Artist Guest of Honour at the World Horror Convention. He has been voted Best Artist by the British Fantasy Society on seven occasions, and has been nominated in that category every year since 1994. He has also been nominated for five Chesley Awards and for the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist five times, with his alter-ego, “Edward Miller”, winning it in 2008.

“If you are a fan of the fantastic,” explains the artist, “then it is not possible to ignore the work of the strange author from Providence. Somehow he has become permanent. He endures. Even the word ‘Lovecraftian’ has slipped into the language, although there might be strange ambiguities as to what it actually means. For some it refers to the literary style, which, let’s face it, is a barrier which some readers never surmount. For others, it has to do with bulging gelatinous masses, the chanting of barbarous names and huge, ancient and tentacled beings.