Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

“For me it is to do with a sense of dread; with the knowledge that the universe is, at best, indifferent and more likely, inimical, and that our grip on sanity is slight. It is to do with the feeling that if you scratch away the surface of our carefully preserved reality you will find madness staring back. And however hard Lovecraft tries, however he strives for that one elusive, perfect word, you know that he will never quite be able to convey the true and awful horror that’s in his imagination. It’s a feeling I share.

“But what sets Lovecraft, and a very few others, apart is that those feelings remain long after the story is finished. The best horror stories have this quality which sets them apart from the merely adequate, if enjoyable, chiller, and sets ‘Horror’ as a genre apart from other literature. It is why the best of Lovecraft’s stories are always worth returning to.”

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BOB EGGLETON was fascinated by science fiction and fantasy at an early age, especially the monster movies featuring Godzilla and other creatures. He attended Rhode Island College and left to pursue a career in commercial illustration and fine art.

His artwork has appeared on countless book and magazine covers, comics, posters, prints, trading cards, stationary, drink coasters and jigsaw puzzles, and has been collected in such volumes as Alien Horizons: The Fantastic Art of Bob Eggleton and The Book of Sea Monsters (both with Nigel Suckling), Greetings from Earth: The Art of Bob Eggleton, Dragonhenge and The Stardragons (both with John Grant), Primal Darkness: The Gothic & Horror Art of Bob Eggleton (with Shinichi Noda) and Dragons’ Domain: The Ultimate Dragon Painting Workshop.

Best known for his spectacular dragons, depictions of Godzilla, and his artwork for Brian Lumley’s “Necroscope” series, the artist’s paintings of Cthulhu have been used, amongst other places, on the Arkham House anthology Cthulhu 2000, Best of Weird Tales, The House of Cthulhu and the premier issue of H. P Lovecraft’s Magazine.

A recipient of multiple Hugo and Chesley Awards for Best Artist, Eggleton has also worked on the conceptual design for a number of movies. An asteroid discovered in 1992 by Spacewatch at Kitt Peak has been named “13562 Bobeggleton” after the artist.

“H. P. Lovecraft has got to be the world’s greatest writer of ‘monsters’ in his terrific stories,” observes Eggleton. “His creatures are like no others in fiction, on the Earth or off it. I try to visualise them as real things, which drip with slime and shamble along. Things that, as Lovecraft himself would say, ‘Cause men to die with the screams still in their throats’.”

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JOHN STEPHEN GLASBY (1928-2011) graduated from Nottingham University with an 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, occult novel The Dark Destroyer, and the SF novel Mystery of the Crater.

More recently, Philip Harbottle compiled two collections of the 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.

A long-time fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, in the early 1970s the author also submitted a collection of Cthulhu 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, and ‘The Quest for Y’ha-Nthlei’—a direct sequel to Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—was written especially for this volume.

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