Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

A novelist, short story writer, critic, screenwriter and anthologist, his many books include the novels One Million Centuries, Sandworld, Sword of the Demon, The Return of Skull-Face (with Robert E. Howard), Space War Blues, Circumpolar!, Lovecraft’s Book, Galaxy’s End, Night of the Living Gator and two Buck Rogers novelisations (under the byline “Addison E. Steele”). His short fiction has been collected in The Ova Hamlet Papers, Before... 12:01... and After, Claremont Tales, Claremont Tales II and Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix.

Lupoff’s non-fiction titles include Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision, Writer at Large and The Great American Paperback, and he has edited All in Color for a Dime and The Comic Book Book (both with Don Thompson) and two volumes of What If: Stories that Should have Won the Hugo.

In 1963, he and Pat Lupoff won the Hugo Award for their fanzine Xero, and a 2004 compilation The Best of Xero was nominated for another Hugo. He is also a winner of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Lifetime Achievement Award and the Left Coast Crime Lifetime Achievement Award for mystery fiction.

A short film based on his story ‘12:01 P.M.’ was an Academy Awards nominee in 1990 and was expanded into a feature three years later.

“I discovered H. P. Lovecraft when I was eleven years old,” recalls Lupoff, “living in a small town in New Jersey, and forced to attend church services every Sunday. I wish I’d had the courage to protest this forced religiosity openly - of course, it didn’t take - but I found other ways to maintain my independence.

“I made up my own, subversive versions of familiar hymns and sang them when called upon to participate. And I sneaked secular reading matter into church, hid it in my hymnal, and read happily while the preacher railed about Mortal Sin, the Day of Judgement, and the Fires of Hell.

“One week I stumbled across a little paperback anthology called The Avon Ghost Reader. As I remember, it had a deliciously lurid cover painting - a green, claw-like hand rising menacingly in the foreground, a spooky looking old mansion in the distance - and a marvellous selection of frightening stories, including ‘The Dunwich Horror’, by H. P. Lovecraft. At age eleven I had no understanding of the publishing industry and didn’t realise that this story was a reprint and that its author had been dead for nearly twenty years.

“What I did understand was that I’d stumbled across an author of unusual merit. I vowed to watch for his byline. My next reward was a copy of another little paperback, Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth, and I was totally hooked. I’ve been a Lovecraft fan for most of my life, and I am delighted to see the Old Gentleman finally getting his due. I’m equally gratified to have made my own small contribution to the traditions of his work.”

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PAUL McAULEY was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire. A former research biologist at Oxford University and UCLA, and a former lecturer at St. Andrews University, he became a full-time writer in 1996. McAuley sold a story to the SF digest If when he was just nineteen, but the magazine folded before it could appear, and his first published story appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1984.

With his debut novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), he became the first British writer to win the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and he established his reputation as one of the best young science fiction writers in the field by winning the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1995.