Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

His other novels include Secret Harmonies (aka Of the Fall), Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale’s’ Angel (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Long Form Alternate History fiction), the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Fairyland, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, Shrine of Stars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun and In the Mouth of the Whale. The author’s short fiction is collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country and Little Machines, while his story ‘The Temptation of Dr. Stein’ was awarded the 1995 British Fantasy Award.

“I lived in the city of Bristol, hard by the Avon river and the Severn estuary in the west of England, for seven years. It was the first place I lived after moving away from home, I studied for both my undergraduate degree and Ph.D at the university, and I had my first job there. So it was definitely an influence on my life, but like the best spring water, it has spent a long time percolating through the strata of my subconscious before becoming the source of a story.

“Not only is Bristol a port city whose port has more or less silted up, but ordinarily it rains there every other day. What better setting for a Lovecraftian homage?

“I sat my final examinations for my B.Sc (a joint degree in Botany and Zoology, if anyone is interested) during the summer of 1976, when ‘Take Me to the River’ is set, which really was as hot and as dry as any disaster imagined by J. G. Ballard. The drought mentioned in the story was real enough - reservoirs and lakes dried up, grass and trees turned brown, crops wilted, people were encouraged to ration water by sharing baths, and the sun burned every day in a pitiless sky that was either hard blue or headachy white. It ended when the government appointed a ‘Minister of Drought, which worked a lot better than any rain dance or cloud seeding, but for a little while it really did seem that the world might end, or that strange, marvellous or fearsome creatures might hatch from the drying mud and foetid rivers.”

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KIM NEWMAN is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man from the Diogenes Club, all under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil”.

His non-fiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.

He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (contributing the latter’s popular ‘Video Dungeon’ column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television documentaries.

Newman’s stories ‘Week Woman’ and ‘Ubermensch’ have been adapted into episodes of the TV series The Hunger, and the latter tale was also turned into an Australian short film in 2009. Following his Radio 4 play Cry Babies, he wrote an episode (‘Phish Phood’) for BBC Radio 7’s series The Man in Black, and he was a main contributor to the 2012 stage play The Hallowe’en Sessions. He has also directed and written a tiny film, Missing Girl.

The author’s most recent books include expanded reissues of his acclaimed Anno Dracula series and the “Professor Moriarty” novel The Hound of the d’Urbervilles (all from Titan Books), along with a much-enlarged edition of Nightmare Movies (from Bloomsbury).

“For anyone following the loose interconnectedness of most of my stories, my contribution to this anthology is (obviously) a follow-up to ‘The Big Fish’ from Shadows Over Innsmouth. Returning to California twenty-six years on from the 1942 setting of the first fish story, we’re going inland this time—because I suspected seaside tales might become over-familiar in this series, and decided it would be effective counter-programming to do something set in a desert.