Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

“‘Another Fish Story’ also fills in a gap in the life and career of Derek Leech, who appears in my novel The Quorum, and several other stories and books of mine, including ‘Seven Stars’ (the serial from Dark Detectives). Most of the people in the story are real and you can look them up in showbiz gossip and true crime books.

“I subsequently wrote a third fish story, getting back to the beach this time, and ‘Richard Riddle, Boy Detective in “The Case of the French Spy”’ will be included in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth.”

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ALLAN SERVOSS’ fascination with the works of H. P. Lovecraft began during his teenage years in Montana when he read a worn paperback copy of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. He soon started ordering all he could find by Lovecraft from a small publishing house “out east” called Arkham House.

After graduating from college, he found himself living in Madison, Wisconsin, and in due time discovered that he lived just a short distance from Arkham House and August Derleth. A visit to Derleth’s home (unannounced) led to a friendship between the two men during the editor/publisher’s final year, and Servoss being invited to illustrate Gary Myers’ Arkham volume The House of the Worm, which finally saw print in 1975. Except for also contributing to a few issues of Whispers magazine, that marked the artist’s last dealing with weird illustration for nearly twenty-five years.

The intervening period was spent raising a family and teaching art until, in 2000, he was asked to produce a cover for the Arkham House edition of In the Stone House by Barry N. Malzberg.

Servoss has had his paintings and drawings displayed in many galleries and juried art exhibitions, illustrated books outside the weird genre, and seen his work reproduced in such periodicals as American Artist Magazine, The Artist Magazine and International Artist. In His Library at R’lyeh, Dead Lovecraft Waits Dreaming... is the title of a portfolio of the illustrator’s work, he was featured in the recent Centipede Press volume Artists Inspired by H. P Lovecraft, and he has enjoyed seeing HPL finally receiving the literary place in history he deserves.

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MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH was born in Knutsford, Cheshire, and grew up in the United States, South Africa and Australia. He currently lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and son.

Smith’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and, under his full name, he has published the modern SF novels Only Forward, Spares and One of Us. He is the only person to have won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story four times—along with the August Delerth, International Horror Guild and Philip K. Dick awards.

Writing as “Michael Marshall” he has published six international best-selling novels of suspense, including The Straw Men and The Intruders, currently in development with the BBC. His most recent novels are Killer Move and We are Here.

“I first read H. P. Lovecraft back when I was discovering horror fiction in the late 1980s. What I admire most about him—in addition to his endlessly foetid imagination, and his richly baroque prose style—is his certainty. His vision. So many writers of the macabre struggle to communicate true darkness, falling over themselves to sell you their slant on the universe. Lovecraft always seems in possession of a secret so black—and yet so unquestionable—that you are left hurrying in his wake, possessed by an awful fascination to be told what he so obviously already knows. Take it or leave it, he says: this is how it is. There are bad things out there. I know, I’ve seen them.

“There’s another group of people with a very particular slant on the universe, one which enables them to behave as others do not. These are thieves. I’m convinced that the first profession was not prostitution, as is so often claimed, but thieving. Nicking things. Taking what belongs to others, and not caring about the consequences—somehow possessing a moral carte blanche. And in ‘Fair Exchange’ I wondered what might happen if someone of this profession got himself pulled into a world far darker than even he could comprehend.”

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STEVE RASNIC TEM was born in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains and lives with his wife, the writer Melanie Tem, in Colorado.