Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

‘Raised by the Moon’ copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2001. Originally published in The Spook, June 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.

‘Fair Exchange’ copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2005.

‘The Taint’ copyright © Brian Lumley 2005. Afterwords: Contributors’ Notes’ copyright © Stephen Jones 2005, 2013.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For NATE

in the year of his spawning,

and those Great Old Ones

MIKE and PAULA

for putting their trust in me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

WEIRD SHADOWS...

by Stephen Jones

DISCARDED DRAFT OF ‘THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH’

by H. P. Lovecraft

THE QUEST FOR Y’HA-NTHLEI

by John Glasby

BRACKISH WATERS

by Richard A. Lupoff

VOICES IN THE WATER

by Basil Copper

ANOTHER FISH STORY

by Kim Newman

TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

by Paul McAuley

THE COMING

by Hugh B. Cave

EGGS

by Steve Rasnic Tem

FROM CABINET 34, DRAWER 6

by Caitlín R. Kiernan

RAISED BY THE MOON

by Ramsey Campbell

FAIR EXCHANGE

by Michael Marshall Smith

THE TAINT

by Brian Lumley

Afterword

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

INTRODUCTION

WEIRD SHADOWS...

AROUND THE END of the 1980s, I had a brilliant idea for an anthology.

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of supernatural fiction writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890, Shadows Over Innsmouth would use the author’s 1931 novella ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ as the literary touchstone for a number of established authors to expand upon his concepts and create a loose, fictional history of the decaying Massachusetts seaport in the story and its ichthyoid denizens, the Deep Ones.

I was so certain that the book would sell that, for the only time in my career, I went ahead and started commissioning stories from authors without a publisher’s deal. Luckily, most of the writers I contacted shared my enthusiasm for the project, and before long I had compiled mostly original stories by an impressive line-up of names, including Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Basil Copper, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Brian Stableford, Michael Marshall Smith and others, including Lovecraft’s seminal 26,000-word story itself.

In the way these things sometimes work out, most of the stories I found myself accepting were from British authors, and in the end I decided to limit the book’s contributors to those shores (after all, Lovecraft himself was an avowed Anglophile, so it seemed somewhat appropriate).

Then I started showing the manuscript to publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. Although many expressed their enjoyment of the book, not a single one made an offer to publish it. A year turned into two. H. P. Lovecraft’s centenary came and went without creating more than a ripple, and still I couldn’t find a publisher.

Finally, I gave up. Reluctantly, I explained the situation to the contributors (who were all very understanding) and released them from their contracts to sell their stories elsewhere. It didn’t come as much of a surprise that many of them found new markets almost immediately.

And that, I thought, was that. At least I had learned a hard lesson— never commission an anthology without first getting an agreement with a publisher.

Then, while I was attending the World Horror Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, I was approached on the final day of the event by Dwayne H. Olson, who had heard that I had a Lovecraftian anthology I could not sell and wanted to introduce me to Phil Rahman of Minneapolis small press publisher Fedogan & Bremer.

Just as August Derleth and Donald Wandrei had initially set up Arkham House to ensure that Lovecraft’s fiction remained in print between hardcovers following the author’s premature death in 1937, so F&B was founded to preserve Wandrei’s work, although it also quickly expanded into a publisher of “widowed” Arkham-style books as well. Shadows Over Innsmouth fitted their avowed objective almost perfectly. Phil was enthusiastic about the book, and a proposed deal was done before the evening was over.

The only problem was that I had already released all the contributors from their contracts. So, over the next couple of months, I contacted all the writers and got them to sell their stories back to me again.