Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

The artist has long been an admirer of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. His works have taken him to picturesque Innsmouth on more than one occasion, about which he has this to say: “The people of Innsmouth have been most kind to me over the years and I’ve enjoyed using them as models, although—and Lovecraft knew this—the ‘Innsmouth look’ as he referred to it, can be a bit hard to nail down on paper. There is, quite frankly, a tendency to over-exaggerate, which I’d like to believe I’ve avoided with my work this time around. I only hope they are as pleased with the results as I am.

“Whether embraced by the Innsmouth folk or not,” he adds, “these illustrations are dedicated to my late brother Jay—a small token for showing me the way not only to Innsmouth, but other fantastic locales as well.”

Broecker was also one of the contributing artists to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, and this new edition of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth features additional illustrations that were not included in the Fedogan & Bremer hardcover.

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RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, where he still lives with his wife Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964, since when his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Bad Thoughts, Think Yourself Lucky and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane.

His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).

PS Publishing recently published the novellas The Pretence and The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, which attempts to reconceive some of the author’s early Lovecraftian ideas and develop them, along with the definitive edition of that early Arkham collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Also available from the same publisher is a volume of all the Campbell–Derleth correspondence, edited by S. T. Joshi.

Now well into his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is also President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

“I started imitating Lovecraft more than fifty years ago,” reveals Campbell. “Soon I learned to subsume his example—his careful sense of structure, his ambition to reach for awe—and mostly did without his Mythos, which in any case was largely constructed by later writers, too often to the detriment of what he was trying to achieve. He meant his inventions to suggest more than they made explicit, but the rest of us filled in so many gaps that the whole thing became as over-explained as the Victorian occultism he wanted to leave behind. Over the decades I’ve tried to reclaim some of his original vision, not least in my novel The Darkest Part of the Woods, which took The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a model of how to do without his Mythos. I hope ‘The Winner’ also gives some sense of his vision without needing explicit references.