Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Following Lovecraft’s untimely death, Derleth developed various fragments and outlines (reputedly) discovered amongst the author’s posthumous papers into Cthulhu Mythos-inspired pastiches, which can be found in such novels and collections as The Lurker at the Threshold, The Survivor and Others, The Mask of Cthulhu, The Trail of Cthulhu and The Watchers Out of Time and Others.

In 1962, he set out his own vision of the Mythos: “The deities of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos consisted first of the Elder Gods, which, though beyond mundane morality, beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil’, were nevertheless proponents of order and thus represented the forces of enlightenment as against the forces of evil, represented by the Ancient Ones or the Great Old Ones, who rebelled against the Elder Gods, and were thrust—like Satan—into outer darkness.”

‘Innsmouth Clay’ is a “posthumous pastiche” which first appeared in the 1971 anthology Dark Things under only Lovecraft’s byline. When reprinted three years later in The Watchers Out of Time, it was properly identified as a collaborative effort between the two authors.

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JOHN STEPHEN GLASBY (1928–2011) graduated from Nottingham University with a honours degree in Chemistry. He started his career as a research chemist for ICI in 1952 and worked for them until his retirement.

Around the same time, he began a parallel career as an extraordinarily prolific writer of novels and short stories, producing more than 300 works in all genres over the next two decades, many under such shared house pseudonyms as “Rand Le Page”, “Berl Cameron”, “Victor La Salle” and “John E. Muller”. His most noted personal pseudonym was “A. J. Merak”. He subsequently published a new collection of ghost stories, The Substance of Shade, the occult novel The Dark Destroyer, and the SF novel Mystery of the Crater.

More recently, Philip Harbottle compiled two collections of Glasby’s supernatural fiction, The Lonely Shadows and The Dark Boatman, while the author’s son, Edmund Glasby, edited The Thing in the Mist: Selected by John S. Glasby, collecting eleven of the author’s stories from Badger Books’ digest horror magazine Supernatural Stories.

Ramble House will publish a further collection of fiction selected from that magazine, along with a new volume of Glasby’s Mythos stories, Dwellers in Darkness and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Meanwhile, the author’s most ambitious Lovecraftian work, Dark Armageddon—a trilogy of novels that unify the “Cthulhu Mythos” and bring it to a climactic conclusion—is set to appear from Centipede Press.

A long-time fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, in the early 1970s the author also submitted a collection of Mythos stories to August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth suggested extensive revisions and improvements, which Glasby duly followed, but the publisher unfortunately died before the revised book could see print, and the manuscript was returned.

In his later years, Glasby returned to writing more supernatural stories in the Lovecraftian vein. ‘The Quest for Y’ha-Nthlei’—a direct sequel to Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—was written especially for Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, as was ‘Innsmouth Bane’, which first appeared in the short-lived H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, before finally being anthologised in this volume.

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BRIAN HODGE is the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical. He’s also written over 100 short stories, novelettes and novellas, plus five full-length collections.

Recent works include No Law Left Unbroken, a collection of crime fiction; The Weight of the Dead and Whom the Gods Would Destroy, both stand-alone novellas; a newly revised hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his latest novel, Leaves of Sherwood.

He lives in Colorado, where more of everything is in the works. He also dabbles in music, sound design and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga, grappling, and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.

As the author explains: “As many times as I’ve read ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, it never occurred to me, until I read it looking for ideas, that neither H. P. Lovecraft nor anyone in the prior “Innsmouth” anthologies had accounted for the prisoners taken during the 1928 raids on the town.