Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“The story goes that, during the Napoleonic Wars, a ship sank off the coast of the Northern fishing town. The sole survivor was a monkey dressed in a miniature sailor’s uniform. The locals, having never seen a Frenchman, took the monkey for a spy, tried the unfortunate creature and hanged it, prompting citizens of rival towns to taunt Hartlepool natives to this day with a jeer of ‘Who hung the monkey?’”

Kim Newman contributed two stories—‘A Quarter to Three’ and ‘The Big Fish’ (under his “Jack Yeovil” byline)—to Shadows Over Innsmouth and, as the author admits, “I thought I wouldn’t write yet another fish story when I finished ‘Another Fish Story’ for the second ‘Innsmouth’ anthology, but then this popped out.”

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REGGIE OLIVER has been a professional playwright, actor and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorised biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and several collections of stories of supernatural terror, including Mrs Midnight, which won the Children of the Night Award for Best Work of Supernatural Fiction in 2011.

More recently, Tartarus has reissued his first and second collections, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, with illustrations by the author, along with a new collection entitled Flowers of the Sea. His novel The Dracula Papers I – The Scholar’s Tale is the first of a projected four, and an omnibus edition of the author’s stories, entitled Dramas from the Depths, is published by Centipede as part of the “Masters of the Weird Tale” series.

The Boke of the Divill is a new novella from Dark Renaissance; it is set in the cathedral town of Morchester, which has been the setting for a number of his stories (including ‘Quieta Non Movere’, which appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 23). It is also the setting of ‘The Archbishop’s Well’.

“Lovecraft’s weird mythology has been a source of fascination and inspiration to me for a long time,” admits the author. “His sense of ‘the other’ is so unique and yet so resonant to the contemporary mind. (No wonder Michel Houellebecq, the brilliant enfant terrible of modern French intellectualism, wrote a book about him!)

“Never having been to the United States, I wanted somehow to bring Lovecraft’s Innsmouth mythology (albeit with variations) to England, and so it came to the seemingly quiet West Country cathedral town of Morchester. All good weird fiction is about the collision of two worlds. In this story Lovecraft comes to the world of M. R. James (with a dash of P. G. Wodehouse thrown in).

“I like to think Lovecraft would have approved; I’m not so sure about James though.”

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ANGELA SLATTER is an Australian writer of dark fantasy and horror. She is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award short-listed Sourdough and Other Stories, and the collection/mosaic novel Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett). More recent publications include the collections The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels and (again in collaboration with Hannett) The Female Factory.

She has an MA and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, and is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award (for her story ‘The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter’ in A Book of Horrors). Her work has also appeared in Australian, British and American “Best of” anthologies, along with Fantasy Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Dreaming Again, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome and Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame.

“My first introduction to Lovecraft was an old reprint collection of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories,” reveals the author. “I was about fifteen and found it (as I found many of my books then) in the book bin at the local supermarket where I worked as a checkout chick on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings.