Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“What stuck with me from that collection was not only the inexorable stripping away of a mystery that ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ embodies, but also the tale of ‘The Outsider’. The images and sensations from this story have stayed with me in the subsequent thirty years—the dark, dank castle, the seemingly endless staircase going up, the awful sense of having lost one’s memories, the strangeness of mirrors, and, of course, the dreadful feeling of isolation and rejection that often comes with discovering a terrible truth—the broken, decaying baroque of it all. They are images and sensations that you find in much of Lovecraft’s work and, when I wrote ‘The Song of Sighs’, I looked back to my fifteen-year-old self and mined her memories—dug into the fear and surprise that Lovecraft’s stories brought, the delighted frisson of horror—and tried to recreate those influences while weaving them in with my own tale.

“As for ‘Rising, Not Dreaming’, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the editor of Innsmouth Free Press, asked me for a short Cthulhu story and the result was a kind of Orpheus tale that came out of a dream. It started with the idea of the kinds of things husbands do that disappoint wives and I wanted it to be something really big, not just simply a refusal to take out the garbage or mow the lawn.”

* * *

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 a string of international best-selling novels of suspense, including the Straw Men series, Killer Move, We Are Here and The Intruders, the latter adapted into an eight-part mini-series for television by BBC America.

Everything You Need was a recent collection of short stories from Earthling Publications, and forthcoming are a tenth anniversary edition of The Straw Men and his next novel.

“My wife and I have been dropping into Carmel once in a while for nearly twenty years,” Smith explains about the setting for his story ‘The Chain’. “Our first visit was on the vacation when we got engaged—back when there were no mobile phones and you couldn’t Google for restaurant or hotel advice—and we have always enjoyed the experience.

“It’s a lovely little place, of course, with an interesting history and a stunning cove and tons of nice shops and galleries and a unique mishmash of cottages from modernist to Storybook. There’s also a restaurant in town that serves the very best Reuben sandwich I’ve ever encountered (rest assured that I have not stinted in my research over the years, and so this is no idle statement).

“However, the town’s always struck me as… odd, and I know I’m not alone. It’s artificial at some very deep level, too perfect to be true, somehow both the logical extension but also the antithesis of what its arty founding fathers dreamed of. Since I came to live in Santa Cruz—only an hour’s drive north—this impression has been further complicated. I’ve heard from more than one source that any misfit or homeless person who happens to wander into Carmel is quietly encouraged (with the assistance of a bus ticket) to go live in my town instead.

“This alleged practice, like the atmosphere of the town itself, cannot but help make you wonder what lies beneath the surface… and for how long it’s been there.

“And, of course, what happens next.”

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SIMON KURT UNSWORTH was born in Manchester in 1972 on a night when, despite increasingly desperate research, he can find no evidence of mysterious signs or portents. He currently lives on a hill in the north of England awaiting the coming flood, where he writes essentially grumpy fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story), whilst being tall, grouchier than he should be, and owning a wide selection of garish shirts and a rather magnificent leather waistcoat. He has a cheerfully full beard and spends most of his life in need of a haircut.