Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

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.

Shadows Over Innsmouth was finally published in 1994 in a beautifully illustrated hardcover edition. It was launched with a fish-themed signing party at the World Fantasy Convention in New Orleans and became the first book from Fedogan & Bremer to sell out and be reprinted. There was an attractive trade paperback edition from Gollancz in Britain, a cute two-volume set published in Japan, and (after rejecting it all those years earlier) Del Rey eventually added it to their handsome series of Lovecraftian paperbacks in America. More recently there has been a stylish Greek edition, and we’ve also sold rights to Russia and Germany. Now that first book (along with this follow-up volume) has been reissued by Titan Books as part of the publisher’s prestigious series of Lovecraft paperbacks. The reviews have been mostly positive, and the original edition was even nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

Not bad for an anthology I couldn’t even sell initially.

The thing was, though, it wasn’t a Lovecraft anthology. Well, not in inspiration, at least. With Shadows Over Innsmouth, I was trying to emulate one of the most talented, hard-working and perceptive editors in the weird fiction field—August W. Derleth (1909-1971).

As much as I admired Lovecraft’s cosmic themes and eldritch horrors, it was actually the pulp thrills of Derleth’s pastiche collection The Mask of Cthulhu, his novel The Trail of Cthulhu and, especially, the anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos that I was attempting to recapture. Lovecraft himself had occasionally encouraged other writers to develop themes from his stories in their own work, and I attempted the same with a fictional history of Innsmouth.

And so the years passed, and I began wondering... if Shadows Over Innsmouth had used Lovecraft’s 1920s-set story for its inspiration, what would happen if we moved on a step further? The answer can now be found in Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, where several of the contributors to the original volume, along with a number of additional authors from both sides of the Atlantic, put their own spin on the dark history of Innsmouth and its batrachian followers of Dagon.

Using an early, discarded draft of Lovecraft’s story as a point of departure, once again as the decades pass, the fishy Deep Ones spread out from the east coast of the United States to cast their scaled shadows across the rest of the world in unusual and often unexpected ways.

And in case you were wondering, yes, this book had it’s own set of problems, although nothing like those that assailed the earlier title. But if you are a Mythos fan who has enjoyed both of these volumes, then rest assured that I am already thinking about those Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth...

Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!

Stephen Jones

London, England