“It was only on the suggestion of two fantasy fans that I showed them to August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Massachusetts and in general advised me in no uncertain terms how to improve the stories. I suspect he would have been gentler if he’d realised I was only fifteen years old.
“I was still in the process of adopting his suggestions when he asked me to send him a story for an anthology he was editing. Delighted beyond words, I sent him the rewritten ‘The Tomb-Herd’, which he accepted under certain conditions: that the title should be changed to ‘The Church in the High Street’ (though he later dropped the latter article) and that he should be able to edit the story as he saw fit. The story as published, there and here, therefore contains several passages that are Derleth’s paraphrases of what I wrote.
“Quite right too: as I think he realised, it was the most direct way to show me how to improve my writing, and selling the story was so encouraging that I completed my first book a little over a year later.”
DAVE CARSON was born in Northern Ireland in 1955. He first discovered the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft when he came across ‘The Lurking Fear’ in a 1960s issue of The Magazine of Horror. He was hooked for life and has since become one of the genre’s most acclaimed and respected illustrators of the author’s work. It was probably in the pages of that same digest magazine that he first saw the artwork of Virgil Finlay and his personal favourite, Lee Brown Coye.
It was not until 1978 that he began to take a more serious approach to his illustration work, developing his use of the pen and ink stipple technique. The following year he discovered The British Fantasy Society and soon he was being published in such magazines as Fantasy Tales, Whispers, Weirdbook, Nyctalops, Kadath, Fantasy Book, Ghosts and Scholars, Dark Horizons, Fear, Skeleton Crew, Interzone, Imagine, White Dwarf and many others.
The artist’s iconic 1979 poster ‘H.P. Lovecraft 1890-1937’ is still selling to this day and was even reproduced in Fortean Times and The Observer’s Review supplement to accompany a book review about Lovecraft.
Among the numerous books that Carson’s artwork has appeared in are: Tales Out of Innsmouth: New Stories of the Children of Dagon, Brian Lumley’s Ghoul Warning, Mad Moon of Dreams and The Clock of Dreams, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, the Dark Voices: The Pan Books of Horror series, The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana: A Guide to Lovecraftian Horror, the “Fighting Fantasy” role-playing book Beneath Nightmare Castle, Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos, Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, Digital Horror Painting Workshop and The Octopus Encyclopedia of Horror.
He also co-edited (with Stephen Jones) and illustrated H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, and his artwork was featured in the documentary film The Eldritch Influence: The Life, Vision and Phenomena of H.P Lovecraft.
Having redesigned and sculpted the statuette himself in the early 1980s, Dave Carson has received the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist on five occasions. When asked on a convention panel why he became an artist, he replied “I just like to draw monsters.” It shows.
ADRIAN COLE was born in 1949 in Devon, where he still lives. He is the author of twenty-five novels and numerous short stories, writing in several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, sword & sorcery and horror.
His first books were published in the 1970s—“The Dream Lords” trilogy—and he went on to write, among others, the “Omaran Saga” and the “Star Requiem” series, as well as writing two young adult novels, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants.
More recently, he has had several books published by Wildside Press, including the “Voidal” trilogy, which collects all the original short stories from the 1970s and ’80s and adds new material to complete the saga. The same imprint has also published the novel Night of the Heroes, an affectionate celebration of the world of pulp fiction, as well as Young Thongor, which Cole has edited and which includes the previously uncollected short “Thongor” stories of Lin Carter.
The author’s latest SF novel is The Shadow Academy from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, with an audio version available from Audible. His short stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and he has written and performed a number of parodies of the genres he loves at various conventions in the past.
“I discovered HPL when I was sixteen,” explains Cole, “working in my school holidays in a hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, for a summer season. In the many bookshops of Newquay I picked up The Lurking Fear and found therein the wonderful ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—its impact on me was instant and long-lasting. (I’ve spent years perfecting the Innsmouth squint.)
“The image of the New England town stayed in my mind, and when I moved to North Devon in 1976, I was stunned to find myself living a few miles from what I took to be the English equivalent of Innsmouth, namely Appledore. Now, don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t dream of insulting the good people of Appledore, even when they squint at me, but its atmosphere, its close-set houses, and its setting so close to the sea (estuary, to be accurate) readily call up the feel of Innsmouth. And at certain times of night, when the tide is right and the moon rises across the water... well. But it’s no problem for me. As I said, I live a couple of miles away.
“Bideford is nothing like Appledore—bigger quayside, steeper hills, narrower side roads, more houses, older... next door is the old charnel house. But none of this has influenced me. I only swim up and down to the estuary at night to be sociable. Doesn’t everyone?”
BASIL COPPER (1914-2013) was born in London, and for thirty years he worked as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time writer in 1970.
His first story in the horror field, ‘The Spider’, was published in 1964 in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, since when his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, been extensively adapted for radio, and collected in Not After Nightfall, Here Be Daemons, From Evil’s Pillow, And Afterward the Dark, Voices of Doom, When Footsteps Echo, Whispers in the Night, Cold Hand on My Shoulder and Knife in the Back.
One of the author’s most reprinted stories, ‘Camera Obscura,’ was adapted for a 1971 episode of the anthology television series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
Besides publishing two non-fiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his other books include the novels The Great White Space, The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis, House of the Wolf and The Black Death. He also wrote more than fifty hardboiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, and continued the adventures of August Derleth’s Holmes-like consulting detective Solar Pons in several volumes, including the novel Solar Pons versus The Devil’s Claw.