More recently, PS Publishing has produced the non-fiction study Basil Copper: A Life in Books, and a massive two-volume set of Darkness, Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper. A restored version of Copper’s 1976 novel The Curse of the Fleers appeared from the same imprint in 2012.
With ‘Beyond the Reef’, the author explained, he “...wanted the atmosphere to be of a ‘faded 1920s variety’ as in HPL’s original tales, but without being too much of a pastiche or derivative in any way.”
NEIL GAIMAN is only mentioned in passing in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in the Lovecraft-Derleth story ‘The Survivor’, in which it is revealed that the mysterious Dr. Charriere has a recognisable drawing of Gaiman on his wall, along with certain cabalistic charts, and pictures of large reptiles.
He has, however, a bust of Lovecraft on his windowsill (the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story), and lives in a remarkably Lovecraftian house, somewhere a long way from the sea.
Gaiman is the most critically acclaimed British graphic novel writer of his generation. He co-wrote the best-selling novel Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), is the author of Neverwhere and American Gods, and became the first person ever to win the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal for the same children’s novel, The Graveyard Book, which spent more than fifty-two consecutive weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The book has also won the Hugo Award, the Booktrust Award and many others.
During the past few years, Gaiman has co-scripted (with Roger Avary) Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture fantasy film Beowulf, while Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust and Henry Selick’s Coraline were both based on his novels. He wrote and directed Statuesque, a short film starring Bill Nighy and his wife, singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer, and he has also just written his second episode of Doctor Who for the BBC.
The story in this volume is dedicated to the late Fritz Leiber.
DAVID LANGFORD was born in Newport, Wales, in 1953, and some eleven years later discovered that he could borrow all H.P. Lovecraft’s books from the library if he assured his mother they were “nice detective stories.”
One vivid memory, of eating porridge while reading of his first Shoggoth, is best not shared.
He has since become a freelance writer, editor and critic, dividing his creative endeavours between books and science fiction fandom (winning the Hugo Award multiple times). His novels include The Leaky Establishment, The Space Eater and The Wilderness of Mirrors, along with Earthdoom! and Guts! (both co-written with John Grant), while a collection of short pastiches appeared under the title He Do the Time Police in Different Voices.
Langford helped produce the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and contributed around 80,000 words of articles to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. He is also one of the three chief editors of the third, online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The End of Harry Potter? was an unauthorised companion to the best-selling series by J.K. Rowling.
He continues to edit and publish his free monthly newsletter, Ansible, and has never really regained the taste for porridge.
D.F. LEWIS had two of his stories rejected in 1968 by August Derleth for being “pretty much pure grue,” since when he has had more than 1,500 tales published in small press magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Described variously as “the Lovecraft of this era” and “either a genius graced with madness (or) a madman cursed with genius,” he cites H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Robert Aickman and Philip K. Dick amongst his disparate literary influences.
As an editor, he has produced ten volumes of the Nemonymous “megazanthus” anthology series, along with The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies.
In 1998 the author was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s special Karl Edward Wagner Award.
HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) is one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors of supernatural fiction.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he lived most of his life there as a studious antiquarian who wrote mostly with no care for commercial reward. During his lifetime, the majority of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry and essays appeared in obscure amateur press journals or in the pages of the struggling pulp magazine Weird Tales.
Following the author’s untimely death, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded the publishing imprint of Arkham House in 1939 with the initial idea of keeping all Lovecraft’s work in print. Beginning with The Outsider and Others, his stories were collected in such hardcover volumes as Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Marginalia, Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Dreams and Fancies, The Dunwich Horror and Others, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, 3 Tales of Horror and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, along with several volumes of “posthumous collaborations” with Derleth, including The Lurker at the Threshold, The Survivor and Others and The Watchers Out of Time and Others.
During the decades since his death, Lovecraft has been acknowledged as a mainstream American writer second only to Edgar Allan Poe, while his relatively small body of work has influenced countless imitators and formed the basis of a world-wide industry of books, role-playing games, graphic novels, toys and movies based on his concepts.
BRIAN LUMLEY started his writing career by emulating the work of H.P. Lovecraft and has ended up with his own, highly enthusiastic, fan following for his world-wide best-selling series of ‘Necroscope’ vampire books.
Born in the coal-mining town of Horden, County Durham, on England’s north-east coast, Lumley joined the British Army when he was twenty-one and served in the Corps of Royal Military Police for twenty-two years, until his retirement in December 1980.
After discovering Lovecraft’s stories while stationed in Berlin in the early 1960s, he decided to try his own hand at writing horror fiction, initially based around the influential Cthulhu Mythos. He sent his early efforts to editor August Derleth, and Arkham House published two collections of the author’s stories, The Caller of the Black and The Horror at Oakdene and Others, along with the short novel, Beneath the Moors.
Lumley then continued Lovecraft’s themes in such novels and collections as The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow, The Clock of Dreams, Spawn of the Winds, In the Moons of Borea, The Compleat Crow, Hero of Dreams, Ship of Dreams, Mad Moon of Dreams, Iced on Iran and Other Dreamquests, The House of Cthulhu and Other Tales of the Primal Land, Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (which includes the British Fantasy Award-winning title story), Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales and Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords. The author’s most recent book is a new collection of non-Lovecraftian horror stories, No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories, from Subterranean Press, and he has also completed a new ‘Necroscope’ novella for the same publisher.