His short fiction is collected in a number of volumes, including Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution, Complications and Other Stories, Designer Genes and Other Stories, Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies, Sheena & Other Gothic Tales, The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution, The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions, The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution, An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales & Contes Cruels, The Gardens of Tantalus and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels, amongst many titles.
A prolific writer about the history of imaginative fiction, he was a leading contributor to the award-winning The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, and contributed a number of articles to Clute and John Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. He has also published numerous non-fiction books, several anthologies and volumes of translations relating to the French and English Decadent movements of the late 19th century.
In 1999, Stableford was awarded the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF scholarship. This completed his set of the four major awards in the field, the others being the J. Lloyd Eaton Award (1987), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1987) and the SFRA’s Pioneer Award (1996).
DAVID A. SUTTON was born and lives in Birmingham, England. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, The International Horror Guild Award and twelve British Fantasy Awards for editing magazines and anthologies.
As an editor, his first professional anthologies were New Writings in Horror & Supernatural (originally published in two volumes and recently reissued as an omnibus entitled Horror! Under the Tombstone) and The Satyr’s Head & Other Tales of Terror. With Stephen Jones he went on to co-edit the Fantasy Tales, Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror and Dark Terrors: The Gollancz Book of Horror series while, more recently, he has edited the anthologies Phantoms of Venice and Houses on the Borderland.
Sutton has been a genre fiction writer since the 1960s. Some early stories appeared in World of Horror, Dark Horizons and Cthulhu, while respected anthology editor Hugh Lamb selected stories for two anthologies in the 1970s, The Taste of Fear and Cold Fear. Since then his fiction has been published in such magazines and anthologies as More Ghosts & Scholars, Kadath, Gothic, Skeleton Crew, The New Lovecraft Circle, Final Shadows, The Merlin Chronicles, The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men, When Graveyards Yawn, Dark Reign, Dead Ends, Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream, The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows and The Black Book of Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series.
The Fisherman was a chapbook from Gary William Crawford’s Gothic Press, while his debut short story collection, Clinically Dead & Other Tales of the Supernatural, was published in 2009 by Screaming Dreams. The author’s own imprint, Shadow Publishing, has recently produced such books as The Female of the Species & Other Terror Tales by Richard Davis, Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types by Johnny Mains, and The Whispering Horror by Eddy C. Bertin.
“When the editor told me he was putting together an anthology based around a single H.P. Lovecraft story,” recalls Sutton, “I immediately thought it might be ‘The Colour Out of Space’, or ‘The Dunwich Horror’, or ‘The Shunned House’. The story he chose is one of the author’s major yarns, but I wouldn’t have pegged it as the focus for the present book.
“However, re-reading ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ after quite a number of years, its stature for me has grown. It is a deeply disturbing story, full of ideas from which to draw another tale. Lovecraft’s blending of the Federal raid on Devil Reef, the weird religious Dagon sect, the attention to historical detail, the resonance of the Cthulhu Mythos and the grim half-humans and Deep Ones, all make this a wonderfully creepy story.”
“PETER TREMAYNE” is the pseudonym of acclaimed Celtic scholar and historian Peter Berresford Ellis. Born in Coventry, England, of Irish descent on his father’s side, he travelled widely in Ireland, studying its history, politics, language and mythology.
As “Tremayne” he made his début with the short horror novel Hound of Frankenstein in 1977, since when he has published such books as The Vengeance of She, Dracula Unborn (aka Bloodright), The Revenge of Dracula, The Ants, The Curse of Loch Ness, The Fires of Lan-Kern, Dracula My Love, Zombie!, The Morgow Rises!, The Destroyers of Lan-Kern, Snowbeast, The Buccaneers of Lan-Kern, Raven of Destiny, Kiss of the Cobra, Swamp!, Angelus!, Nicor!, Trollnight, Ravenmoon (aka Bloodmist) and Island of Shadows.
In 1994 he published Absolution of Murder, the first of his international best-selling murder mystery novels about 7th century Irish advocate Sister Fidelma, who uses the ancient Brehon Law system. There are now twenty-four titles in the series, including the collection Whispers of the Dead.
Tremayne has edited Masters of Terror: William Hope Hodgson and Irish Masters of Fantasy, his short stories are collected in My Lady of Hy-Brasil and Other Stories, Aisling and Other Irish Tales of Terror and An Ensuing Evil and Others: Fourteen Historical Mysteries, and he collaborated with Peter Haining on the 1997 non-fiction study The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula.
He has also written biographies of authors H. Rider Haggard, W.E. Johns and Talbot Mundy, and from 1983-93 he published eight adventure thrillers under another pseudonym, “Peter MacAlan.”
“The Irish language contains Europe’s third oldest literature with a mythology second to none,” explains the author. “While H.P. Lovecraft (in his seminal essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’) tended to dismiss Irish horror tales as ‘more whimsically fantastic than terrible’, he had to rely for his judgment on translators of Irish folklore such as Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, etc. who were not primarily concerned with the cosmic horror of the weird tale.
“Lovecraft made the mistake of thinking of Irish writers of the true weird, such as Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Fitzjames O’Brien and Bram Stoker, as ‘British’ and not Irish. In Irish myth there appear the ancient gods of evil known as the Fomorii (Dwellers under the Sea) and an ancient synonym for these beings is Daoine Domhain— the Deep Ones. Could the terrible clashes between the Irish deities of Light and Darkness have been carried to the New World by Irish immigrants to be picked up as Lovecraft’s tales of the Deep Ones?