Best known for his spectacular dragons, depictions of Godzilla, and his artwork for Brian Lumley’s “Necroscope” series, the artist’s paintings of Cthulhu have been used, amongst other places, on the Arkham House anthology Cthulhu 2000, Best of Weird Tales, The House of Cthulhu and the premier issue of H. P Lovecraft’s Magazine.
A recipient of multiple Hugo and Chesley Awards for Best Artist, Eggleton has also worked on the conceptual design for a number of movies. An asteroid discovered in 1992 by Spacewatch at Kitt Peak has been named “13562 Bobeggleton” after the artist.
“H. P. Lovecraft has got to be the world’s greatest writer of ‘monsters’ in his terrific stories,” observes Eggleton. “His creatures are like no others in fiction, on the Earth or off it. I try to visualise them as real things, which drip with slime and shamble along. Things that, as Lovecraft himself would say, ‘Cause men to die with the screams still in their throats’.”
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JOHN STEPHEN GLASBY (1928-2011) graduated from Nottingham University with an honours degree in Chemistry. He started his career as a research chemist for ICI in 1952 and worked for them until his retirement.
Around the same time, he began a parallel career as an extraordinarily prolific writer of novels and short stories, producing more than 300 works in all genres over the next two decades, many under such shared house pseudonyms as “Rand Le Page”, “Berl Cameron”, “Victor La Salle” and “John E. Muller”. His most noted personal pseudonym was “A. J. Merak”. He subsequently published a new collection of ghost stories, The Substance of Shade, occult novel The Dark Destroyer, and the SF novel Mystery of the Crater.
More recently, Philip Harbottle compiled two collections of the Glasby’s supernatural fiction, The Lonely Shadows and The Dark Boatman, while the author’s son, Edmund Glasby, edited The Thing in the Mist: Selected by John S. Glasby, collecting eleven of the author’s stories from Badger Books’ digest horror magazine Supernatural Stories.
A long-time fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, in the early 1970s the author also submitted a collection of Cthulhu Mythos stories to August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth suggested extensive revisions and improvements, which Glasby duly followed, but the publisher unfortunately died before the revised book could see print, and the manuscript was returned.
In his later years, Glasby returned to writing more supernatural stories in the Lovecraftian vein, and ‘The Quest for Y’ha-Nthlei’—a direct sequel to Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—was written especially for this volume.
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CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, The Drowning Girclass="underline" A Memoir and The Red Tree, which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards.
Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores, To Charles Fort with Love, Alabaster, A is for Alien and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Subterranean Press has recently released a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One).
“‘From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6’ probably started taking shape in 1996,” recalls the author, “after David J. Schow sent me a beautiful reproduction of the Devonian-aged fossil hand shown in the opening scenes of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Dave has the most awesome collection of Creature memorabilia anywhere on earth, I suspect. I sat the model atop a bookshelf in my office, and from time to time I’d think about it’s plausibility as an actual fossil, about coming across it in some museum drawer somewhere, forgotten and dusty with an all but indecipherable label, and what implications to our ideas of vertebrate evolution such a fossil would have.
“And then, late in 2001, when I was doing research for my fourth novel, Low Red Moon, I began attempting to figure out where precisely Lovecraft had meant the town of Innsmouth to be located. I finally settled on Crane Beach and Ipswich Bay, west of Cape Ann. Anyway, the two things came together—the ‘fossil’ hand of the Creature, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—and I stopped working on the novel just long enough to write this story. I borrowed Dr. Solomon Monalisa from one of my earlier stories, ‘Onion’.”
“As for why I decided that Ipswich Bay was Lovecraft’s Innsmouth Harbour, here’s a quote from my online journal, from my entry for November 26, 2001:
Lovecraft indicates that the narrator’s bus, after leaving Newburyport, is travelling south-east, following the coast. HPL writes: “Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich.” This definitely indicates that the direction of travel is, in fact, south-east. A little father along, “At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left.” At this point the road on which the bus is travelling begins to climb to higher ground; at the crest of the rise, the passengers... beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head [another HPL invention] and veer off towards Cape Ann... but for a moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.” The narrator must, at this point, be looking to the east or south-east.
For me, the key is finding the Manuxet River. Of course, there really is no Manuxet River, per se—it’s yet another of HPL’s geographical fictions, but there are many rivers between Plum Island and Cape Ann, winding, swampy things that eventually empty into Plum Island Sound or Ipswich Bay. The river closest to Plum Island (and the bus doesn’t seem to travel very far from the point where the narrator loses sight of the island before reaching the crest of the hill from which Innsmouth is visible) is the Ipswich River. A little farther on, there’s the Castle Neck River. It’s the mouth of this river that I’m favouring at the moment as the location of Innsmouth, based on HPL’s statement that the Manuxet “...turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater’s end.” Now, as the sea lies to the north, most of the rivers along this part of the coast do not make southerly turns, but flow north and east to the Atlantic. Notably, the Castle Neck River does have a distinct south-east kink just as it enters the estuary at the north-west end of Ipswich Bay.
Of course, HPL obviously took considerable liberties with the local geography, and I suspect that he may have also shortened the distance between Cape Ann and Plum Island in his head, recalling some excursion or another and compressing or expanding distance as we all tend to do. So, blah, blah, blah, and in my story at least, Innsmouth Harbour is at the mouth of the Castle Neck River (i.e., the Manuxet).”