“‘The Taint’ was originally published in a limited edition of Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth in time to launch the book at the World Fantasy Convention, Madison WI, in November 2005.”
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RICHARD A. LUPOFF was born in Brooklyn, New York, and for many years has lived in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Patricia. He spent a few years in the US Army in the late 1950s, never firing a shot in anger and never had one shot at him, neither of which he regrets. He has worked as both a print and broadcast journalist from his student days onward, and for fifty years has done a books-and-authors show on local radio station KPFA.
A novelist, short story writer, critic, screenwriter and anthologist, his many books include the novels One Million Centuries, Sandworld, Sword of the Demon, The Return of Skull-Face (with Robert E. Howard), Space War Blues, Circumpolar!, Lovecraft’s Book, Galaxy’s End, Night of the Living Gator and two Buck Rogers novelisations (under the byline “Addison E. Steele”). His short fiction has been collected in The Ova Hamlet Papers, Before... 12:01... and After, Claremont Tales, Claremont Tales II and Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix.
Lupoff’s non-fiction titles include Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision, Writer at Large and The Great American Paperback, and he has edited All in Color for a Dime and The Comic Book Book (both with Don Thompson) and two volumes of What If: Stories that Should have Won the Hugo.
In 1963, he and Pat Lupoff won the Hugo Award for their fanzine Xero, and a 2004 compilation The Best of Xero was nominated for another Hugo. He is also a winner of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Lifetime Achievement Award and the Left Coast Crime Lifetime Achievement Award for mystery fiction.
A short film based on his story ‘12:01 P.M.’ was an Academy Awards nominee in 1990 and was expanded into a feature three years later.
“I discovered H. P. Lovecraft when I was eleven years old,” recalls Lupoff, “living in a small town in New Jersey, and forced to attend church services every Sunday. I wish I’d had the courage to protest this forced religiosity openly - of course, it didn’t take - but I found other ways to maintain my independence.
“I made up my own, subversive versions of familiar hymns and sang them when called upon to participate. And I sneaked secular reading matter into church, hid it in my hymnal, and read happily while the preacher railed about Mortal Sin, the Day of Judgement, and the Fires of Hell.
“One week I stumbled across a little paperback anthology called The Avon Ghost Reader. As I remember, it had a deliciously lurid cover painting - a green, claw-like hand rising menacingly in the foreground, a spooky looking old mansion in the distance - and a marvellous selection of frightening stories, including ‘The Dunwich Horror’, by H. P. Lovecraft. At age eleven I had no understanding of the publishing industry and didn’t realise that this story was a reprint and that its author had been dead for nearly twenty years.
“What I did understand was that I’d stumbled across an author of unusual merit. I vowed to watch for his byline. My next reward was a copy of another little paperback, Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth, and I was totally hooked. I’ve been a Lovecraft fan for most of my life, and I am delighted to see the Old Gentleman finally getting his due. I’m equally gratified to have made my own small contribution to the traditions of his work.”
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PAUL McAULEY was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire. A former research biologist at Oxford University and UCLA, and a former lecturer at St. Andrews University, he became a full-time writer in 1996. McAuley sold a story to the SF digest If when he was just nineteen, but the magazine folded before it could appear, and his first published story appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1984.
With his debut novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), he became the first British writer to win the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and he established his reputation as one of the best young science fiction writers in the field by winning the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1995.
His other novels include Secret Harmonies (aka Of the Fall), Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale’s’ Angel (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Long Form Alternate History fiction), the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Fairyland, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, Shrine of Stars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun and In the Mouth of the Whale. The author’s short fiction is collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country and Little Machines, while his story ‘The Temptation of Dr. Stein’ was awarded the 1995 British Fantasy Award.
“I lived in the city of Bristol, hard by the Avon river and the Severn estuary in the west of England, for seven years. It was the first place I lived after moving away from home, I studied for both my undergraduate degree and Ph.D at the university, and I had my first job there. So it was definitely an influence on my life, but like the best spring water, it has spent a long time percolating through the strata of my subconscious before becoming the source of a story.
“Not only is Bristol a port city whose port has more or less silted up, but ordinarily it rains there every other day. What better setting for a Lovecraftian homage?
“I sat my final examinations for my B.Sc (a joint degree in Botany and Zoology, if anyone is interested) during the summer of 1976, when ‘Take Me to the River’ is set, which really was as hot and as dry as any disaster imagined by J. G. Ballard. The drought mentioned in the story was real enough - reservoirs and lakes dried up, grass and trees turned brown, crops wilted, people were encouraged to ration water by sharing baths, and the sun burned every day in a pitiless sky that was either hard blue or headachy white. It ended when the government appointed a ‘Minister of Drought, which worked a lot better than any rain dance or cloud seeding, but for a little while it really did seem that the world might end, or that strange, marvellous or fearsome creatures might hatch from the drying mud and foetid rivers.”
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KIM NEWMAN is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man from the Diogenes Club, all under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil”.
His non-fiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.