Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

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.

Lovecraft was not adverse to testing early drafts his latest story out on friends and colleagues, as this extract from a letter written to fellow Weird Tales author Clark Ashton Smith and dated February 18, 1932, illustrates:

Glad to hear you liked ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and thanks tremendously for the suggestions concerning possible alteration. Your central idea of increasing emphasis on the narrator’s taint runs parallel with D’Erlett’s [August Derleth] main suggestion, and I shall certainly adopt it in any basic recasting I may give the tale. The notion of having the narrator captured is surely a vivid one containing vast possibilities—and if I don’t use it, it will be only because my original conception (like most of my dream-ideas) centred so largely in the physical detachment of the narrator.

As Lovecraft’s seminal story, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth, kicked off Shadows Over Innsmouth, it is his surviving discarded draft of the tale that is featured in this volume. According to Lovecraft biographer and scholar S. T. Joshi, this “may be his second or even third attempt at the story, since he announces in several letters that he is using the plot as ‘laboratory experimentation’ by writing it out successively in different styles”. The compressed and incomplete version of the story that appears in this book only survived because it was found on the reverse of pages containing the final draft.

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RIAN 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.