BEHOLD: DREAMSCAPES INTO DARKNESS

According to the original note card upon which the story idea was jotted, I dreamed up "One More" in 1992 -- not long after sending my first stories out into the publishing universe.  To quote, "I'm at the ocean-side home of an austere man with silver hair..."  It wasn't until the summer of Y2K that I penned the actual first draft, which went into my archive of completed manuscripts.  For years, that dream haunted me, in which I found myself homeless and living on meager pickings from trashcans along a stretch of rainy beach.  My dream-character then found further horror in the ocean-side house of said silver-haired man, who had constructed a bizarre version of a roller coaster inside his lair.

When the fine folks at Firbolg Publishing put forth an open call for Dreamscapes into Darkness, an anthology that came with a warning to be careful for what you wish for, I cycled back to that story, and the main character -- a hungry, homeless boy desperate for his next meal.  The hunt for sustenance leads him past the trashcans and promise of returnables, to a house among the dunes he's been warned to avoid.  I dusted off that first draft manuscript, fired it off to Firbolg's leading lady, Doctor Alex Scully, for review, and was thrilled to receive an acceptance to the fine anthology, which also contains reprints by the likes of such literary superstars as Mary Shelley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.P. Lovecraft.  "One More" is, in fact, nestled beside a reprint of "The Rocking Horse Winner" by none other than the brilliant D.H. Lawrence.

Several of my talented contemporaries in the table of contents were kind enough to share the back stories behind their stories in Dreamscapes into Darkness.

Patrick Lacey on "That Other Place": "I wish I could tell you a mind-blowing, earth-crashing story about where I got the idea for my Dreamscapes piece, but, like many of my other story ideas, this one came out of the ether. I was walking past a tree one day and imagined, for no reason I could pinpoint, that there was a window embedded in the wood. Not a decoration or a piece of junk but an actual window. It was stupid, I thought. You couldn’t make something so random into something scary. But the idea stayed with me. I’d already written about everyday objects/occurrences that become evil (see: video games, a dumpster, a cuckoo clock, and even junk mail), so why not this? I got thinking about what I’d do if I could see through the window, about what would be on the other side. Would it be a world similar to ours or entirely foreign? And if something lived in said world, would it be friendly? I assumed not if I was writing about it. Combine all this with my fascination with alternate dimensions and you have the boring but lucrative story behind ‘That Other Place.’"

Roxanne Dent on "Heart of Stone": "Initially, I received the idea as a writing prompt from a Sunday writers' group soiree. The word was ‘Stone.’ But the story itself developed after I attached the two words, ‘Heart of.’  I thought about the romantic relationships I’d had when I was young. I was often attracted to ‘Bad Boys,’ or those who had issues and couldn’t or wouldn’t commit. I was left in the dust, hurt and depressed.  It finally occurred to me I wanted to be the one who healed them of their pain and live happily ever after. It was unrealistic, arrogant and doomed to failure. The idea of creating a character with those exaggerated traits falling in love with the epitome of evil, unconscious of her motivation, caught my imagination.  Setting the tale in a church like the one mentioned in The Da Vinci Code, with the statue of a demon coming alive, came to me when I woke up one morning. It also tied in to my love of history and the supernatural.

K. Trap Jones on "The Weathermaker": "The inspiration came from a question lingering within my mind, ‘What if controlling the weathering elements were a job?’ The task has to be stressful with the way the atmosphere functions and the different environments requiring unique weathering patterns. The character of the Weathermaker needed to be unstable and I wrote the tone for him built around an elderly philosopher with severe anger issues. I imagined him being alone within a remote cabin and constantly having to monitor weathering patterns in order to avoid catastrophes. One slip could cause a typhoon or hurricane; one spike of anger could spark horrendous tornadoes. Although he is not a violent man, I wanted to create a personality built on frustration and resentment for the task he is burdened with and the lack of respect he feels civilization grants the weather. The combination of anger and resentment towards people surfaces when the Weathermaker has to sometimes deal with the occasional rogue death hiccup in the system.  When an adrenaline junkie crosses the threshold of purgatory and washes upon the shores of the Weathermaker’s land, he must not only deal with the anger of the old man, but also the reality that he alone has to continue upon the path of death in order to continue towards the afterlife."

(Promotional artwork for "One More")

Rob Smales on "First Horse": "When I write, I either write a flash fiction (something extremely short), or I run a bit long -- and these days, my tendency is toward the long. Sometimes…okay, often, I have trouble coming in under the maximum word count publishers are looking for. When the idea for First Horse occurred to me, I realized I would need an explanation of spirit guides, for readers who were unfamiliar with the concept. I did some research (the internet being a wonderful thing), and came up with plenty of Native American legends that mentioned spirit guides, but none that explained them, or gave their origins. So I wrote one. I enjoyed writing the tale that opens the story, the legend of Warrior and Dog, that Grandfather Whitefeather tells to Jimmy Tsosi. I’ve read Native American myths, and was trying to mimic the voice you hear in them -- a voice distinctly not my own. It was fun. But there was a problem: by the time I was done, I’d taken up over a quarter of the word allotment given by Firbolg Publishing, and I hadn’t even started the story I wanted to tell. *sigh* I picked up my editing pen…

B. E. Scully on "The Son Who Shattered His Father's Dream": "Parents always want the best for their children. But what if ‘the best’ ends up being the absolute worst thing any parent could imagine?  My short story “The Son Who Shattered His Father’s Dream” was inspired by an article in The New Yorker magazine titled ‘The Empire of Edge,’ by Patrick Radden Keefe. It chronicled the rise and fall of a young trader who got caught participating in a huge financial scandal, and focused especially on the trader’s childhood -- both the unconditional support and the crushing expectations of the man’s formative years. In fact, I took the title of my story and the anecdote behind it directly from an actual incident in this family’s life. The story was fascinating and, even though the trader certainly did have his fall coming, it was heartbreaking, too, particularly for his family. It got me thinking about the tricky territory parents navigate between pushing their children and perhaps pushing them too hard and way too far -- sometimes even straight off of a cliff. So I took all of this and turned it into my own more dark, much more sinister tale."

(The note card for "One More")

Nancy Hayden on "No Man's Land": "A few years ago, my husband and I visited the Western Front in France. I was interested in the Argonne Forest as this was where millions of U.S. soldiers fought at the end of the war, including my great uncle. Thousands were killed. We walked along a logging road in the re-grown Argonne Forest, past partially filled in shell holes, and found an old WWI trench that cut back into the woods. We decided to explore the trench. We hadn’t gone very far when my husband became uneasy. That wasn’t like him. A little further along, he said he had to get out of there, and before waiting for me to answer, he hurried back the way we’d come. When we were back on the logging road, he confessed to feeling anxious, like something was pulling him down, each step harder than the last. I don’t know what it was, but something was going on in that trench. And that’s where my story begins -- a husband and wife exploring France’s abandoned WWI trenches. Only for them, it wasn’t as easy to get out."

Kurt Fawver on "An Interview With Samuel X. Slayden": "If you've read my story, you'll know that it involves the torture (or perhaps terrible enlightenment?) of a group of writers who are well-known and well-regarded in the world of the story. However, when I initially wrote the tale, I used caricatures of authors from ‘real life’ as the bases for my fictional authors. As I edited, I decided that approach was too fraught with problems to be sustainable. One, I didn't want to represent any real author negatively for fear of offending and two, I didn't feel I ‘knew’ the famous authors I was using in any personal sense, so that the caricatures were too thin, too one-dimensional. So, I took my authors back to the drawing board and rewrote them all. I think the result was better, more realistic characters that had no cognate in reality. That said, even in rewriting, I did leave a few ‘trademark’ qualities stuck to several of my ill-fated authors. So it might be an interesting exercise for a reader to try to figure out what ‘real’ author was originally the foundation for each of my tormented scribes."

Joe Powers on "Lead Us Not Into Temptation": " This story, about a reformed child predator who finds himself back on the hunt, was based on a random guy I saw in the bank parking lot one morning. Something about the way he looked and carried himself made me wonder what he was up to, and I created this monster in my head based on that quick observation. I’d started dating someone new around the time I completed the first draft. She’d been very enthusiastic and supportive of the stuff I’d shown her to that point. Horror writers are a strange lot that are, at best, often viewed with wary skepticism, but she didn’t seem fazed by my chosen genre. Without really thinking it all the way through I sent a copy of the draft to her and eagerly awaited her adulation. It occurred to me not long after this might not be the best way to impress the mother of a young daughter. Luckily for me this wonderful woman -- now my fiancée -- drew no conclusions about my character from my questionable subject matter. We laugh about it now, but looking back it could have gone south in a hurry."    

The End is the Beginning!

Most dreams play out over a matter of seconds. Some nightmares last far longer. So was the case with one I experienced twenty years ago, in which I found myself trapped with other survivors in a house hidden among tall Douglas firs, located somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. We moved around the house quietly, ever mindful of an unidentified danger lurking outside the walls of our fortress and prison. It rained nonstop throughout the nightmare; it was always night beyond the windows.  I only caught glimpses of the faceless horrors lurking on the other side of the door, which was even more effective -- my imagination has always responded to instances when what you don't see is more terrifying than what you do. Before dream's end, the situation inside the house degenerated to a level as dangerous as the one outside, and there was something else I remember quite clearly: the trees, and the rich smell of the needles and pitch.  It burned in my nostrils.

The dream quickly got recorded on a note card and went into my catalog of ideas, but was not so quickly written.  Not until 2010, when the longhand manuscript was dashed off in a matter of days and then went into my file cabinet, part of the 'inventory' I keep of completed first draft manuscripts.  Out it again came in December of 2013, and off it went to Firbolg Publishing's latest anthology call, Enter at Your Own Risk: The End is the Beginning, a collection of environmental-themed horror fiction edited and compiled by the brilliant Dr. Alex Scully. I'd already appeared in their amazing previous release with my story told from the perspective of H.P. Lovecraft's ultimate big bad, C'Thulhu, Dark Muses, Spoken Silences -- and which featured reprints by Poe, Polidori, Lovecraft, and Washington Irving, along with a lineup of some of my favorite contemporaries.  And I was beyond thrilled to learn that my tale, "Every Seven Years, Give or Take", would be part of this important book.  As with the previous release, End features reprints by such notables as Mary Shelley, Lovecraft, M. R. James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mr. Poe, my favorite writer of all time.  And again I share an incredible Table of Contents with many of today's most talented scribes, many of whom shared the back stories behind their stories.

Eric J. Guignard on "She Will Rise Again":  "As a lover of fairy tales and Greek mythology, I delight in the fantasy concepts of invisible gods and elements surrounding us, spirits residing in trees and flowers, animals, and even inanimate objects. Mother Nature, in particular, is a wonderful personification of the life-giving and nurturing aspects of the world we live in. I wanted to explore the idea that if she were a real being, what would be the circumstances or effects of her existence as one of substance but who is hidden from civilization. After a few failed envisionings, she ended up with a C'Thulhu-esque element, as one who slumbers while the planet turns, rising only with sacrifice and when she is needed."

B. E. Scully on "Nothing But Skin and Bones":  "I was living in the eye of the urban hurricane known as Los Angeles when life picked me up and threw me into the whirlwind. When I landed, I was in hill country, West Virginia. Mountaintop removal had been going on for years by then, and right in the middle of lush, blue-green mountains you’d see these flattened, barren stretches, like the surface of the moon. It sometimes happens with mountaintop removal that old family cemeteries get wiped off the mountain along with everything else. The dead get discarded like trash in a landfill. I left West Virginia years ago, but those displaced bones and that dark, disturbed earth stayed with me. When I sat down to write a story for The End Is the Beginning, I went back to those mountains and found a man sitting alone in one of those blasted moonscapes. The rest of the story is what happens when the living and the dead get pushed too far, and start pushing back. As for me, I’m putting my money on the birds, the bees, and the bones."

Tais Teng on "The Art of Losing Wars Gracefully":  "When pigeons awoke me one morning with their insistent and deeply annoying cooing I realized that, though, we built the cities we never really own them. For the pigeons our proudest high-rises are only cliffs, nesting places. Fire ants gnaw the timbers of our homes and have their own highways in our walls. Below us rats rule the sewers and there are urban foxes hunting in our back-gardens. All my life we have been at war with the animal kingdom: mice steal our cheese and nibble our bread no matter how good we hide it. There was a wasp-nest once in our front garden; the exterminator had to come back three times before those insects were gone. ‘You should not plant anything edible there for at least  a year,’ the exterminator told us. ‘The poison I used is rather strong.’ That skirmish with the wasps didn't feel like victory and we knew they would be back. I got it: never try to win a war with animals, a draw, a temporary stalemate is the best you can hope for."

Kenneth W. Cain on "Her Living Corals":  "My story came to me while studying my Nano-reef tank. There are many mysteries in this tank, which make my mind wander.  I’ve always had a fear of the ocean. Not the water itself, but the haunts in its depths. These waters often frequent my stories. Who knows what exists in the deepest recesses of the ocean? What a man or woman is capable of within those areas? With this story I wanted to explore the ongoing ruin of our coral reefs. While keeping and maintaining reef tanks can be a rewarding experience, it can never compare to the real thing. The seas are full of life, brimming with extraordinary creatures, some of which can barely be seen. Besides millions of beautiful fish, there are copepods and amphipods, many varieties of snails, tiny anemones and feather dusters, limpets and chitons, starfish, and so much more that we need to preserve. Do yourself a favor, if you haven’t explored these reefs; check it out before its too late. In the meantime, do your part to help."

K. Trap Jones on "The River":  "The inspiration came from the idea that sometimes we take nature for granted. We look upon her with beauty, but often times ignore the power that she can possess. I wanted to tell a story of how easily something bad can happen. With one slip of a foot, a traditional fishing trip can go horribly wrong. Mother Nature, to me, can be a gentle loving soul, but then unleash rage at any given moment. Through this narrative, I wanted to give both sides of Mother Nature almost like a wonderful woven spider web. From afar, the web is spectacular, but once it has you in her grasp, the situation alters from beauty to dismay. Through the depressive narrative tone and the mental anguish of the narrator, the story comes off as a battle between the will of man and the overall endurance of Mother Nature. One slip was all that it took."

Rose Blackthorn on "Consequences":  "My story is set in a small town on the Oregon coast, not far from where I once lived. I have an abiding love of the ocean and its wildlife, including not just those who live in the water but the myriads of birds and animals who live near the shore. I think people for a long time have thought that the renewability of the ocean was boundless, but it’s becoming clearer now that over-fishing and the indiscriminate dumping of waste is building to a possible point of no return. With the nuclear plant in Japan bleeding toxins into the Pacific, it just adds another layer of worry about what is happening to our natural planet. So, I wrote a story about a woman who is dealing with general life issues -- aging, divorce, trying to make ends meet -- who is lucky enough to live in a beautiful place that she loves. Then I added in one variation of a worst-case scenario to the changes wrought in nature, and the possible consequences. Honestly, the whole idea scares me, too."

Julianne Snow on "There Is No Wind That Always Blows":  “When I saw the call for Enter at Your Own Risk: The End is the Beginning, I was immediately struck with a number of ideas that could work. After discarding all of those I settled on the premise for a wicked little apocalyptic tale that asks what would happen if the winds picked up to the point they wiped most of humanity from the surface? In Chaos Theory there is a statement: It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world. But what if more than one butterfly flapped their wings in unison? Could a cataclysmic event actually occur? And what would the remnants of humanity do to survive? ‘There Is No Wind That Always Blows…’ explores the physical and emotional strain such an event wreaks and leaves you wondering if the next gust of wind will ever end.”

Mark Patrick Lynch on "The Mourning Worm":  "A pleasure of writing SF is the world building. Creating planets, alien moons, and exotic space stations can be great fun -- but sometimes a little demanding. In 'The Mourning Worm' I went for a real location, a place I’d actually stayed in. Gregory’s cottage is as described (though as yet awaiting the interior refit), surrounded by the dense woods and rolling countryside of Wiltshire. It is enchanting in almost every aspect. But real locations bring with them their own hazards. In this case it was the low beams of the ceilings. I’m 5’11 (and a half). The cottage was built hundreds of years ago, when people were shorter in general... Yeah, you do the math. I didn’t come out of that stay with a concussion, but my head was like Braille for someone who reads the bumps and orbits of skulls. Maybe it was as I was wandering around a wee bit senseless that the notion for 'The Mourning Worm' came to me: holes in the world, absences…like the memories and minutes I seemed to have lost after I forgot to duck while walking from one side of a room to the other."

Sydney Leigh on "Rabenschwarz":  "There’s something about the fact that while intended for children, fairy tales are actually rather terrifying -- their settings, mood, atmosphere, and messages are all fascinatingly macabre. I felt this might make for an interesting backdrop for an environmental horror story, and loosely based ‘Rabenschwarz’ on 'Foundling-Bird', one of the lesser-known tales from the brothers Grimm. The unknown has always been the most frightening possibility for me in terms of natural disasters, ecological horrors, and the infinite list of environmental threats -- and the first thing that comes to mind when I worry about what the future brings is always the extinction of animals. The idea of them being removed from their natural habitats by mankind is the driving force behind this story, which plays on the idea that an unseen presence dwelling in the forest is not taken into account while some fairly grisly events are unfolding and no one quite knows who to blame. I’m afraid the supernatural element in the story allows for a happier ending than I think the animals in our world will have...so the presence of this force, raven-black and understandably sinister in nature, was my way of illuminating that for the reader."

Lawrence Santoro on "So Many Tiny Mouths":  "Someone said horror starts when innocence sets foot in the forest.  Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden for example; the forest primeval. Pennsylvania, 1950-something:  Summers, mom, dad, cousins and I would hop into the old man's Chevy and head toward the Atlantic Ocean.  Three hours later our first half-dozen layers of winter skin would have blistered to a sweat-slick peel and salt-water taffy would have yanked the year's fillings from our heads. Before becoming beach-blanket brisket though we had to cross inland Jersey, eighty-plus non air-conditioned miles, me in back meditating on undertow, riptides, and sand sharks.  Thus occupied, I didn’t notice that most of Jersey was trees.  Those eighty-some miles, the whole of central Jersey, was a geo-political entity: the Pine Barrens. Nighttime, homeward-bound, cousin Fred (who knew about such things) whispered tales about the woods that unspooled by our car in the dark.  They were inhabited by six-fingered folk who lived in caves, who prayed to odd and grubby gods, made their own gas from pig shit and ate lost travelers.  They were "Pineys” and you stayed away from them. Much later, I made a film in the Barrens.  Alas, Pineys turned out to be garden-variety Americans.  I got to know them -- somewhat -- and the Barrens -- a bit -- and have tried I don’t know how many times to get the place down on paper.  I keep trying.  Love, I think.  This is one such effort.  I think I’m closing in, but wouldn’t bet that I’ve got it.  It’s an elusive place.  The forest always is. By the way, Earl Sooey?  He's fiction, a coincidence.  No one I met.  Really."

CANOPIC JARS: Tales of Mummies and Mummification

(Behold -- Canopic Jars!)

I love creature features.  Creature double-features even more.  Along with giant rubber suit monsters of the Japanese variety, mummies have always ranked among my favorite things that creep, crawl, and create terror from the television set. Those desiccated former Pharaohs and doomed princes occupy a unique place in my heart, ever since my Uncle Jimmy and his pal Warren, tasked with babysitting me as a young boy, switched the dial to WLVI-Channel 56, and Boris Karloff's Imhotep dragged his dusty bandages across the snowy screen. Mummies trigger a unique brand of fear within me.  In high school, when I was just starting to write and tap into my imagination, I woke from a nightmare about being pursued by a mummy and jotted the dream down on a note card as a potential story idea. Not long after, I wrote it out and, these many years later, the tale, "That Which Must Be Confronted", still resides in my file system, and I vividly remember the raw nerves of the original dream, which translated onto the page.

Late last year, two friends planning to open a new press approached me about editing an anthology of short stories and asked me about ideas on a theme.  I instantly tossed out the notion of mummies -- the original zombies, and an icon that doesn't get nearly as much play.  I suggested a fresh approach from the expected Egyptian landscape: bog mummies, mummies from outer space, and also the all-important element of the jars in which organs were preserved and stored for future use by the embalmed upon their return from the dead. And thus, Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification was born, the first project by the fine folks at Great Old Ones Publishing.

Over the course of the summer and into the early autumn, publishers Philip Perron (who runs the fantastic Dark Discussions Podcast) and Douglas Poirier invited writers they respected to submit stories for consideration.  I, too, sent out a handful of invitations, and was blown away by the brilliance and variety that resulted. Rejecting stories was difficult; accepting those that made it into the book, a whopping twenty-nine (including a reprint of H.P. Lovecraft's classic, "Under the Pyramids") proved fairly easy.  T. G. Arsenault unleashes evil on an unsuspecting town in "Symphony of the Ancient Gods".  David C. Hayes explores the history of the genre from an actor's POV in "That's a Wrap". Suzanne Robb's heartbreaking "Portraits of the Dead" tackles the loss of loved ones and the belief in their resurrection, the fundamental basis for Egyptian mummification.  The menu's unique in my tawdry tale set at a society party, "Mummy Chips", and Karen Dent embalms the entire Earth in the outstanding "Walking White Death". In addition to fantastic fiction that spans the globe from Egypt to Ireland, New York City penthouses to digs in remote China, from France to the far reaches of the cosmos, Canopic Jars also features poetry by Esther M. Leiper-Estabrooks and a foreword from Patrick Rhea, screenwriter and director behind Lionsgate's Nailbiter film.

Canopic Jars went to press in record time and debuted at Anthocon in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where fifteen of the anthology's contributors were in attendance.  Copies of the book flew off the Great Old Ones Publishing table in the dealer's room, and energy and excitement for the project was everywhere you turned.  A fantastic roster of authors, a beautiful layout (Egyptian hieroglyphs and ankhs detail the scene breaks and end pages), and a classic horror trope given a fresh dusting off, if you will, have resulted in a book I am supremely proud of.  Next up: Great Old Ones have asked me to edit their new anthology, based upon another idea I suggested: Bugs!

Answering THE CALL OF LOVECRAFT!

The book that would not die lives!  Long last, The Call of Lovecraft is available in both e- and print formats. It's been a circuitous route -- TCoL was staked, eulogized, and nearly forgotten...until the fine folk at Evil Jester Press asked me to take the reigns of a personal project, anything I wanted within reason, and I exhumed the collection from the dead.  I was one of the first authors accepted when TCoL was envisioned by another editor, a different press.  I brought back our celebrated cover artist, Billy Tackett, the uber-awesome Ramsey Campbell, and 99.9% of the original Table of Contents from Year:2010, which includes so many talented authors.  I even bulked up the page count by adding six hand-chosen authors whose work routinely ranks among my favorite.

Like TCoL, my original short story offering, "The Green Dream," experienced a whirlwind journey en route to publication -- it was accepted in June 2010 for this collection, which then folded when the book company dissolved; was accepted for another to be published by The Twisted Library, which was also cancelled in October 2011.  By that point, I had written "The Mercy of Madness" to replace it within TCoL.  "The Green Dream" found a home in my enormous collection of original short and long stories, The Fierce and Unforgiving Muse: Twenty-Six Tales from the Terrifying Mind of Gregory L. Norris (EJP).  "Mercy" is an updated, rewritten version based upon the most horrific dream of my life, which involved a forced march to an abandoned factory deep in the woods during an icy rainstorm.  The original story was read during the early days of my first writer's group, late 1993. During that same time, Scott Goudsward read his Lovecraftian tale "That Place" to an audience looking over its shoulder while navigating the brooding autumn darkness on the way to their vehicles post-meeting.  That both stories are contained within the covers of TCoL seems not only fitting to me, but supremely cool.

It was my pleasure to ask my fellow contributors to share a bit of back-story behind their stories in The Call of Lovecraft.

Ramsey Campbell on "Cold Print": "My short story 'Cold Print' began life as 'The Successor'. It was one product of my struggle to sound like myself. I wrote a bunch of these after delivering The Inhabitant of the Lake and 'The Stone on the Island' to August Derleth in March 1963. A couple saw limited circulation, but nearly all of them were rewritten from scratch to their considerable benefit. I mentioned having finished 'The Successor' to Derleth in June 1964, but subsequently did nothing with it until he asked me (in late1967, I think it would have been) to come up with a new Lovecraftian tale for his next anthology. If I looked at 'The Successor', I imagine it was askance.


Parts of it do survive in 'Cold Print': many of the urban descriptions, and except for changing 'moist' to 'wet', the final image. The main changes were to the characters. The protagonist Derek Sheridan collects banned books, and that’s pretty well all the reader learns about him, because I’d simply put myself into the story. Sheridan meets his unnamed contact at a film society based on the Merseyside Film Institute and has to suffer the other’s enthusiasm for bad thirties Hollywood movies. In those days I was given to inserting observations into the story whether or not they were relevant to the theme. I needed Sam Strutt to let the telling become more controlled, and I borrowed details of him from a gym master at my old school and a colleague in the Civil Service who would ask me to lend him exciting books. 'The Successor' will be included as an extra in the forthcoming follow-up from PS Publishing to their definitive edition of The Inhabitant of the Lake – the second volume will collect the rest of my Lovecraftian short stories. Meanwhile, here’s 'Cold Print', risen from the dust." 


Scott T. Goudsward on "That Place": "The original version of 'That Place' was written way back circa 1993/1994 and, after several failed attempts at placing it, the story was re-written and re-named.  It was one fated night at my writer's group that Gregory Norris heard it, and it stuck in his craw as did the story he was reading at the same time.  Through the years, I'd re-written it a few times to try to make it 'fit' and always thought it was going to end up a trunk story until the invite went out for The Call of Lovecraft.

What made the story what it is, the thing was based on a gaming session of the RPG The Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium.  My brother was running it and I can't tell you who else was at the table.  The undead ghoul rats (as I call them) from the session ended up being the creatures beneath the grates in the story.  The tunnels as well as some of the characters are long imagined speculation between friends and I..."

William Meikle on "The Colour of the Deep": "I don't like caves; dark passageways filled with creeping shadows, slimy moss and big beasties just waiting to jump. It's something that's been with me since my childhood when three of us ventured into one and, as a joke, I was left alone in the dark. That experience led directly to my story 'The Colour of the Deep.'  My friends came back for me, and we're still friends to this day, so the story isn't autobiographical beyond the first couple of paragraphs. But I really don't like caves."

Carol MacAllister on "Blood Pine": "In some pagan beliefs, the pine tree is considered to be 'alive.'  If you touch one you just might feel the pulsing life within it, particularly, if you are within a remote stand. Kirlian photography shows plants that have been trimmed back or cut still hold phantom energy shapes of lost limbs. Sick plants are said to be helped if surrounded by well ones – a communication of sorts takes place and many sick plants recover. So, if vegetation does have a unique mind of its own what would happen if human blood got into the mix?   I saw this when traveling through Kentucky years ago where wide open spans of Civil War battlefields lay before me, dotted with tall dark spruce. How interesting, I thought, they scattered the landscape like they’d sprouted from the dead who had lain there after the battles. And with a little tap on the shoulder from Lovecraft and fostering from otherworldliness, a stand of pine, as in 'Blood Pine,' might easily mutate and interact with humans, perhaps like Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows."

John F. D. Taff on "The Tentacle": "'The Tentacle' began life when my friend, J. Travis Grundon, wanted a story for a Lovecraft anthology he was putting together—which ultimately became Gregory’s The Call of Lovecraft. Now, I’ve read Lovecraft and enjoyed some of his stories, but he’s not exactly my cup of tea.  I think this is because his writing style has been pastiched to death, like Chandler.   And because his style has a kind of humorless aridness to it that’s a bit too pompous for my taste.  Probably shouldn’t be knocking Lovecraft in an anthology dedicated to him, but there are some pieces by good ole H.P. that I do like.  At the Mountains of Madness is a particularly effective story.  Anyway, what I wanted to do with 'The Tentacle' was pastiche the old guy and add a little humor to the mix.  The result is a story that has a lot of Lovecraftian elements in it, plus (hopefully) the humor I was aiming for; but also, at the end, a poignant and cosmic twist that lends a more serious air to the story’s conclusion.

Roxanne Dent on "Magnus the Magnificent": "As a lover of the sea and paranormal magicians who do more than parlor tricks, I was intrigued by the combination. When I lived in New York I taught remedial reading to prisoners in a prison and later joined an organization that helped them to adjust to life on the outside.  One thing I discovered was that it was extremely rare for an ex-prisoner to remain out of jail.  There were many reasons for this, including family dynamics, drugs and poverty, but one thing stood out.  It had a lot to do with 'hubris,' or pride that made him overestimate his criminal creativity, causing him to think he could execute the big score and get away with it.  I used all of these elements in my story, 'Magnus the Magnificent.'"

Geoffrey James on "The Vessel": "My exposure to Lovecraft goes back to the 1960s when I discovered a box of Weird Tales magazines in a drawer at my grandmother's house.  Later, my father (who'd collected the volumes) gave me a copy of Lovecraft's Best Supernatural Stories, which at the time contained his membership card in the "Weird Tales Club," which, alas, is now lost, although I still do have the book. When Gregory asked me to write a story for this volume, I turned to 'The Dunwich Horror' because, before my father died, he and I drove into central Massachusetts and, based upon internal references in Lovecraft story, discovered that Dunwich was, in fact, the town of Shutesbury.  Sentinel Hill is still there (there's a retreat center atop it!) as are numerous (apparently) pre-Columbian stone ruins. In my view, the most original aspect of Lovecraft's writing is his rejection of the dichotomy between good and evil. All horror written before Lovecraft assumes a world where Good and Evil are in equilibrium, with Evil able to (temporarily) overcome Good, but where Good will eventually triumph. As such, horror existed in an essentially Christian context.

Lovecraft completely scraps that dialectic. Lovecraft separates religion into two general categories: traditional religions which are based upon human imagination and therefore impotent and (for want of a better term) eldritch religions, which are based on actual (albeit alternate) reality and therefore powerful. Put another way, trying to scare away Cthulhu with a crucifix will get your crushed or eaten. As such, in Lovecraft's world, it makes a certain amount of sense for those who are religiously minded to worship the elder gods, since they 1) actually exist and 2) actually have an impact on the mortal world. Unfortunately, Lovecraft never pursues this angle, instead attributing such worship to either cultural or racial degeneracy or a combination of both. In other words, to Lovecraft, those who worship the Elder Gods are simply sub-human.

When writing 'The Vessel' I decided instead to take my cue from my father's observations and treat such worship not as a manifestation of inferiority, but rather an understandable reaction to the intrusion of an alternate reality into the mortal world. While Lavinia's family background and albinism have certainly influenced her life, what's far more important to her is an ecstatic religious experience that makes her feel cherished in a way that she'd been unable to experience before. In doing so, I tried to raise her from the subhuman caricature that she is in the original story into more of a human being, with understandable motivations and desires.

H. David Blalock on "The Shed": "As a long-time Lovecraft fan, I often find interesting ideas surrounding ordinary objects, usually at the most unexpected times. In the case of ‘The Shed’, I was mowing my lawn when I noticed the door to the shed in my yard was slightly ajar and didn't remember leaving it open. One thing led to another, and soon that shed had become something much more sinister than a simple wood and metal structure. The story, once the idea was developed, took just a short time to write. I was delighted to find that it met the requirements of TCoL."

Karen Dent on "Endless Hunger": "As a child, I loved the old movie The Crawling Eye.  The mists, the mountain, the psychic woman connected to the monster are all rolled up with my first introduction to Lovecraft.  I’d always wanted to create a story that would affect others as those images had me.  I hadn’t read any of Lovecraft’s works in years so I downloaded every story I could -- and scared the crap out of myself all over again.  He was a painter of words, teleporting you from a soft, cushy couch to getting dragged into the deep recesses of an agonizing forever. 

                                       

The idea of endless suffering, the inability to escape and the slow torture of continued cognitive thought horrifies me.  I hope you like ‘Endless Hunger’ -- however I think placing it in New Hampshire, at Lake Winnipesaukee might have been a mistake.  I no longer feel safe walking the black road alone in the dark of night, especially when I pass the D.H. [Divided Highway]."

John B. Rosenman on "I Luv RT": "Sometimes stories come from nowhere, an empty void.  Or a faint wind on your face.  Or from a word, a book cover, a sublimely beautiful sunrise—or sunset. In the case of ‘I LUV RT,’ the kick-starter was very definite.  I was driving down the street, minding my own darn business, when a pretty girl cut in front of me, giving me the finger as she sped on.  I recall that her license plate contained the letters ‘RT.’

I sped up, ran the girl off the road, and killed her.

No, I didn’t.  I was pissed for a few seconds and then forgot it.  Or rather, I went home and wrote a story called ‘I LUV RT,’ which is about a nerdy loser with self-esteem issues who has a young girl cut in front of him on the road . . .

Well, you get the idea.  And I swear on my psychiatrist’s couch the character in the story has nothing in common with me.  Honest!  I’m absolutely comfortable with my rugged masculinity.

At the time I wrote the story, I was reading the works of H.P. Lovecraft.  At the Mountains of Madness, “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and so on.  What impressed me the most was the creepy, Medusa-like nature of supernatural horror.  Imagine the sinister and seductive possibilities of ultimate evil! There are not only cosmic forces that don’t care a rat’s ass about us, but to most of us, they are ineffable, indescribable, and unimaginable. You not only can’t capture their good side in a photograph, they don’t have a good side.  And if your mind is strong and resilient enough to view them directly for a whole second, in the next second, it will probably snap like a dry pretzel and crumble completely.  Unless you are one of the few who find them beautiful.

Look out!  These banished Old Ones want to return and take over Main Street again.  Are you going to stand in their way?

So an impatient female driver and Lovecraft’s view of supernatural evil and horror were two main influences on the story.  I’ll mention one more: the possibility that we’re ultimately all alone and don’t even begin to understand each other as well as we think.  In my case, was that female driver really disgusted with my slow driving, or was there another reason she cast driver etiquette to the winds and blew me off?  I hope you read my story and find out, then realize it’s unwise to make assumptions about anybody.  Who knows?  Even your sweet old granny may have a body or two stashed in the cellar.

There’s a lot more I could tell you about ‘I LUV RT,’ but then I’d spoil the surprise. So—enough said!"

James Ravan on "The Winds of Gobekli Tepe": "I prefer fiction that is rooted in truth and 'The Winds of Gobekli Tepe' is such a story. The setting, a hilltop expanse called Gobekli Tepe, does exist and is a thriving archaeological site today. What happened there? Why was the site buried? Who buried it? What rituals were performed by these prehistoric peoples millennia before writing was invented? To what Gods? And to what intent? Gregor Engel, a field archaeologist, his wife Ingrid, Aya and her mother Kek, explore these questions."

Jacqueline Seewald on "Legend": "As the educational media specialist/librarian for a large regional high school in Central New Jersey, I did all the book ordering. High school students love horror fiction. So it's important to provide a quality collection. One of the books I ordered was Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, ten stories by the master edited and introduced by Joyce Carol Oates. As I examined the book, making certain it was appropriately cataloged, I became intrigued. I knew I wanted to be the first to read this particular volume. So I checked it out and took it home with me that day. Oates, a prolific mainstream literary author, wrote what I consider to be a brilliant essay on Lovecraft. After reading that as well as the short stories in the collection, I was inspired to write my own short story, a tribute to the father of modern horror fiction. I hope readers will enjoy ‘Legend.’"

Derek Neville on "The Clearing": "The original germ for the idea for 'The Clearing' actually started in a dream I had. The fragments I remember from it were that I had a bird's eye view of a man wandering into, of all things, a clearing and finding an abandoned train there. It should be noted, I have very odd dreams pretty much every night, but regardless it was a visual that stuck in my head. With most of my story ideas I tend to latch onto a moment that just gives me a feeling in my gut, something that no matter how many times I think about it, I get that same excitement to start filling in all the blanks. I have a lot of ideas, as I'm sure most of my fellow writers do, and a lot of them exist in this form of smalls scenes and moments, just waiting for their time in the sun to be fully explored. When Greg first approached me about contributing to The Call of Lovecraft it was like he opened up a door and gave me carte blanche to figure out why this man and this train were in a clearing to begin with. It was a chance to play in a sandbox I'm most comfortable in. 

For me, 'The Clearing' was about exploring a lot of different themes, and I won't explain them all here as the reader's interpretation of the story is far greater than my intention. I'll tell you that one of the bigger ideas that the story is picking at is the eternal battle between free will versus fate. If you knew that someone was pulling the strings would that impact the choices that you made? Also, I've always been a big fan of ensemble pieces and there's nothing more fun for me as a reader and as a writer than to watch a group of people who hate each other have to band together to survive. I hope 'The Clearing' makes the reader ask a lot of questions. I'm sorry to report that the answer's are not all there on the page, but I think I gave you enough to draw your own conclusions on what things meant. The story is very similar in that way. It asks questions, big questions, like are we ultimately judged for the wrong we do? I'll be honest with you, I had a blast writing this story and I hope that enthusiasm comes through on the page." 

and artist Billy Tackett on his beautiful cover: "I've always been a Lovecraft fan and doing this cover was a treat. For some reason I had never considered doing any Lovecraftian pictures but while doing the research for The Call of Lovecraft I was bitten by the bug! I'm currently working on a series of pictures featuring the indescribable horrors featured in Lovecraft's works."