Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

His collection, Strange Gateways, recently appeared from PS Publishing, following the critically acclaimed Quiet Houses from Dark Continents Publishing (2011) and Lost Places from Ash-Tree Press (2010), which was Peter Tennant from Black Static magazine’s joint favourite collection of the year (along with Angela Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories). His fiction has been published in a large number of anthologies including the World Fantasy Award-winning Exotic Gothic 4, Terror Tales of the Cotswolds, Terror Tales of the Seaside, Where the Heart Is, At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Exotic Gothic 3, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, Hauntings, Lovecraft Unbound and Year’s Best Fantasy 2013. He has been represented in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror six times, and he was also in The Very Best of Best New Horror.

The author has a further collection due—the as-yet-unnamed collection that will launch the Spectral Press Spectral Signature Editions imprint. His novel The Devil’s Detective is due out from Doubleday in the US and Del Rey in the UK in early 2015.

You can find him on Twitter or Facebook, or in various cafés in Lancaster staring at his MacBook and muttering to himself.

“I’m not a big Lovecraft fan,” admits Unsworth. “Don’t get me wrong—I like the stories (some a great deal), but his stuff isn’t particularly what I have in my mind when I write. The stories are sometimes stuffy, a little claustrophobic (and not in a good way) and hysterical, despite a certain elemental power that the best of them contain. They’re rarely subtle, and sometimes veer dangerously close to cliché or stereotype.

“Where he comes into his own, I think, is in creating this huge world, and worlds beyond the world, in which we can play. Whether it’s the audio dramatisations of the marvellous H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society or the blood-spattered glories of Stuart Gordon’s Re-animator, there seems to be lots of space to expand on HPL’s original works, and twist and flex the things he wrote about into new and (hopefully) interesting shapes. I’ve done it, sometimes deliberately (as in ‘Into the Water’), and sometimes without really realising it until after, when I suddenly understand that I might not have actually said ‘Hey, this is one of Cthulhu’s children!’ in the text but that’s what I’ve intimated.

“The reason we can do this, that Lovecraft’s stuff lends itself to this kind of expansion is, I think, that his horrors are emphatically external, clamouring from the Outside and trying to get in. And the Outside is huge, unbelievably massive, which means we can put whatever we want into it and it never gets full.

“For an author, that kind of freedom—a framework with unlimited playground space—is too big a thing to ignore. Besides, tentacles and things moving in the abyssal blackness below us and above us and behind us seem like such good things to write about…”

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CONRAD WILLIAMS was born in 1969 and currently lives in Manchester, England, with his wife, three sons and a monster Maine Coon. He is an associate lecturer at Edge Hill University.

He is the author of seven novels (Head Injuries, London Revenant, the International Horror Guild Award-winning The Unblemished, the British Fantasy Award-winning One, Decay Inevitable, Blonde on a Stick and Loss of Separation), four novellas (Nearly People, Game, the British Fantasy Award-winning The Scalding Rooms and Rain) and two collections of short stories (Use Once Then Destroy and Born with Teeth). His debut anthology, Gutshot, was short-listed for both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards.

As the author recalls: “I’d found a hag stone—a pebble with a hole bored through it by the force of water over countless years—a long time ago on a forgotten beach, but the actual story came about after a visit to Alderney last summer.

“I spent three days with my family in Fort Clonque, which has been a Landmark Trust holiday destination since 1966. It was once a naval base guarding against attack from the French and then, in 1940, it was appropriated by Nazi Germany—Hitler thought it strategically valuable—and it was re-fortified and manned in preparation for an invasion of the mainland which, of course, never came.