Lovecraft's Monsters - Softcover

Gaiman, Neil; Lansdale, Joe R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 161696121X ISBN 13: 9781616961213

Publisher: Tachyon Publications, 2014

Synopsis

Prepare to meet the wicked progeny of the master of modern horror. In Lovecraft's Monsters, H. P. Lovecraft's most famous creations— Cthulhu, Shoggoths, Deep Ones, Elder Things, Yog-Sothoth, and more, appear in all their terrifying glory. Each story is a gripping new take on a classic Lovecraftian creature, and each is accompanied by a spectacular original illustration that captures the monsters' unique visage.

Contributors include such literary luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Karl Edward Wagner, Elizabeth Bear, and Nick Mamatas. The monsters are lovingly rendered in spectacular original art by World Fantasy Award–winning artist John Coulthart (The Steampunk Bible).

Legions of Lovecraft fans continue to visit his bizarre landscapes and encounter his unrelenting monsters. Now join them in their journey...if you dare.

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Datlow is one of horror’s most acclaimed editors. She was the fiction editor of OMNI for nearly twenty years, and edited the magazines Event Horizon and Sci Fiction. Her many anthologies include the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series; Snow White, Blood Red; Lovecraft's Monsters; and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror. Datlow has won multiple Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus, and Shirley Jackson awards. She has received several lifetime achievement awards, including a World Fantasy Award―her tenth―in 2014. Datlow lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From "Only the End of the World Again" by Neil Gaiman

There was a note under the door from my landlady. It said that I owed her for two weeks’ rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of Revelations. It said that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early hours of this morning, and she’d thank me to be quieter in future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the non-believers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water. It said that she felt she ought to remind me that she had assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she’d thank me if in the future I’d keep to it.

I crumpled the note, dropped it on the floor, where it lay alongside the Big Mac cartons and the empty pizza cartons, and the long-dead dried slices of pizza.

It was time to go to work.

I’d been in Innsmouth for two weeks, and I disliked it. It smelled fishy. It was a claustrophobic little town: marshland to the east, cliffs to the west, and, in the centre, a harbour that held a few rotting fishing boats, and was not even scenic at sunset. The yuppies had come to Innsmouth in the 80s anyway, bought their picturesque fisherman’s cottages overlooking the harbour. The yuppies had been gone for some years, now, and the cottages by the bay were crumbling, abandoned.

The inhabitants of Innsmouth lived here and there in and around the town, and in the trailer parks that ringed it, filled with dank mobile homes that were never going anywhere.

I got dressed, pulled on my boots and put on my coat and left my room. My landlady was nowhere to be seen. She was a short, pop-eyed woman, who spoke little, although she left extensive notes for me pinned to doors and placed where I might see them; she kept the house filled with the smell of boiling seafood: huge pots were always simmering on the kitchen stove, filled with things with too many legs and other things with no legs at all.

There were other rooms in the house, but no-one else rented them. No-one in their right mind would come to Innsmouth in winter.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 161696121X
• ISBN 13: 9781616961213
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Datlow Ellen