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The November 1980 issue of the fine
Italian horror magazine Kadath (edited by Francesco Cova) was dedicated
to Brian Lumley and featured new fiction and verse by him as well as an
interview, a bibliography, and other goodies. It was such a handy item that with
characteristic originality, we shamelessly decided to do the same thing. The
result is this special Brian Lumley issue of Crypt of Cthulhu. And since
we were so taken with Stephen Fabian's dust jacket for Lumley's Arkham House
volume The Horror at Oakdeene, we decided to wrangle a Fabian cover
ourselves. It worked.
Brian Lumley is one of the leading Cthulhu
Mythos writers working today, and we had promised to deal with his work way back
in the very first issue of Crypt of Cthulhu. Now, eighteen Crypts
later, here is that promised (or threatened) review-essay "Brian Lumley ---
Reanimator".
We were also fortunate to be able to
interview Brian (in the first, by the way, of a series of interviews with Mythos
authors --- not an idle boast, since we've already done two more).
And what would a Lumley issue be without a
first-hand glimpse of his fiction? First we offer a two-parter,
"Demoniacal" by David Sutton and "The Kiss of Bugg-Shash" by
Brian Lumley. Sutton's story first appeared in New Writings in Horror and the
Supernatural, Vol. II (Sphere Books), where Lumley saw it. As he relates,
"His tale was so obviously a Mythos story that I wrote him and said, 'Let
me do a sequel!', because I had an idea for just such. He OK'ed that and I wrote
'The Kiss of Bugg-Shash', which definitely was Mythos and so brought
Dave's tale firmly into the genre also." Both stories then appeared
together in Jon Harvey's pamphlet series Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,
number 3 (Spectre Press). We suspect that few readers, especially in the United
States, have seen the stories, and we are pleased to present them.
And needless to say, we are even more
tickled to be able to include a brand-new story written by Lumley expressly for
this issue of Crypt of Cthulhu, "The Statement of One John
Gibson". It will gibber for itself.
Finally, you will find two new poems by
our featured writer, one horror and one fantasy.
So as you prepare, hearts pounding and
pulses-racing, to turn the page, you may notice your palms beginning to sweat.
But really they're not --- it's just the special binding of this, the Brian
Lumley issue of Crypt of Cthulhu.
Robert M. Price, Editor
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