Debatable and Disturbing
EDITORIAL SHARDS

Issue 029

copyright © 1985 by Robert M. Price
reprinted by permission of Robert M. Price

No, it's not just your imagination: Crypt of Cthulhu is printing more fiction! And we are only printing fiction by the pros! We believe this is the level of quality you have come to expect from Crypt of Cthulhu. This issue features a sinister sextet of stories by a no less ghoulish group of writers!

Lin Carter's "The Vault Beneath the Mosque" is another chapter in his reconstruction of Alhazred's objectionable Necronomicon, eventually to be a full-fledged book, as we predicted back in Crypt of Cthulhu #2. Lovecraft himself mentioned this episode in his letters, and now you can learn what eldritch secret was too shocking for even HPL to relate in detail!

"The Gods of Drinen" is the second installment of a trilogy Gary Myers began in Crypt #22 with "The Priest of Mlok". Look for the third tale in a soon-upcoming issue of this magazine.

We welcome Eddy C. Berlin, a Belgian who writes with eerie effectiveness in several languages, and whose four-hundred-plus (!) stories have appeared in Year's Best Horror and Pan Book of Horror Stories collections and many other volumes and magazines as well. He slithers into these pages with "The Waiting Dark".

The saga of Gnostic swashbuckler Simon of Gitta continues in "The Wedding of Sheila-Na-Gog" by Glenn Rahman and Richard L. Tierney.

Duane Rimel, a veteran of The Acolyte, Weird Tales, and of course, Crypt of Cthulhu, returns with "Goodbye, Joe", a disquieting tale of a brief supernatural intrusion into the mundane.

Finally, you may experience a feeling of deja vu on reading "I am Your Shadow" by Clark Ashton Smith. You have read another draft called "Strange Shadows" in Crypt of Cthulhu #25. We realize that many Crypt readers are scholarly enthusiasts and are greedily eager to see as much as they can of their favorites' work, even variant drafts of familiar stories. And "I Am Your Shadow" is significantly different from "Strange Shadows" to merit making it available.

Robert M. Price, Editor