The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. Brian Stableford

The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

INTRODUCTION

Writers of imaginative fiction are often asked where they get their ideas from. The fact is that they come from anywhere and everywhere, that the writerly state of mind involves living in an atmosphere that is as profusely-scattered with ideas as the cities of industrial England used to be with the smoke-particles that served as nuclei for the precipitation of smog. Literature is, after all, little more than a temporary weather-phenomenon, which flourished for a while when the climate was conductive and is now in the process of dying out, not because of the activation of any kind of Clear Air Act but merely because the intellectual air we breathe nowadays is too arid to support it. Most writers, however, find that sort of explanation too tedious, so they mostly manufacture shorter and wittier formulae for use as replies. I always say that I steal them, although I readily acknowledge that this is an empty boast. It is after all, great writers who steal; the rest of us merely borrow.

One of the side-effects of the historical growth of prose fiction, which became as profuse as an Amazonian rain forest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although it will presumably dwindle away to a mere blasted heath in the twenty-first, is that the smoke-particles around which literary ideas might form were intensively recycled, recklessly multiplied in the meantime by a quasi-microbial process of fission. The easiest place for any modern writer to find ideas to steal, or merely borrow, is the work of other writers.

Unlike common-or-garden theft and borrowing, of course, literary appropriation is subject to a mutation rate so extreme that one might almost suspect the everpresence of some strange background radiation of the kind that was once mislabeled “inspiration”. (Cynics, of course, might suggest that it is more akin to chemical pollution, but cynics have such dirty minds that one would naturally expect them to manifest such a preference.) At any rate, the literary recycling and reproduction of previously-owned ideas always involves a certain amount of alteration. The distinction between literary theft and literary borrowing is akin to that between beneficial and injurious mutation, the observed ratio being not dissimilar to that pertaining to biological mutation—although successive generations of fiction, not being subject to such rigorous processes of eliminative selection, tend to conserve far more deleterious mutations than successive generations of natural organisms.

The mutational processes to which recycled ideas are routinely subject are many and varied, but it is easy enough to identify some broad categories, the most important of which are extrapolation, inversion, perversion and subversion. The categories are, of course, far more distinct in theoretical terms than they ever are in quotidian practice; most actual transformations combine the elementary strategies in idiosyncratic ways. All the stories in this collection are extrapolations, that being inherent to the definition of a sequel, but all of them also feature a degree of perversion and subversion, and it is the degree and direction of these further adjustments that characterize me as a writer. I am, I fear, unassailably addicted to perversion and subversion, albeit in a purely literary sense. (In real life I am a run-of-the-mill recluse with hardly any personality at all.) Some readers—those in search of straightforward hommages, slavish pastiches, or further segments cut from the infinitely-repeating patterns that some successful literary series tend to become—might conceivably be disappointed by my notion of how sequels ought to be written. Hopefully, others won’t.

The pattern formed by assembling these sequels inevitably provides some insight into my tastes as a reader, but cannot be taken as a straightforward indicator thereof. Collections of sequels to the works of famous writers are frequently commissioned nowadays in pursuit of marketing strategies, attempting to exploit the cachet attached to the names of writers whose modern celebrity is stubborn but regrettably posthumous. Some of the stories in this collection were written in response to invitations to submit to anthologies of that sort, and are thus representative of eccentric juxtapositions of market forces and my own inclinations.

“The Innsmouth Heritage” is a sequel to “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H. P. Lovecraft. It was commissioned for use in an anthology called Shadows Over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones, but when the anthology initially failed to sell I redirected it to a specialist publisher of Lovecraftiana, Necronomicon Press, who issued it as a chapbook in 1992. The anthology eventually sold to Fedogan & Bremer, who published it in 1994.

“The Picture” is a sequel to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It was first published in the second issue of The Seventh Seal in 2000.

“The Temptation of Saint Anthony” is a sequel to one of the items in the Golden Legend, assembled by Jacobus de Voragine, although earlier versions of the story predated that collection; it might better be regarded as an alternative version of the story reproduced by Voragine, and subsequently stolen or borrowed by many other artists and writers. It was first published in The Secret History of Vampires edited by Darrell Schweitzer, published by DAW in 2007.

“The Ugly Cygnet by Hans Realist Andersen” is a sequel to “The Ugly Duckling” by Hans Christian Andersen. It originally appeared in the fourth issue of The Seventh Seal in 2001.

“Art in the Blood” is an addition to the Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle, although it combines the features of that series with those of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos,” as per the brief of the anthology for which it was written, Shadows Over Baker Street edited by John Pelan and Michael Reaves, published by Del Rey in 2003.

“Mr. Brimstone and Dr. Treacle” is a sequel to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. It first appeared (under the pseudonym Francis Amery) in Naked Truth 6 (1996).

“Jehan Thun’s Quest” is a sequel to “Maitre Zacharius” by Jules Verne. It was written for The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown, published in the UK by Robinson and in the USA by Carroll & Graf in 2005.

“The Immortals of Atlantis” is, in some ultimate sense, a sequel to Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, although it actually refers back to some of the multitudinous other sequels produced in the interim, especially those associated with the nineteenth century occult revival. It first appeared in disLocations edited by Ian Whates and published by the Newcon Press in 2007.

“Between the Chapters” is a sequel to the third chapter of Genesis, filling in the narrative gap which separates that chapter from the following one. It appears here for the first time.

“Three Versions of a Fable” is a sequel to “The Nightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde, which was itself a calculatedly-perverted version of a story by Hans Christian Andersen. It first appeared in Bats and Red Velvet 14 (1995).

“The Titan Unwrecked; or, Futility Revisited” is a sequel to Le Chevalier Tenebre by Paul Feval, which I translated into English as Knightshade; it is also a sequel to a hypothetical alternative version of a story by Morley Robertson that was originally called “Futility,” although it is better known as “The Wreck of the Titan,” and to similar alternative versions of the Allan Quatermain series by H. Rider Haggard and Dracula by Bram Stoker, as well as to the Rocambole series originated by Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail and carried forward by other hands. As if that were not complication enough, it also features Lovecraftian elements closely akin to those featured in “The Innsmouth Heritage” and “Art in the Blood.” It first appeared in Tales of the Shadowmen, edited by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, published by Black Coat Press in 2005.

THE INNSMOUTH HERITAGE

The directions Ann had dictated over the phone allowed me to reach Innsmouth without too much difficulty; I doubt that I would have fared so well had I been forced to rely upon the map printed on the end-papers of her book or had I been forced to seek assistance along the way.

While descending from the precipitous ridge east of the town I was able to compare my own impressions of Innsmouth’s appearance with the account given by Ann in her opening chapter. When she spoke to me on the phone she had told me that the book’s description was “optimistic” and I could easily see why

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