Prior to the first American Publication of Brian Lumley's ground-breaking, dead waking, best-selling Necroscope ® in 1988--the first novel in a long-lived, much-loved series--this British author had for twenty years been earning an envious reputation writing short stories, novellas, and a series of novels set against H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic Cthulhu Mythos backdrop. In addition and for a further twenty years Lumley's non-Mythos Fantasy, SF, and Horror stories have been appearing on a regular basis in some of the world's most famous publications; for example The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Weird Tales, along with anthologies such as Karl Edward Wagner's Year's Best Horror Stories, Charles L. Grant's Final Shadows, and Kirby McCauley's Frights, among others.

With his multiple-award-winning literary career now spanning over four decades, Lumley continues to write his superior fictions, examples of which from each of those decades can be found in this current collection, where Weird Tales itself is represented by no less than five stories!