Michael Shea began writing Momma Durtt in 1986. Momma Durtt has lain unpublished ever since.

Hippocampus Press is proud to present this novel of cosmic eco-horror from the pen of one of the masters of contemporary weird fiction. With vibrant characters, racy language, and a spectacular denouement, Momma Durtt is uniquely suited to our own times.

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Michael Shea deftly blends the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

In the title story, an exploration team on a desert planet encounters a terrifying alien monstrosity. In “The Angel of Death,” a serial killer hunting innocent women turns out to be a visitor from another world. In “Uncle Tuggs,” a more traditional horror story infused with a dose of black humor, a series of grisly and bizarre deaths ensues that may be connected to the mysterious disappearance of old Uncle Tuggs, and in “The Horror on the #33” a wino witnesses a horrific murder committed by a strange wasp-headed monster on a city bus.

The classic story “The Autopsy,” which Algis Budrys called “one of the most successful meldings of science fiction with horror that I have ever encountered” and which was filmed for Guillermo Del Toro’s Netflix series Cabinet of Curiosities, tells of an aging pathologist called in to perform an autopsy — but what he discovers during his examination is chilling and unthinkable.

This beautiful new edition features a new introduction by Laird Barron. Available in hardcover or paperback from Valancourt Books and featuring the classic story THE AUTOPSY.

This Centipede Press special edition book is printed in four colors and two colors throughout, bound in black cloth, with printed endpapers, a stunning dustjacket, top-edge stain, and ribbon marker.

A “Sword and Sorcery” thriller as only Michael Shea could write them. This signed edition is limited to 300 copies, so order this collector’s item now from Centipede Press.

Netflix has announced the new and upcoming, Cabinet of Curiosities, originally slated to be titled 10 After Midnight. Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro has selected 10 stories by different writers for this omnibus series.

Michael Shea’s World Fantasy Award winning novella, THE AUTOPSY, is planned to be the second story aired. Details released below:

“Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham (Mythic Quest), Glynn Turman (Fargo), and Luke Roberts (Black Sails) will appear in an episode written by David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight; Batman Begins) and based on a short story by Michael Shea, and directed by David Prior (The Empty Man; AM1200)”.

Early in his career, Michael Shea wrote the Lovecraftian novel The Color out of Time (1984). He subsequently wrote some of the most scintillating and gripping tales of the Cthulhu Mythos in contemporary weird fiction, including “Fat Face” and “Copping Squid.” These tales mingled Lovecraftian themes with the gritty realism of urban horror, and they often featured drug addicts, prostitutes, and others whom conventional society treats with scorn and marginalization.

Shea wrote the novel Mr. Cannyharme in 1981, and it constitutes a remarkable adaptation of Lovecraft’s early story “The Hound” (1922), about the depredations of an ancient Dutch vampire. In Shea’s novel, Mr. Cannyharme stalks the seedy Mission District of San Francisco in the aftermath of the hippie movement of the 1960s. Holed up in a rundown hotel, the seemingly harmless Cannyharme—aged, feeble, bent almost double with a crippling disease—is the focus of the supernatural terror in the novel.

Jack Hale, who manages the hotel, is one of the few who sense the danger to society and the world that Cannyharme represents. With a motley band of young whores and drug dealers, he takes on the challenge to counteract the horrors that Mr. Cannyharme seeks to release upon an unsuspecting world.

Mr. Cannyharme, written in a vibrant prose that brings to life the multitude of characters that populate the book, is a triumph of Lovecraftian terror, but also speaks of the way in which those who are regarded as the refuse of society can assert their dignity and self-worth in a grim environment. In this sense, it proves to be a novel affirming the triumph of the human spirit over the horrors facing it.

Mr. Cannyharme, in its limited hardcover edition, features Smyth-sewn signatures and an illustrated dust wrapper. Each copy is individually shrink-wrapped. All Hippocampus Press limited editions are printed on 60# white offset paper, acid free and elemental chlorine free.

Order Limited Cloth Edition

• Limited cloth $45.00 $30.00 pre-publication discount!
• Edited by S. T. Joshi, with a foreword by Linda Shea.
• Cover artwork by Tom Brown. Cover design by Daniel V. Sauer.
• Publication date: October 2021 (limited cloth)
• Publication date: August 2021 (paperback and ebook)
• 296 pages
• Limited hardcover: 500 copies only
• Paperback and eBook are also available at all major booksellers.

Publisher Weekly review
DMR review
Miskatonic Review

World Fantasy Award winner Michael Shea’s A Quest for Simbilis is now available in a new edition!

Spatterlight Press released the book on their “Paladins of Vance” label. A Quest for Simbilis is an authorised sequel to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books.

Fans of Michael and Jack will remember the saga of Cugel the Clever. Cugel was dumped by a winged demon into the northern shores of the Sea of Cutz. Cugel vows to take revenge from Iucounu, the Laughing Magician and sets forth his journey back to Almery…

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“Uncle Tuggs” was first published in 1986 in F&SF Magazine. Since then, it has been anthologized over and again. In this collection, Uncle Tuggs makes his most recent appearance in Hingston and Olsen’s collection, The Ghost Box.
The Ghost Box is just that: a diminutive box full of individually bound scary stories including not only Shea’s work, but also that of Robert Hugh Benson, Stephen King, and Harlan Ellison. Chosen by the editor, Patton Oswalt, “Uncle Tuggs” settles nicely in the box as Shea effortlessly melds horror and humor in this story of a land possessed by a vengeful demon.

Set in the Sonoma County California hills of the 80’s when marijuana was still illegal, “Uncle Tuggs” is a horrific frolic in which the tools come alive to wreak bodily destruction. Shea’s narrative uses his own familiarity with the time, the place, and the life of an honest man working hard labor. At the story’s center is a red-neck hero, the tongue in cheek witness to the destruction of some no-good good ole boys. Laird Barron once graced the humor of the story with it’s own name: Tuggsian. This blend of supernatural revenge and pure backwoods bumbling definitely lives up to that name.

The much-reprinted “Fat Face” takes us into the seedy underworld of prostitutes and drug dealers in San Francisco, while other tales such as “Dagoniad,” “Copping Squid,” and “Tsathoggua” vividly meld Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the contemporary world of California, with its swimming pools and beachcombers. Shea was also fascinated with Lovecraft’s novel of Antarctic horror, At the Mountains of Madness, and his stories “Under the Shelf” and “Beneath the Beardmore” take us to that frozen land of death and terror.

The title story, “Demiurge,” is a previously unpublished novella that draws upon Lovecraft’s tales of psychic possession in its chilling portrayal of a nameless monster who may be the harbinger of the overthrow of the entire human race.

Michael Shea (1946–2014) was the award-winning author of The Color out of Time, the Nifft the Lean series of fantasy novels, and the classic tales “Polyphemus” and “The Autopsy.” This volume of his complete Cthulhu Mythos tales has been assembled by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft and the Mythos.

Dark Regions Press in Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Micheal Shea Edited by S. T. Joshi.

NEW BOOK from HIPPOCAMPUS PRESS “And Death Shall Have No Dominion: A Tribute to Michael Shea”

Devotees of World Fantasy Award–winner Michael Shea’s work will welcome this tribute volume, a labor of love put together by his widow, Linda, and weird fiction expert Joshi. The entries range from poems to excerpts from his longer fiction, including the epic fantasy series Nifft the Lean.

There are enough glimpses of Shea’s impressive imagination to make newcomers seek out more of his writings. One highlight is an unpublished novella, the moving “Credit Card,” in which the lead, Ricky Deuce, journeys to see his cancer-stricken wife, Angie, who has to impersonate her sister to get insurance coverage.

A number of talented writers, including Laird Barron and Jessica Amanda Salmonson, share their memories of Shea. The last word, appropriately, belongs to the author himself, in the form of a short meditation about horror in which he lyrically describes humankind as “spinning inside a discus of dust and fire flung out by the first heartbeat of time.”

Review from Publishers Weekly.

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Michael Whelan, Alan Clark, Alan Kozlowski, Steve Gilbert and John Stewart’s illustrations of Shea work are also in the books as well as tributes and remembrances written by people in the field:  Laird Barron, Sam Hamm, Jessica Salmonsen, Wilum Pugmire, just to name a few.

Michael first came to writing, intending to be a poet and one can always hear his love of meter and song in all of his prose.

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