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.

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