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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“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.

Written with Shea’s vibrant originality, humor, wit and street sense, the story is set in contemporary San Francisco. It pays homage to H.P. Lovecraft’s “Whisperers in Darkness” in which Tsathoggua (1930) first appeared, and to Clark Ashton Smith’s, “Tales of the Satampra Zeiros” (1931).

Michael’s “Tsathoggua” was originally published by Centipede Press, in the Shea collection “The Autopsy and Other Tales” (2008). PS Publishing reprinted the story in “Copping Squid” (2009), a collection of Shea Mythos. And, in 2017, Dark Regions Press re-released the tale along with the never before published novella “Demiurge”, in the collection of the same name “Demiurge:The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea”. It also appeared in Prime Book’s “The New Cthulthu, The Recent Weird” (2011).

Enjoy this FREE hour-long episode which you can listed to online or download as an mp3 from the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast.

This podcast includes the vocal stylings of Andrew Leman, a founding members of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

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.

You can also read BENEATH THE BEARDMORE in A Mountain Walked, edited by S T Joshi and published by Dark Regions Press in 2014.

It is also released May 2017 by Dark Regions Press in Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Micheal Shea Edited by S. T. Joshi.