Lurkers

I wrote The Lurkers in Abyss when I was still at school. In fact it was only a week after I left that I received a letter from Clarence Paget on behalf of Herbert van Thal, editor of the Pan Books of Horror, accepting it for publication. The story came out the following year in the Eleventh Pan Book of Horror. It was my first professional sale.

Many years later I was contacted by John Pelan, who was compiling Cemetery Dance's massive two-volume anthology The Century's Best Horror Fiction, in which he chose what he regarded as the best horror story for each year of the twentieth century. To my surprise he had picked The Lurkers in the Abyss to represent 1970.

A particular enthusiast for that story is Johnny Mains. For several years he had tried to persuade me to write a sequel - something which I had never even contemplated, let alone tried to do. And to be honest I was far from sure there was any potential for a sequel to it. But Johnny was persistent and I did, eventually, make a few stabs at writing one, though without success. The story I needed just wouldn't come to me and the attempts all ended in the metaphorical waste bin (i.e. dumped somewhere out of the way on my computer).

When it finally hit me, the actual writing of the first draft came quick, even though it ended up twice the length of the original story. Thus Lurkers was born.

I was still far from sure about it, though, and it was only at Johnny's insistence that I finally decided to include it in my collection, The Lurkers in the Abyss and Other Tales of Terror, the one story in it which had never been published elsewhere. So it was a relief when I read Demonik's comments in his review of my collection on The Vault of Evil:


"Fleeing the scene of a not altogether successful bank robbery, Johnny runs into a gang of thugs. It's Dag and the lads, looking not a day older than when last we met, and still stubbornly immune to the wonders of Clearasil. Johnny, in no mood for humouring cretins, brandishes his sawn-off shot-gun. Dag good as laughs in his face, so the desperate villain blows away one of his mates. Chased through the backstreet's by the pack, Johnny arrives at a row of derelict houses, picks the wrong one, and plummets through the rotting boards to land in a stinking, slime-filled crater in the cellar floor.

Dag and cronies arrive to gloat from the gallery.

The first of the abominations emerges from its tunnel ....

.... and that's where the story really gets going, taking in an Aliens-style shoot out with hideous subterranean creatures and an equally terrifying encounter with a ragged, once human tribe who hunt on behalf of the Old Ones. Sequels are risky, perhaps even more so when penned by the original author. Get them wrong and you risk killing two stories in one go, but, claustrophobic and suspenseful, Lurkers works just fine for this reader."