"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 14 - Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

heroes into my horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Let's face it, most stories
or novels in the triple genres have at least one such. Robert E. Howard
created an entire galaxy of them, mostly eclipsed by Conan; Jack Vance's
Dying Earth novels had perhaps the weirdest, best loved of all weird heroes,
Cugel the Clever; even H. P. Lovecraft—the Old Gent of Providence,
Rhode Island, who wasn't especially known for tales of derring-do—had
his main man, despite that Randolph Carter came close to fainting on more
than one occasion. However:
It isn't that the heroes presented here are necessarily my favorites from
my own books (they're all pretty much my favorites . . . how does one sep-
arate out a favorite child?). But it is that these stories are either brand-
new, or they've not hitherto seen mass market publication in America. The
Dreamland tales weren't included in the Hero of Dreams series because
they were relatively new when that quartet was published and wouldn't
fit into the collection of short stories and novelettes titled Iced on Aran. But
they fit perfectly well here. The Titus Crow stories—including his origin
and his first encounter with satanic forces—were only available in a hand-
some small-press book and in a paperback collection in the United King-
dom. There are several more Titus Crow tales, but the ones presented here
are my favorites, at least of this weird hero's exploits.
Then we get to Harry Keogh, the eponymous Necroscope.
Not so long ago, during a transatlantic telephone conversation with my
American friend and publisher, Tom Doherty, the subject of the Necro-
scope surfaced when Tom mentioned The Lost Years, a pair of prequels I
 INTRODUCTION

had written to cover what seemed a protracted period of inactivity in Harry
Keogh's life. But Tom had noticed, like a good many others before him,
a gaping hole in the chronology. There was plenty of time which I hadn't
yet accounted for. Hadn't the Necroscope done anything during that period
between The Lost Years and The Source}
Well, that set the wheels turning. I still had a few notes lying about
from years ago, when I'd been working on the books in the series: this or
that paragraph, hand-written on a scrap of paper, literally a few, mainly
undecipherable words; eleven typed but coffee-stained, creased-up pages; a
short incomplete Keogh episode or adventure that hadn't wanted to fit in
at the time .. . that sort of thing. And I remembered all of the short stories
I'd worked into the longer novels. Like Wratha's story in Blood Brothers,
and poor little Cynthia's tale, in The Last Aerie. And I saw that indeed
there was no reason why the Necroscope had to be written large; Harry
could as well put in appearances in short stories and novelettes as in inch-
and-a-half-thick blockbuster novels. And Tom Doherty was right: there
was indeed this gap in the chronology.
So let's cut a long story short. The bits and pieces came together in two
novelettes, Dead Eddy and Dinosaur Dreams, and the eleven coffee-stained
pages were rewritten, expanded, and typed up into the short episode set
on Starside in the vampire world. (The reason why Resurrection didn't
appear in Deadspawn, which was to have been its original destination, is
that at the time, thirteen years ago, I thought it was too like a dark episode
toward the end of The Source. I can't think why I thought that, because