<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Hugh B. Cave (Hugh Barnett Cave) (June 11, 1910 – June 27 2004) was born in Chester, England. He emigrated to America with his family when he was five, barely surviving the voyage when he was nearly washed overboard during an Atlantic storm. He grew up around Boston, Massachusetts, selling his first fiction in 1929.

Inspired by such writers as Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe, over the next two decades, Cave went on to publish more than 800 stories in the pulp magazines. His work regularly appeared in such popular titles as Argosy, Adventure, Weird Tales, Ghost Stories and Black Book Detective Magazine, but he is most associated with the so-called “shudder” or “weird menace” pulps, such as Horror Stories, Terror Tales, Dime Mystery Magazine, Thrilling Mysteries and Spicy Mystery Stories. He was so prolific that he would often have more than one story in a particular issue, either under his own by-line or such pseudonyms as “Geoffrey Vace” (mostly used by his brother Geoffrey (1906-88)) or the humorous "Justin Case".

With his wife and two sons he moved to Haiti for almost five years, where he wrote the travel book Haiti: Highroad to Adventure (1952) and several novels about that country. While working on another travel book, Four Paths to Paradise: A Book About Jamaica (1961), he bought a ruinate 541-acre coffee plantation in the Caribbean Island’s Blue Mountains, and spent the next 18 years restoring it while he continued to write. During this period, he contributed another 350 stories to such “slick” magazines as American Magazine, Redbook, Liberty, Collier’s, Country Gentleman, Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, including forty-six to The Saturday Evening Post alone. Cave had been almost forgotten as a horror writer when in 1972 Karl Edward Wagner saw one of the author’s stories in Good Housekeeping and contacted him. Cave had lost all the copies of his early stories and correspondence in an accidental fire in 1967, but Wagner persevered, editing and publishing Murgunstrumm and Others (1977), a collection of Cave’s best horror tales, illustrated by Lee Brown Coye. The book won the 1977 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.

A proposed companion volume of Cave’s fiction was prepared by Wagner and eventually appeared as Death Stalks the Night (1995). It was followed by a further collection of weird fiction, The Door Below (1997) and a collection of stories from Dime Detective entitled Bottled in Blonde (2000). Meanwhile, other small press imprints had started reprinting collections and chapbooks of Cave’s pulp fiction, most notably The Corpse Maker (1988) edited by Sheldon Jaffrey.

Cave returned to the horror genre in the 1970s with new stories in such magazines as Whispers and Fantasy Tales, and he produced a string of modern horror novels, most of them paperback originals. Although the author drew on his Caribbean experiences for such voodoo novels as Legion of the Dead (1979), The Evil (1981), Shades of Evil (1982), Disciples of Dread (1988), The Lower Deep (1990), Lucifer’s Eye (1991), The Evil Returns (2001), The Restless Dead (2003) and the separately published novella, [["The Mountains of Madness] (2003), he also turned to more Apocalyptic horrors in The Nebulon Horror (1980) and The Dawning (2000). Isle of the Whisperers (1999) involved an archaeologist’s search for the gateway to another dimension.

Cave received Life Achievement Awards from The Horror Writers Association in 1991, The International Horror Guild in 1998, and The World Fantasy Convention in 1999. He was also presented with the Special Convention Award at the 1997 World Fantasy Convention gathering in London, where he was co-Special Guest of Honor. Cave of a Thousand Tales (2004) is a biography of the author by his friend, Florida journalist Milt Thomas.