The Watchers Out of Time and Others

by August Derleth, H.P. Lovecraft

The story themes set forth by H.P. Lovecraft and developed by August Derleth have been collected into one omnibus of post-mortem collaborations belonging virtually to every period of Lovecraft's work. The tales follow a common pattern. A lineal descendent of the Whateleys, the Marshes, or the Bishops - or a similarly molded character of problematical nature - settles among the rugged hills and dark forests of his New England ancestry or in the neighborhood of a deteriorated coastal town. Occasionally, a nocturnal habitue of the byways and alleys of the Rhode Island capital succeeds the customary figure. Ancient rites and black magic still abet the forces of evil. The vestigial aura of malignancy pervading the landscape and the concomitant pipping of the frogs and whippoorwills give substance to the strange half-whispered tales among the old families. Inevitably the protagonist's curiosity and subsequent investigations prove his downfall - but, fortunately, not before the hasty scrawls of the perennial manuscript have produced those pleasant nostalgic shudders. The resemblances, the, are obvious. But Derleth, cleverly and entertainingly, maintains interest and suspense, rearranging with novel twists and varying distortion the fundamental elements.
For devotees of the Gothic tradition, this collection is a feast of good reading, incurring a debt of gratitude to August Derleth for preserving the essence of that eldritch world created by H.P. Lovecraft.

***

This edition was published by Arkham House. There exists three prints of the original Arkham House hardcover:
- First Printing: 1974 (approx. 5,000 copies)
- Second Printing: 1984 (approx. 2,000 copies)
- Third Printing: 1988 (approx. 3,000 copies)
Later variants of the collection, often titled simply "The Watchers Out of Time," were published as paperbacks by other publishers such as Carroll & Graf in 1991 and Del Rey in 2008.

Genres: Horror, Fiction

405 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and for his own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the Cosmic Horror genre, as well as his founding of the publisher Arkham House (which did much to bring supernatural fiction into print in hardcover in the US that had only been readily available in the UK), Derleth was a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography

A 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, Derleth considered his most serious work to be the ambitious Sac Prairie Saga, a series of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works designed to memorialize life in the Wisconsin he knew. Derleth can also be considered a pioneering naturalist and conservationist in his writing

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augus...]

Reviews

[The Artificer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Derleth may deserve much of the credit for keeping HP Lovecraft's legacy alive with his printing of "The Outsider and Others", but he did the mythos no favors with this particular collection of stories.

These are, at best, rehashings of previous Lovecraft stories, and at worst, a dumbing down and 'Westernizing' of the mythos itself. Derleth applied a bizarre almost alchemical 'Elemental' nature to the Great Old Ones where none existed as Lovecraft created them, he also made them "evil" rather than simply indifferent to humanity.

If you are looking for a collection of Lovecraft look elsewhere. If you've read all of Lovecraft's original works, his rewrites and ghostwriting, Chambers, Smith, and Blackwood, and STILL need more Mythos...

Then this might be your book.

[Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Repetitive, derivative, and boring, I have slogged my way through another collection of August Derleth’s interminable pastiches of Lovecraft's fiction. I need to quit being such a completist. Oh well! This edition of “The Watchers Out of Time,” published by Derleth's own press Arkham House, includes also the novella “The Lurker on the Threshold,” through which glimmers of something interesting appear, perhaps holdovers from Lovecraft's notes. These glimmers are later drowned in turgid, uninspired prose and Derleth’s awkward refurbishing of Mythos as a binary battle between cosmic forces of good and evil, a designation that never really works. This addition of morality rings hollow throughout the rest of these tales which hew to almost the same formula in each, a riffing of one or more of Lovecraft’s stories retold in a more conventional, boring manner.

The worst part of Watchers is the facade it presents of being at least partially written by Lovecraft himself, when less than 5% or so of the entire work was cribbed from his notebook by Derleth and it really shows. I imagine that if I had read this as my introduction to Lovecraft’s writings, I don’t think I would have gone further, and in no way would I have understood what the fuss was about; they are, at best, passable, standard supernatural horror, not suspenseful in the least and adding absolutely nothing new to the genre, in direct contrast to the genre defying, eerie, idiosyncratic writing of Lovecraft himself. For anyone who has read any of Lovecraft, or even any of his better followers, one can already figure out where the story is going by the end of the first paragraph; no surprises, no suspense, it seems Derleth never tired of writing the exact same plot over and over.

[Chuck McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautiful hardback edition of Arkham House's The Watchers Out of Time and Others is an excellent read and includes a couple of absolute classics of Lovecraft's short stories, including 'The Shadow Out of Space', 'The Shuttered Room', "The Watchers Out of Time', along with some lesser-known tales. The entire series to which this edition belongs is worth getting your hands on if you're a fan or collector of Lovecraft.

[Marvin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lovecraft's fragments of stories reedited, rewritten, and often reinterpreted by August Derleth. And that is the problem. Derleth was nowhere near the writer that Lovecraft was and, while he tried hard to keep the Lovecraftian atmosphere, most of these stories fall flat. A good one to avoid unless you are a Lovecraft completist.

[Alexie_Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ya que te acostumbras al estilo de escritura de Lovecraft sus historias son muy geniales; ese misterio monstruoso y el horror cósmico hace trabajar tu cerebro intentando imaginarte las situaciones y a las criaturas pero... me quede con la intriga en "Los que vigilan desde el tiempo" pues esta incompleta.