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In Lovecraft's Shadow: The Cthulhu Mythos Stories of August Derleth
A protégé of H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth patterned his own eerie fiction after images and themes taken from the horror stories written by Lovecraft for the pulp magazine Weird Tales. It was Derleth who formally named the myth pattern permeating his mentor's works after a fearsome alien being called Cthulhu who made but a single appearance in Lovecraft's ouevre. Derleth continued Lovecraft's legacy with his own series of highly original tales, set in a similar dark universe where chaos and evil vie with humanity for control of the world. This anthology collects the best of Derleth's horror cycle.
351 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1988
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About the author
August Derleth
885 books298 followersAugust 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...]
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...]
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November 24, 2017
I’m a longtime H.P. Lovecraft fan. I’ve taught his work, too; in fact, as I write this, an adorable green Cthulhu plush toy, a gift from a former student, studies me from a nearby shelf.
But one night a few years ago I asked my wife, who was studying her Kindle particularly intently, what she was reading. When she answered “The Watcher in the Window and Other Stories” by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, I—according to her—“sneered.”
I honestly have no memory of this incident, but I’m sure it’s true. Like many others, I’ve long thought of August Derleth as nothing but a talentless opportunist who, after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, hijacked the fallen writer’s copyrights and set out to create a long series of spurious “posthumous collaborations” often utilizing nothing more than a line or two of actual Lovecraft culled from the master’s notes. He also wrote many Lovecraftian stories under his own solo byline, stories that misrepresented the basics of the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” (a phrase Derleth himself coined) and doing irreparable damage to Lovecraft’s reputation for years to come. The fact that in 1939 Derleth, along with Donald Wandrei, founded Arkham House Press—still in business today—specifically to preserve and promote Lovecraft’s writings was looked at as the sole bright spot in the man’s otherwise dismal record concerning all things “HPL.”
Yet during his lifetime, and for some time after, Derleth was quite popular with horror readers. In the 1970s noted fantasy writer Jessica Amanda Salmonson went so far as to state that the Lovecraft/Derleth collaborations “were occasionally, if not usually, superior to Lovecraft writing on his blundering, bumbling own. Of all the horror fiction masters, HPL probably ranks pretty near the bottom of the list—though he would indeed belong on the list—because he was the narrowest, the blow-hardiest and the most boring. Derleth, however, was a professional. HPL was never that; he was a rank amateur who did one thing well… And yet, although he was the greater writer, Derleth is trapped in the shadow of HPL, a shadow that Derleth built himself—practically single handedly—possibly undermining his own recognition in so doing.”
But in time things changed, and Derleth was hurled into the outer darkness somewhere beyond even the cosmic Leisure World where the Great Old Ones pass their time rocking on the front porch and playing Cthulhu Parcheesi. Influencing this miserable accounting for the past couple of decades has been a passionate group of Lovecraft scholars and fans who have followed something of a scorched-earth policy regarding all things Derleth. If you don’t believe me, just have a look around at a few Lovecraftian sites online—it will take you only a few minutes to discover copious amounts of quite astonishing rage and invective toward Derleth. Reading this material one gets the sense of August Derleth as a kind of cartoon villain, a veritable Snidely Whiplash—mustachioed, top-hatted and black-hearted—doing violence to Lovecraft’s own flawlessly shining Dudley Do-Right. He was dishonest, one reads, talentless, uncomprehending, and worthless. The tone of these critics is often so over-the-top, so splenetic, that I’ve begun to wonder if there might be room in the “Physician’s Desk Reference” for a newly-diagnosed disease—DDS, or Derleth Derangement Syndrome.
Well, to summarize I’ll quote one of the more temperate of such reviewers: “Derleth was a hack, and everybody knows it.”
But my finding is that in matters of this sort it’s exactly those things that “everybody knows” which are most in need of re-examination. And having spent considerable time lately with his writings, I’ve become convinced that no one is more in need of re-examining than August Derleth.
Whatever one thinks of him, there is no question that Derleth (1909-1971) was an extraordinary figure. Author of over a hundred books ranging from mainstream regional fiction set in his native Wisconsin to poetry praised by the likes of Edgar Lee Masters to books of Wisconsin history to biographies of Emerson and Thoreau to popular mysteries starring his Sherlock Holmes doppelganger Solar Pons, Derleth was a protean literary figure. His association with H.P. Lovecraft began through correspondence when Derleth was still a young man; it blossomed as the less-experienced writer slowly grew into a professional author partly through Lovecraft’s encouragement and tutelage. With Lovecraft’s approval he was, along with several others, writing stories set within the Cthulhu Mythos and selling them to WEIRD TALES when he was in his early twenties. One of the most moving sections of Derleth’s beautiful “Village Year,” a selection of writings from his journals focused mostly on nature and life in his home town of Sac Prairie, comes when he learns of the passing of his literary mentor:
“I was profoundly shocked and grieved today,” he writes, “to learn by letter from Howard Wandrei that H.P. Lovecraft has died. This was by chance on the way to the marshes, and I carried H.P.L. with me hour after hour, sharing with the memory of him this Wisconsin landscape he will now never know, though he had hoped some day to know it. Mentor, friend, scholar—all these he was to me and more; he never ceased to encourage, to stimulate, to advise; he was tolerant with every opinion, wise and kind always…The qualities of mind and spirit that were his, I should be well pleased to possess.”
This lovely paragraph illustrates something that his detractors are loath to admit: August Derleth could write. Consider the opening paragraph from “Village Year”:
“Walking through a gentle fall of snow tonight to grandfather Derleth’s, and knowing grandmother to be dying, I could not help thinking of change, and all the aspects of change eternally taking place, some clearly obvious, and so many secret, but no less eventually plain to the eye and heart: the eternal flux—and I thought: It is more than just birth and death, more than a tree gone, a house risen: the slow, inexorable changing of a way of life, the difference between youth and age, in final analysis always the gulf between generations. Snow came down with a faint whispering, and in the melancholy of my occupation with grandmother’s slow dying, I thought of these flakes as voices all around me in the still, windless air, the voices of those people and things long gone, the remote pulse of life gone by.”
Or this:
“At the line of earth and sky, two solitary lights shone, yellow and far, like stars, and I was taken again by the feeling of loneliness, a kind of sadness that always strikes into me when I see these far lights shining steadily and alone far out on the prairie, because they seem to symbolize a certain mystery of earth and the living upon it. Because I do not know who lives there, and have no wish to know, they stand for the fundamental mystery I apprehend in every life, in every dwelling around me all the time, the knowledge that attempts to understand lives and their motives are too often folly, for the complexity of one laid bare is no key to all the others, and we are all crying in the wilderness.”
This is simply gorgeous, and shows Derleth’s clear indebtedness to Emerson and Thoreau; yet it is very much Derleth in language and tone. “Village Year” is filled with such writing; it’s a brilliant book. One wonders how such a talentless hack managed to write it.
Of course some (not all) of Derleth’s detractors are willing to admit that he may have created writing of quality in other areas, but that his Lovecraftian efforts are utterly without merit—“a mass of sub-literary rubbish,” in one professional critic’s coolly objective phrase; “only the critically naïve—or inept—could find virtues” in it. This is quite a statement, since one such work, the posthumous collaboration “The Shuttered Room”—frequently reprinted and twice filmed—must be counted among the most famous works ever to have appeared under H.P. Lovecraft’s name. (This powerful tale, written by Derleth from Lovecraft’s notes, can be found in “The Watcher in the Window and Other Stories.”)
Well, at the risk of appearing both naïve and inept, I go on record here to say that I have just finished reading Derleth’s collection “In Lovecraft’s Shadow” (Mycroft & Moran)—and have thoroughly enjoyed it. This book, large format and magnificently illustrated by the great fantasy artist Stephen Fabian, contains none of the posthumous collaborations, only work that Derleth published under his name alone (along with a handful of actual collaborations with Mark Schorer and Robert E. Howard). Reading these stories is inevitably a bit like reading fan fiction—Lovecraft’s shadow does indeed hover over the pages, just as it does over the pages of the Cthulhu Mythos tales of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and…well, anybody who ever wrote a Lovecratian story other than Lovecraft himself. But unlike Derleth’s Lovecraft collaborations, most of these tales do not attempt to mimic Lovecraft’s highly elaborate, baroque style; they use the characters and imagery of the Cthulhu Mythos universe, but are told in much plainer, pulp-fiction language. The stories themselves are more plot-oriented than Lovecraft’s generally were; things happen much more swiftly in Derleth, and what he sacrifices in atmosphere (surely Lovecraft’s crowning strength as a writer) he makes up for in pure, propulsive storytelling.
The difference might be expressed this way: that Lovecraft is to Derleth as, say, a volume of “The Collected Works of Poe” is to a stack of “Tales of the Crypt” comic books. Simply put, Derleth’s Mythos stories are fun in a way that Lovecraft’s, for all their greatness, rarely are. Again and again in reading Derleth’s stories I found myself thinking of the Saturday afternoon serials children flocked to in the 1930s and ’40s—never more so than with a story such as “Lair of the Star Spawn,” which combines Lovecraftian monsters with a lost-city narrative that is both corny and quite exciting. Later efforts remove some of the silliness, but Derleth does have a tendency to literalize the Creatures From Beyond in a way Lovecraft never did, leading to a diminution of cosmic mystery but an increase in sheer movie-style entertainment. Indeed, after I read my first Derleth Mythos story, “The Dweller in Darkness,” I told my wife that while it didn’t totally succeed as a Lovecraft story, it would have made a marvelous episode of THE OUTER LIMITS. (As it turned out, I wasn’t far wrong; Derleth never had any work on OUTER LIMITS but several of his stories were adapted for LIGHTS OUT, NIGHT GALLERY, and, most notably, Boris Karloff’s THRILLER.)
As long as one keeps in mind that Derleth is not Lovecraft, and that his tales have a fundamentally different tone and approach, “In Lovecraft’s Shadow” offers great pleasures. In addition to “Lair of the Star Spawn” and “The Dweller in Darkness,” I particularly enjoyed “The Thing That Walked on the Wind,” “The Return of Hastur,” “The Whippoorwills in the Hills,” and “The Seal of R’lyeh.” Most of these stories originally appeared in WEIRD TALES, the premiere magazine of its time for such fiction (and indeed Lovecraft’s own main publisher), and they’ve been reprinted many times in anthologies. Not bad for sub-literary rubbish.
To be sure, it’s fair to say that the Cthulhu Mythos stories do not represent August Derleth at his best. No pastiche ever represents any writer at his best; pastiches and shared-universe stories invariably involve borrowed ideas and approaches. Howard, Leiber, and Bloch all produced numerous Cthulhu stories, but would anyone seriously claim that they represent the best work of the creators of Conan the Barbarian, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and “Psycho”?
Another criticism sometimes leveled at this collection, that the stories are repetitive, has a certain validity. On the other hand, has there ever been a major writer more repetitive than H.P. Lovecraft? As Salmonson wrote in the ’70s, Lovecraft did “one thing well.” He was able to create an unparalleled sense of mounting dread and terror through his use of elaborate descriptions, invariably heavy on obscure adjectives, which reflected his conception of “cosmic fear.” No one ever did it better. But reading a lot of Lovecraft stories in one go can lead to an uncomfortable sense that most of them are pretty much the same story. In that sense Lovecraft was a bit of a literary one-trick pony—but it was a hell of a trick.
Too, for all his regard for Lovecraft himself, Derleth seems not to have taken the Mythos terribly seriously; he claimed that Lovecraft himself created the stories “as pure entertainment, no more,” and described them as “minor but curiously interesting tales in the Gothic tradition.” It is exactly this attitude which Derleth brought to his own Mythos tales, and it is, alas, exactly this attitude which enrages the anti-Derleth folks. Was Derleth blind to the very real literary qualities of Lovecraft’s stories? Maybe. Do today’s Lovecraft obsessives take their hero a mite too seriously? Definitely.
It’s not as if Derleth is beyond criticism in terms of his role in Lovecraftian history. There seems to be no question that he did commit a good deal of jiggery-pokery in order to get control of Lovecraft’s copyrights after the writer’s death, just as there is no question that it was fundamentally dishonest of him to bill stories he himself had written as “by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.” (Though one wonders what readers might have thought of him putting only his own name on stories which were actually derived from notes and lines in Lovecraft’s papers.) Anyway, if we start throwing writers under the bus because of their dubious morals and ethics, we’ll soon end up with a pretty empty bus. Lovecraft himself, with his virulent xenophobia and racism, certainly won’t be on it.
But however one views the extra- (or sub-) literary shenanigans of August Derleth, it’s surely time for a reassessment of this unique writer. His non-Lovecraftian horror tales, collected in such books as “Who Shall I Say Is Calling? and Other Stories” and “That Is Not Dead,” available from the August Derleth Society (derleth.org), are a fine place to start. And “Village Year,” his journal of life in Sac Prairie, is magnificent; it deserves the status of American Classic—a book that belongs on your shelf right next to “Walden.”
And, yes, the Lovecraft stories are worth reading too—“In Lovecraft’s Shadow” and “The Watcher in the Window and Other Stories” are fine books which each contain at least some stories which are as effective as many of Lovecraft’s.
No doubt about it: I’ve discovered that I was wrong, terribly wrong, to sneer at my wife’s taste for Derleth years ago, to accept without question what “everybody knows.” His Lovecraftian work is in fact quite worthwhile—but only for fans who don’t take the Mythos, or themselves, too seriously.
Think of it this way: if you’re the kind of Lovecraft fan for whom the name August Derleth induces the rage-and-ridicule symptoms of DDS, you should stay away from these books; they will definitely bring on an attack. On the other hand, they may be for you if you’re someone who can have fun with a lighter approach to the Mythos…and maybe even enjoy cuddling a Cthulhu plush toy once in a while.
Four stars for Derleth; one bonus star for this edition’s gorgeous Stephen Fabian illustrations.
But one night a few years ago I asked my wife, who was studying her Kindle particularly intently, what she was reading. When she answered “The Watcher in the Window and Other Stories” by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, I—according to her—“sneered.”
I honestly have no memory of this incident, but I’m sure it’s true. Like many others, I’ve long thought of August Derleth as nothing but a talentless opportunist who, after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, hijacked the fallen writer’s copyrights and set out to create a long series of spurious “posthumous collaborations” often utilizing nothing more than a line or two of actual Lovecraft culled from the master’s notes. He also wrote many Lovecraftian stories under his own solo byline, stories that misrepresented the basics of the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” (a phrase Derleth himself coined) and doing irreparable damage to Lovecraft’s reputation for years to come. The fact that in 1939 Derleth, along with Donald Wandrei, founded Arkham House Press—still in business today—specifically to preserve and promote Lovecraft’s writings was looked at as the sole bright spot in the man’s otherwise dismal record concerning all things “HPL.”
Yet during his lifetime, and for some time after, Derleth was quite popular with horror readers. In the 1970s noted fantasy writer Jessica Amanda Salmonson went so far as to state that the Lovecraft/Derleth collaborations “were occasionally, if not usually, superior to Lovecraft writing on his blundering, bumbling own. Of all the horror fiction masters, HPL probably ranks pretty near the bottom of the list—though he would indeed belong on the list—because he was the narrowest, the blow-hardiest and the most boring. Derleth, however, was a professional. HPL was never that; he was a rank amateur who did one thing well… And yet, although he was the greater writer, Derleth is trapped in the shadow of HPL, a shadow that Derleth built himself—practically single handedly—possibly undermining his own recognition in so doing.”
But in time things changed, and Derleth was hurled into the outer darkness somewhere beyond even the cosmic Leisure World where the Great Old Ones pass their time rocking on the front porch and playing Cthulhu Parcheesi. Influencing this miserable accounting for the past couple of decades has been a passionate group of Lovecraft scholars and fans who have followed something of a scorched-earth policy regarding all things Derleth. If you don’t believe me, just have a look around at a few Lovecraftian sites online—it will take you only a few minutes to discover copious amounts of quite astonishing rage and invective toward Derleth. Reading this material one gets the sense of August Derleth as a kind of cartoon villain, a veritable Snidely Whiplash—mustachioed, top-hatted and black-hearted—doing violence to Lovecraft’s own flawlessly shining Dudley Do-Right. He was dishonest, one reads, talentless, uncomprehending, and worthless. The tone of these critics is often so over-the-top, so splenetic, that I’ve begun to wonder if there might be room in the “Physician’s Desk Reference” for a newly-diagnosed disease—DDS, or Derleth Derangement Syndrome.
Well, to summarize I’ll quote one of the more temperate of such reviewers: “Derleth was a hack, and everybody knows it.”
But my finding is that in matters of this sort it’s exactly those things that “everybody knows” which are most in need of re-examination. And having spent considerable time lately with his writings, I’ve become convinced that no one is more in need of re-examining than August Derleth.
Whatever one thinks of him, there is no question that Derleth (1909-1971) was an extraordinary figure. Author of over a hundred books ranging from mainstream regional fiction set in his native Wisconsin to poetry praised by the likes of Edgar Lee Masters to books of Wisconsin history to biographies of Emerson and Thoreau to popular mysteries starring his Sherlock Holmes doppelganger Solar Pons, Derleth was a protean literary figure. His association with H.P. Lovecraft began through correspondence when Derleth was still a young man; it blossomed as the less-experienced writer slowly grew into a professional author partly through Lovecraft’s encouragement and tutelage. With Lovecraft’s approval he was, along with several others, writing stories set within the Cthulhu Mythos and selling them to WEIRD TALES when he was in his early twenties. One of the most moving sections of Derleth’s beautiful “Village Year,” a selection of writings from his journals focused mostly on nature and life in his home town of Sac Prairie, comes when he learns of the passing of his literary mentor:
“I was profoundly shocked and grieved today,” he writes, “to learn by letter from Howard Wandrei that H.P. Lovecraft has died. This was by chance on the way to the marshes, and I carried H.P.L. with me hour after hour, sharing with the memory of him this Wisconsin landscape he will now never know, though he had hoped some day to know it. Mentor, friend, scholar—all these he was to me and more; he never ceased to encourage, to stimulate, to advise; he was tolerant with every opinion, wise and kind always…The qualities of mind and spirit that were his, I should be well pleased to possess.”
This lovely paragraph illustrates something that his detractors are loath to admit: August Derleth could write. Consider the opening paragraph from “Village Year”:
“Walking through a gentle fall of snow tonight to grandfather Derleth’s, and knowing grandmother to be dying, I could not help thinking of change, and all the aspects of change eternally taking place, some clearly obvious, and so many secret, but no less eventually plain to the eye and heart: the eternal flux—and I thought: It is more than just birth and death, more than a tree gone, a house risen: the slow, inexorable changing of a way of life, the difference between youth and age, in final analysis always the gulf between generations. Snow came down with a faint whispering, and in the melancholy of my occupation with grandmother’s slow dying, I thought of these flakes as voices all around me in the still, windless air, the voices of those people and things long gone, the remote pulse of life gone by.”
Or this:
“At the line of earth and sky, two solitary lights shone, yellow and far, like stars, and I was taken again by the feeling of loneliness, a kind of sadness that always strikes into me when I see these far lights shining steadily and alone far out on the prairie, because they seem to symbolize a certain mystery of earth and the living upon it. Because I do not know who lives there, and have no wish to know, they stand for the fundamental mystery I apprehend in every life, in every dwelling around me all the time, the knowledge that attempts to understand lives and their motives are too often folly, for the complexity of one laid bare is no key to all the others, and we are all crying in the wilderness.”
This is simply gorgeous, and shows Derleth’s clear indebtedness to Emerson and Thoreau; yet it is very much Derleth in language and tone. “Village Year” is filled with such writing; it’s a brilliant book. One wonders how such a talentless hack managed to write it.
Of course some (not all) of Derleth’s detractors are willing to admit that he may have created writing of quality in other areas, but that his Lovecraftian efforts are utterly without merit—“a mass of sub-literary rubbish,” in one professional critic’s coolly objective phrase; “only the critically naïve—or inept—could find virtues” in it. This is quite a statement, since one such work, the posthumous collaboration “The Shuttered Room”—frequently reprinted and twice filmed—must be counted among the most famous works ever to have appeared under H.P. Lovecraft’s name. (This powerful tale, written by Derleth from Lovecraft’s notes, can be found in “The Watcher in the Window and Other Stories.”)
Well, at the risk of appearing both naïve and inept, I go on record here to say that I have just finished reading Derleth’s collection “In Lovecraft’s Shadow” (Mycroft & Moran)—and have thoroughly enjoyed it. This book, large format and magnificently illustrated by the great fantasy artist Stephen Fabian, contains none of the posthumous collaborations, only work that Derleth published under his name alone (along with a handful of actual collaborations with Mark Schorer and Robert E. Howard). Reading these stories is inevitably a bit like reading fan fiction—Lovecraft’s shadow does indeed hover over the pages, just as it does over the pages of the Cthulhu Mythos tales of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and…well, anybody who ever wrote a Lovecratian story other than Lovecraft himself. But unlike Derleth’s Lovecraft collaborations, most of these tales do not attempt to mimic Lovecraft’s highly elaborate, baroque style; they use the characters and imagery of the Cthulhu Mythos universe, but are told in much plainer, pulp-fiction language. The stories themselves are more plot-oriented than Lovecraft’s generally were; things happen much more swiftly in Derleth, and what he sacrifices in atmosphere (surely Lovecraft’s crowning strength as a writer) he makes up for in pure, propulsive storytelling.
The difference might be expressed this way: that Lovecraft is to Derleth as, say, a volume of “The Collected Works of Poe” is to a stack of “Tales of the Crypt” comic books. Simply put, Derleth’s Mythos stories are fun in a way that Lovecraft’s, for all their greatness, rarely are. Again and again in reading Derleth’s stories I found myself thinking of the Saturday afternoon serials children flocked to in the 1930s and ’40s—never more so than with a story such as “Lair of the Star Spawn,” which combines Lovecraftian monsters with a lost-city narrative that is both corny and quite exciting. Later efforts remove some of the silliness, but Derleth does have a tendency to literalize the Creatures From Beyond in a way Lovecraft never did, leading to a diminution of cosmic mystery but an increase in sheer movie-style entertainment. Indeed, after I read my first Derleth Mythos story, “The Dweller in Darkness,” I told my wife that while it didn’t totally succeed as a Lovecraft story, it would have made a marvelous episode of THE OUTER LIMITS. (As it turned out, I wasn’t far wrong; Derleth never had any work on OUTER LIMITS but several of his stories were adapted for LIGHTS OUT, NIGHT GALLERY, and, most notably, Boris Karloff’s THRILLER.)
As long as one keeps in mind that Derleth is not Lovecraft, and that his tales have a fundamentally different tone and approach, “In Lovecraft’s Shadow” offers great pleasures. In addition to “Lair of the Star Spawn” and “The Dweller in Darkness,” I particularly enjoyed “The Thing That Walked on the Wind,” “The Return of Hastur,” “The Whippoorwills in the Hills,” and “The Seal of R’lyeh.” Most of these stories originally appeared in WEIRD TALES, the premiere magazine of its time for such fiction (and indeed Lovecraft’s own main publisher), and they’ve been reprinted many times in anthologies. Not bad for sub-literary rubbish.
To be sure, it’s fair to say that the Cthulhu Mythos stories do not represent August Derleth at his best. No pastiche ever represents any writer at his best; pastiches and shared-universe stories invariably involve borrowed ideas and approaches. Howard, Leiber, and Bloch all produced numerous Cthulhu stories, but would anyone seriously claim that they represent the best work of the creators of Conan the Barbarian, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and “Psycho”?
Another criticism sometimes leveled at this collection, that the stories are repetitive, has a certain validity. On the other hand, has there ever been a major writer more repetitive than H.P. Lovecraft? As Salmonson wrote in the ’70s, Lovecraft did “one thing well.” He was able to create an unparalleled sense of mounting dread and terror through his use of elaborate descriptions, invariably heavy on obscure adjectives, which reflected his conception of “cosmic fear.” No one ever did it better. But reading a lot of Lovecraft stories in one go can lead to an uncomfortable sense that most of them are pretty much the same story. In that sense Lovecraft was a bit of a literary one-trick pony—but it was a hell of a trick.
Too, for all his regard for Lovecraft himself, Derleth seems not to have taken the Mythos terribly seriously; he claimed that Lovecraft himself created the stories “as pure entertainment, no more,” and described them as “minor but curiously interesting tales in the Gothic tradition.” It is exactly this attitude which Derleth brought to his own Mythos tales, and it is, alas, exactly this attitude which enrages the anti-Derleth folks. Was Derleth blind to the very real literary qualities of Lovecraft’s stories? Maybe. Do today’s Lovecraft obsessives take their hero a mite too seriously? Definitely.
It’s not as if Derleth is beyond criticism in terms of his role in Lovecraftian history. There seems to be no question that he did commit a good deal of jiggery-pokery in order to get control of Lovecraft’s copyrights after the writer’s death, just as there is no question that it was fundamentally dishonest of him to bill stories he himself had written as “by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.” (Though one wonders what readers might have thought of him putting only his own name on stories which were actually derived from notes and lines in Lovecraft’s papers.) Anyway, if we start throwing writers under the bus because of their dubious morals and ethics, we’ll soon end up with a pretty empty bus. Lovecraft himself, with his virulent xenophobia and racism, certainly won’t be on it.
But however one views the extra- (or sub-) literary shenanigans of August Derleth, it’s surely time for a reassessment of this unique writer. His non-Lovecraftian horror tales, collected in such books as “Who Shall I Say Is Calling? and Other Stories” and “That Is Not Dead,” available from the August Derleth Society (derleth.org), are a fine place to start. And “Village Year,” his journal of life in Sac Prairie, is magnificent; it deserves the status of American Classic—a book that belongs on your shelf right next to “Walden.”
And, yes, the Lovecraft stories are worth reading too—“In Lovecraft’s Shadow” and “The Watcher in the Window and Other Stories” are fine books which each contain at least some stories which are as effective as many of Lovecraft’s.
No doubt about it: I’ve discovered that I was wrong, terribly wrong, to sneer at my wife’s taste for Derleth years ago, to accept without question what “everybody knows.” His Lovecraftian work is in fact quite worthwhile—but only for fans who don’t take the Mythos, or themselves, too seriously.
Think of it this way: if you’re the kind of Lovecraft fan for whom the name August Derleth induces the rage-and-ridicule symptoms of DDS, you should stay away from these books; they will definitely bring on an attack. On the other hand, they may be for you if you’re someone who can have fun with a lighter approach to the Mythos…and maybe even enjoy cuddling a Cthulhu plush toy once in a while.
Four stars for Derleth; one bonus star for this edition’s gorgeous Stephen Fabian illustrations.
October 7, 2017
August Derleth was a student of Lovecraft's work, and although critics of work would call him highly derivative, I would call it some really nice examples of fan fic. Lovecraft died an obscure author, and it was Derleth, who promoted Lovecraft's work through the creation of the publishing company Arkham House, who is responsible for Lovecraft's notoriety. Reading this anthology is my first foray into Derleth's works, and I am excited to read more. So far, in my reading of "The Dweller in Darkness," a nice little tale of Nyarlathotep, I've noted that Derleth is a name dropper, almost like a gossip magazine. If it's a proper noun used by Lovecraft, it's in this story by Derleth.
"Beyond the Threshold" was good. Lots of pipes and chanting. I like the Wisconsin thing that Derleth has going on - I was getting a little tired of Howie's New England. "Ithaqua" makes strides with the Western, Wisconsin feel. Here we have an ancient elemental, an evil being of snow and ice, worshipped by the native American tribes in the area. The story starts when three frozen bodies fall from the sky. The last couple of stories in this first section were mediocre and short.
The middle section of this book is a reprint of "The Mask of Cthulhu," which I've reviewed separately here. I enjoyed most of the stories, but in particular, I liked "The Seal of R'yleh" because of the romantic element involved in the search for Cthulhu, and also "The Whippporwills in the Hills", not for the birds, which were cool and sinister in an Alfred Hitchcock sort of way, but because of the party line gossipping that was the norm for the local yokels.
Although Derleth can not come close to Lovecraft's ability to write a creepy tale, I think it is unfair that w compare the two. Derleth takes the original and does his own thing. And he does it well, in his own style. Bravo to a some great, fun stories.
"Beyond the Threshold" was good. Lots of pipes and chanting. I like the Wisconsin thing that Derleth has going on - I was getting a little tired of Howie's New England. "Ithaqua" makes strides with the Western, Wisconsin feel. Here we have an ancient elemental, an evil being of snow and ice, worshipped by the native American tribes in the area. The story starts when three frozen bodies fall from the sky. The last couple of stories in this first section were mediocre and short.
The middle section of this book is a reprint of "The Mask of Cthulhu," which I've reviewed separately here. I enjoyed most of the stories, but in particular, I liked "The Seal of R'yleh" because of the romantic element involved in the search for Cthulhu, and also "The Whippporwills in the Hills", not for the birds, which were cool and sinister in an Alfred Hitchcock sort of way, but because of the party line gossipping that was the norm for the local yokels.
Although Derleth can not come close to Lovecraft's ability to write a creepy tale, I think it is unfair that w compare the two. Derleth takes the original and does his own thing. And he does it well, in his own style. Bravo to a some great, fun stories.
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