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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but not Exceptional,
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This review is from: The Dark Brotherhood and other pieces (Hardcover)
CONTENTS:Introduction, by August Derleth "The Dark Brotherhood," by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth "Suggestions for a Reading Guide," by H. P. Lovecraft "Alfredo," by H. P. Lovecraft "Amateur Journalism: Its Possible Needs and Betterment," by H. P. Lovecraft "What Belongs in Verse," by H. P. Lovecraft "Bells," by H. P. Lovecraft "A Cycle of Verse ('Oceanus,' 'Clouds,' 'Mother Earth')," by H. P. Lovecraft "Cindy: Scrub Lady in a State Street Skyscraper," by H. P. Lovecraft "On a Battlefield in France," by H. P. Lovecraft "The Loved Dead," by C. M. Eddy, Jr. "Deaf, Dumb, and Blind," by C. M. Eddy, Jr. "The Ghost-Eater," by C. M. Eddy, Jr. "The Lovecraft 'Books': Some Addenda and Corrigenda," by William Scott Home "To Arkham and the Stars," by Fritz Leiber "Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin," by Fritz Leiber "Lovecraft and the New England Megaliths," by Andrew E. Rothovius Howard Phillips Lovecraft: A Bibliography," by Jack L. Chalker "Walks with H. P. Lovecraft," by C. M. Eddy, Jr. "The Cancer of Superstition," by H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr. "The Making of a Hoax," by August Derleth "Lovecraft's Illustrators," by John E. Vetter "Final Notes," by August Derleth. Writes S. T. Joshi of this volume: Another interesting collection of Lovecraft miscellany. Among the works by Lovecraft are "Suggestions for a Reading Guide" (an unpublished contribution to Anne Tillery Renshaw's handbook WELL BRED SPEECH [1936], "Alfredo" (a parody of an Elizabethan tragedy written in 1918), and several poems and essays on poetry. The three revisions of stories by C. M. Eddy are collected here for the first time. . . Of the works about Lovecraft, Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars" is a delightful whimsy, while "Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin" is a substantial discussion of Lovecraft's contribution to science fiction. Some controversy was raised by the publication of the Chalker bibliography, as George T. Wetzel claimed with some plausibility that Chalker had pirated Wetzel's own bibliography of 1955. Vetter's essay is still the most detailed treatment of its subject. "Final Notes" reprints most of the material in SOME NOTES ON H. P. LOVECRAFT (1959), including Barlow's journal of 1934.A number of interesting illustrations are scattered throughout the volume. The jacket by Frank Utpatel has always charm'd me. I found this the least interesting of these kinds of books published by Derleth. HPL's poetry is among his poorest, and the revisions with C. M. Eddy, Jr. are merely okay. "The Loved Dead," with its theme on necrophilia, has an intriguing history. It is debatable how much of these revisions was written by HPL. Writes Joshi, in his biography of Lovecraft (page 306): "Lovecraft reports in late October that Eddy is working on another story, entitled 'The Loved Dead'. . . There was, as with its two predecessors, in all likelihood a draft written by Eddy for this tale; but the published version (WEIRD TALES, May-June-July 1924) certainly reads as if Lovecraft had written the entire thing. Here there IS the sort of adjective-choked prose we have seen in 'The Hound' and other tales of this period--references to a 'foetid hollow', 'poison-tongued gossip', an 'exotic elixir'. and other such things. The tale is, of course, about a necrophile, who works for one undertaking establishment after another so as to secure that intimacy with corpses he desires; some passages are remarkably explicit for their day..." The story proved so successful that, in some towns, it created an uproar that led to this issue of WEIRD TALES being pulled off some newsstands. It was this event, if I am not mistaken, that resulted in Farnsworth Wright's paranoid reception of future submissions of fiction by Lovecraft. More and more of HPL's tales were rejected over time, which had the effect of slowing down his productivity to an alarming degree. The title story, "The Dark Brotherhood," is one of Derleth's fake posthumous collaborations "with" H. P,. Lovecraft, and it is certainly one of the queerest. The histories of the writing of these stories needs to be recording, and thankfully someone is now doing some excellent work on that history. I am extremely curious -- did Derleth write "The Dark Brotherhood" specifically because he was working on this new collection of Lovecraft miscellany? The story was written, then, perhaps in 1965 or whenever Augie was planning this book one would assume, and although Lovecraft's name is conjoined to ye byline, HPL had no hand in the creation of this story. It seems interesting that Derleth named the book after this new "collaboration," as he named THE SHUTTERED ROOM AND OTHER PIECES after the unfortunate title story of that book. My impression is that one of the ways in which Derleth justified adding Lovecraft's name to these stories is that Derleth strove to write the narrative in the voice of H. P. Lovecraft, but in this he was not very successful. Here are the opening paragraphs of "The Dark Brotherhood": [It is probable that the facts in regard to the mysterious destruction by fire of an abandoned house on a knoll along the shore of the Seekonk in a little habited district district between the Washington and Red Bridges, will never be entirely known. The police have been beset by the usual number of cranks, purporting to offer information about the matter, none more insistent than Arthur Phillips, the descendant of an old East Side family, long resident on Angell Street, a somewhat confused but earnest young man who prepared an account of certain events he alleges led to the fire. Though the police have interviewed all persons concerned and mentioned in Mr. Phillips' account, no corroboration--save for a statement from a librarian at the Athenaeum, attesting only to the fact that Mr. Phillips did once meet Miss Rose Dexter there--could be found to support Mr. Phillips' allegations. The manuscript follows.] * * * * I. The nocturnal streets of any city along the Eastern Seaboard afford the nightwalker many a glimpse of the strange and terrible, the macabre and outre, for darkness draws from the crevices and crannies, the attic room and cellar hideways of the city those human beings who, for obscure reasons lost in the past, choose to keep the day secure in their grey niches--the misshapen, the lonely, the sick, the very old, the haunted, and those lost souls who are forever seeking their identities under cover of night, which is beneficent for them as the cold light of day can never be. These are the hurt by life, the maimed, men and women who have never recovered from from the traumas of childhood or who have willingly sought after experiences not meant for man to know, and every place where the human society has been concentrated for any considerable length of time abounds with them, though they are seen only in the dark hours, emerging like nocturnal moths to move about in their narrow environs for a few brief hours before they must escape daylight once more. Having been a solitary child, and much left to my own devices because of the persistent ill-health which was my lot, I developed early a propensity for roaming abroad at night, at first only in the Angell Street neighborhood where I lived during much of my childhood, and then, little by little, in a widened circle in my native Providence. By day, my health permitting, I haunted the Seekonk River from the city into the open country, or, when my energy was at its height, played with a few carefully chosen companions at a "club-house" we had painstakingly constructed in wooded areas not far out of the city. I was also much given to reading, and spent long hours in my grandfather's extensive library, reading without discrimination and thus assimilating a vast amount of knowledge, from the Greek philosophies to the history of the English monarchy, from the secrets of ancient alchemists to the experiments of Niels Bohr, from the lore of Egyptian papyri to the regional studies of Thomas Hardy, since my grandfather was possessed of very catholic tastes in books and, spurning specialization, bought and kept only what in his mind was good, by which he meant that which involved him. But the nocturnal city invariably drew me from all else; walking abroad was my preference above all other pursuits, and I went out and about at night all through the later years of my childhood and throughout my adolescent years, in the course of which I tended--because sporadic illness kept me from regular attendance at school--to grow ever more self-sufficient and solitary. I could not now say what it was I sought with such determination in the nighted city, what it was in the ill-lit streets that drew me, why I sought old Benefit Street and the shadowed environs of Poe Street, almost unknown in the vastness of Providence, what it was I hoped to see in the furtively glimpsed faces of other night-wanderers slipping and slinking along the dark lanes and byways of the city, unless perhaps it was to escape from the harsher realities of daylight coupled with an insatiable curiosity about the secrets of city life which only the night could disclose. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Now this is excellent, but it evokes the spectre of H. P. Lovecraft moreso than it does his narrative voice, although one certainly finds echoes of that as well. It is reminiscent of the manner in which Lovecraft wrote of the early life of Charles Dexter Ward. Derleth was indeed a gifted writer, a man of talent -- he wrote extremely well. I think the emotion of the history of these posthumous collaborations and the effect they have had on the history of criticism of Lovecraft's Works has blinded severe critics to the power and charm of... Read more ›
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