Customer Reviews

The Shuttered Room and other tales of horror

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Actually, this volume consists of HPL pastiches by August Derleth, presented as posthumus completions of unfinished stories or based on notes made by Lovecraft while he was alive. In reality, Derleth would often take as little as a single isolated sentance from Lovecraft's notebooks and spin a tale around it. Derleth handles the Mythos shoddily, making the tales far more repetitive, predictable and inanely cross-referential than Lovecraft would have, and without the fine (if often overblown) melodramatic flourishes that marked Lovecraft's style.

Derleth is only ever half good when describing scenery - at which he excels Lovecraft. Otherwise, it's a lukewarm volume of Lovecraft Lite, and only one for the confirmed fan - newcomers should look to the Penguin editions, edited by ST Joshi for a more authentic entry to Lovecraft's work.

These stories were written long after H. P. Lovecraft was dead, and he had no hand in their composition. August Derleth wrote these stories alone, basing some of them on notes left by Lovecraft, or from entries in Lovecraft's Commonplace Book (which Derleth included in his fabulous second Arkham House volume of Lovecraft's writings, BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP). The stories in this book are:
The Survivor
Wentworth's Heritage
The Peobody Inheritance
The Gable Window
The Ancestor
The Shadow out of Space
The Lamp of Alhazred
The Fisherman of Falcon Point
The Dark Brotherhood
The Shuttered Room

"The Survivor" is Derleth's finest Lovecraftian story, a superb rendering of the Lovecraftian mood and style. It's major flaw is when Derleth drags in one of his favorite devices, the listing of Cthulhu Mythos gods and lore, which slows down the eerie narrative and adds absolutely nothing to the plot. The setting in Lovecraft's Providence is quite successful. Lovecraft enjoyed writing about houses of weird repute, and the Charriere house of this story is every bit as chilling and menacing as Lovecraft's "The Shunned House." This is a fine weird tale.

With "Wentworth's Heritage," Derleth begins to write tales that are, in some ways, a mockery of Lovecraft's style and theme. Derleth distinguished these stories from those with his own byline by assuming that he had mastered "the Lovecraft voice" and was penning stories that sounded as if they were written by Lovecraft himself; but this was Derleth's great delusion, and modern critics who do not know the history of these tales still feel that they are "lesser" Lovecraft, tales written by HPL when he was having a less-than-inspired day. One of Derleth's tricks is to try and begin a story "in the Lovecraft tradition" by ripping off several of Lovecraft's own story beginnings. Hence we find this opening paragraph:

"North of Dunwich lies an all but abandoned country, one which has returned in large part--after its successive occupation by the old New Englanders, the French Canadians who moved in after them, the Italians, and the Poles who came last--to a state seriously close to the wild. The first dwellers wrested a living from the stony earth and the forests that once covered all that land, but they were not versed in conservation of either the soil or its natural resources, and successive generations still further depleted that country. Those who came after them soon gave up the struggle and went elsewhere."

It's not a bad paragraph--Derleth was in fact quite a fine writer if not a great one--but it doesn't quite ring true as authentic Lovecraft prose, and it was in error that Derleth added Lovecraft's name to his collections of these stories. Only "The Survivor" of these stories had its first publication in WEIRD TALES; most of the others saw their first publication in THE SURVIVOR AND OTHERS, a book that Derleth published himself through Arkham House.

When we get to "The Shuttered Room," things are really pathetic. This is nothing more than an extremely silly, poorly conceived and badly written ripoff of Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror." The stupid ending is, as far as I'm concerned, more of an insult to Lovecraft's memory than the homage Derleth perhaps intended these tales to be.

Still, the stories are entertaining in and of themselves. Derleth was a completely professional writer, with an okay imagination and a love for the Mythos fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. If you enjoy Cthulhu Mythos fiction, this is a book you may enjoy. But if you're looking by Works by H. P. Lovecraft, don't buy this book.

This is a book of stories written by Derleth -- it is not the book of a similar title, THE SHUTTERED ROOM AND OTHER PIECES, that was published in hardcover by Arkham House in 1959.

So most of these tales were just okay with the highlight being -The Fisherman of Falcon Point- which as you may have guessed has to do with good ole Dagon and fishy people. In -Witch's Hollow- no one dies or goes insane which was kind of strange for a Lovecraft story. The worst thing about this collection is that 3 of the 6 stories are of the well-tread Lovecraftian "relative-from-europe-comes-to-america-to-collect-his-inheritance-in-the-form-of-an-old-house" variety. This leads me to believe that there was a reason that Lovecraft didn't finish these fragments and that they should have just been left to die (or go insane).

This book was weird and uncommon from the start of the first page. It was a bit hard to capture what was going on in each of the stories. but, that is is his style; slow and steady, and then BAM!, over your head with a brick. It always seems that Lovecraft can intertwine some part of his other works into every other, making it all look like one misplaced story. If you like H.P. Lovecraft, don't miss out on this one.