Customer Reviews

The Watchers Out of Time (Masters of Horror)

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

I've just read the reviews previously posted here for The Watchers Out of Time. Perhaps some of this criticism is a little harsh. I do agree that there's been some deception -- surely the fault of neither Lovecraft or Derleth, since both men were long dead when this edition was published.

The stories are all credited simply to H.P. Lovecraft on the front cover. But -- confusingly -- the back cover describes the book as a joint effort of Lovecraft and Derleth. Then we get more confused when, looking at the back of the flyleaf, we discover that ALL the stories are copyrighted by August Derleth alone.

Derleth and Lovecraft knew each other, and they did do some genuine collaboration. But I think this volume is predominantly Derleth's work. One of the other reviewers guessed "95% Derleth's" as I recall. I could believe that.

When I say the other reviews are too harsh, I mean that August Derleth was a pretty good author in his own right. At his best, when Derleth writes these gothic tales he rivals Lovecraft in narrative and tone. Some of these stories are very good actually-- well worthy of "Weird Tales" and other pulp collections of the time.

Unfortunately, one of Derleth's limitations when writing Lovecraftian material was his conventional religious belief. He tended to spin Lovecraft's cosmic "old ones" into something resembling Christian devils or demons. This loses much of the very chilling alien flavor of Lovecraft's original mythos. There is always a kind of nihilistic despair haunting around the edges of real Lovecraft stuff-- e.g., "At the Mountains of Madness."

All in all, one must agree that the book is less than what is advertized. And yet, Derleth is a good writer and his tales can be enjoyable. I enjoyed the book and hate to see it so roundly and harshly panned. The problem is-- this is just NOT really H.P. Lovecraft's writing.

It is most unfortunate and wrong in more ways than one that this collection of stories is passed off as the work of H.P. Lovecraft. All of these stories were written by August Derleth, who was inspired by various little notes Lovecraft left behind, but the only indication of the true ownership of the tales comes in the list of sources from which these stories were assembled, a section quite easy to overlook by the general reader. Any Lovecraft disciple must have mixed feelings about August Derleth. His contribution to the Lovecraft legacy is undeniably significant; in the years after Lovecraft's death, Derleth almost single-handedly kept his memory alive, forming historic Arkham House to publish the master's stories himself. Derleth's contribution is much more controversial when it comes to extending the Cthulhu legacy, however, for his conception of the Mythos is significantly different from that of Lovecraft; Derleth tended to see things in black and white, good vs. evil. This bifurcation of the Mythos legacy is in sharp contrast to Lovecraft's original vision of a world where good and evil do not exist per se. Reading Derleth's Mythos stories poses a danger of the reader conflating Derleth's ideas and conceptions with those of Lovecraft, and I for one strive to keep the original legacy intact in my mind. This danger is exacerbated by Derleth's frequent citation of events and characters from Lovecraft's original writings. Dunwich and Innsmouth serve as frequent settings for these stories; familiar names such as Wilbur Whateley and the Whateley clan, Obed Marsh and his batrachian (which seems to be Derleth's favorite word) descendants are encountered at every turn; and all manner of dark tomes are referred to, those introduced by members of the Lovecraft Circle as well as others Derleth invents himself.

August Derleth was a perfectly competent writer capable of producing an impressive story every now and then. For the most part, however, his work is overly formulaic and repetitive, and, while he tries very hard to write the kind of stories Lovecraft wrote, his stories just don't captivate the reader or come alive with the type of overwhelming, cosmic menace that seemed to live in the very words Lovecraft put to paper. The fifteen stories collected here are remarkably similar in plot and presentation, and that helps make this a somewhat tedious read at times; sometimes the only real spark of interest generated in my mind was a curiosity to see just how commonplace a spin a given story would place on Lovecraft's otherworldly cosmology. When Derleth did dare to color outside the lines, his attempts come off rather strangely and almost comically. A case in point is The Dark Brotherhood, a tale in which a band of strange men bearing an incredibly strong resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe introduce a character clearly based on Lovecraft himself to a vision of another world. Having these alien creatures adopt the image of Poe makes the story memorable to the reader at the expense of the story's effectiveness.

You really won't find anything here that did not originate with Lovecraft; Derleth seems to have a literary mold in which he mixes Mythos beings and characters in random fashion from one story to the next. As I say, though, Derleth is a competent writer, so few of these stories are painfully hard to read; judged outside of the context of Lovecraft, they are effective albeit repetitive. As a Lovecraft fan, I enjoy Derleth's stories (and I might note that his best are to be found not here but in The Mask of Cthulhu and The Trail of Cthulhu), but they are just so lifeless that the memory of them begins to fade as soon as I finish them. I believe there is material here capable of entertaining both the Lovecraft devotee as well as the general horror fan. The important thing to keep in mind, though, is that these stories really should not be attributed in any way to Lovecraft, no matter what the book cover might want you to believe.

As other readers have mentioned, this really isn't Lovecraft's work at all. There are some good ideas here, but also a lot of rehashing and too many references to HP's own stories. I also find Derleth's "Christianization" of the Cthulhu mythos quite annoying (i.e., the cosmic striggle of good and evil). For Lovecraft, the Elder Gods were bad guys, including Azathoth, Yog Sothoth, etc., and the Great Old Ones were bad guys, including Cthulhu, Shub Niggurath, etc. Only the "Other Gods" (Nodens et al, unnamed) were not malevolent, and mostly neutral, though enemies of the Elder Gods. Derleth, however, rewrites the mythos so that the Elder Gods are the good guys (Nodens et al), and the others are all known as The Ancient Ones. There was some cosmic "war in heaven", where the virtuous Elder Gods won, but continually struggle against evil, etc., etc. It diminishes the existential terror that was part of Lovecraft's appeal, and completely changes one of the most important characteristics of his creations. Still, there are some imaginative stories here, though they're not the slightest bit scary. Worth reading if your a fan of Lovecraft, but don't expect too much.

One should be warned that these stories are mostly not written by Lovecraft, but by his self-proclaimed inheritor, August Derleth. And the discerning reader will notice a difference in the depth and texture of these stories as compared to the real deal. There also is considerable repetition in the themes of these stories. However, one of the odd things about Lovecraft fans (myself included) is that imitation is not necessarily considered a bad thing--the obsessive repetition of Lovecraft's themes seems somehow a fitting homage to his helpless mortals drawn to their doom by forbidden knowledge. My recommendation is to read the real Lovecraft first. If you like it, you'll probably think this is OK too.

As I'm sure most people buying this know, this isn't really H.P. Lovecraft's writings, it's August Derleth's, expanding on Lovecraft's existing stories as well some some ideas Lovecraft never got around to writing. And I guess a few August Derleth originals.

Derleth is not a bad writer, but he is a bad mimicker of Lovecraft. So the most Lovecraftian of the stories are probably the worst. "The Shadow out of Space", for instance, is essentially the same plot as "The Shadow out of Time", only all the mystery and creepiness sucked out.

Probably the best of the Lovecraft-ish tales is "The Shuttered Room", which does a pretty good job of combining The Dunwich Horror and Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Far too many of the tales (including that one, actually) use the same exact plot: Person inherits a property, then discovers that the person he inherited it from was up to no good, which continues to happen beyond the grave.

Lovecraft almost used that device a couple of times, but he changed things a bit (like in The Call of Cthulhu, the person simple inherits some notes), when Derleth uses the devices, there's no subtlety.

One story, "The Lamp of Alhazred" is a very nice homage and tribute to Lovecraft. There a few other Innsmouth ones, one actually pretty decent ("Innsmouth Clay")

The title story is unfinished, and on the face of it, seems to have a very similar plot as "The Lurker at the Threshold" (a novel by Derleth under Lovecraft's name), only told from the narrator's point of view and set in Dunwich.

All in all, if you are a Lovecraft fan or a completest, it's worth picking up. But for most others it a pass.

Unlike some readers, I actually read the covers and realized this wasn't original stories from HP Lovecraft. However, the are heavily inspired by his works, included some of his notes and unfinished stories. Most Lovecraft fans will enjoy this book for its Lovecraftian flavor. There is a bit of a repetition in some of the story lines (old houses and dead mysterious relatives, etc). But in an age where horror is dumbed down, this is as close as you can get to Lovecraft or Poe. A great companion to the three part Lovecraft collection from Del Ray: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, Dreams of Terror and Death: The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft and The Road to Madness.

You've got to give the publishers a bit of credit for even printing something that isn't going to make a profit for them, barring some macabre miracle. But it's like someone had to convince the publisher very hard and finally they said: "OK, but put a skull with a snake crawling out of it's mouth on the cover and put that whatsisname horror guy (HPL) as the author. Hide the real author in the fine print. Try to dig up a positive review, even if it's written on papyrus." No collector's item here, but as formulaic and repetitious as they can get, these stories get into your blood, and I, for one can never get enough...what a shame they both died young, even August Derleth was only 71 I think. Always worth curling up with when the modern world has ground you down.

I loved these stories thirty years ago when I was a clueless Cthulhu Mythos kid, and I still enjoy some of them to-day. I recently reread, carefully, those first few of these stories that made up the initial collection, THE SURVIVOR AND OTHERS, for a series of video commentaries that I record on YouTube, where I discuss all sorts of Lovecraftian matters; and I was astonished to find that I liked these stories far more than I thought I would. I became an obsessed Lovecraftian in the early 1970s, and that was a time of great tumult in the Lovecraft scene. Derleth's death changed everything, and Lovecraft scholarship gained new energy. Much of the new commentary painted August Derleth as a villain, and part of his crime was writing these stories and adding Lovecraft's name to the byline. So I've always had it in the back of my mind that these were poor stories written by a Lovecraft wannabe. I was dead wrong.

This edition lacks the fun novel, THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD, the book that began the whole thing of Derleth's writing stories on his own that he passed off as "posthumous collaborations" "with" H. P. Lovecraft. One of Derleth's delusions in the writing of these tales was that he was writing in the style and voice of Lovecraft -- he even boasted about it, writing once, "It isn't easy to write like H. P. Lovecraft. I should know!" Perhaps his initial intentions were good -- wanting to give Lovecraft credit where he felt credit was due; for in THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD Derleth did indeed include two chunks of Lovecraft's writing, which are now known as "The Round Tower" and "The Rose Window." The problem with these stories is that they are extremely inferior to Lovecraft's -- and yet clueless reviewers confuse these works by Derleth with Lovecraft's original tales. To this day people write of "H. P. Lovecraft's novel, THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD," or refer ti it as HPL's "unfinished novel." It is nothing of the sort.

Because of the emotion aroused by what many see as Derleth's stealing Lovecraft's name and allure so as to sell books of his own, people have condemned these stories out of hand. But in point of fact, some of these stories are rather good. "The Survivor" is one of my favourite Lovecraftian tales -- it it IS as Lovecraftian as anything written by those who wrote stories in the Lovecraft tradition. The dark Gothic atmosphere of the story "feels" very much like the atmosphere one finds in Lovecraft, and the eerie mystery and slow revelation concerning the Charriere house in Providence and its inhabitant is wonderful. Derleth brings the atmosphere of this uncanny residence to life as surely as anything that Lovecraft wrote on his own. The story is dead cool. It's one fatal flaw, the defect that would taint so much of Derleth's Mythos tales, is his dragging in the Cthulhu Mythos elements, which add absolutely nothing to the plot of the story, does nothing to enhance the mystery of this fine tale. Derleth loved to write detailed accounts concerning his interpretations of the Mythos in tale after tale -- and it all becomes quite tedious. "The Survivor"'s flow of narrative is suddenly interrupted by:

"Finally, and most important, according to the surgeon's notes, was a completely alien culture which was as old as earth, nay, older, involving ancient Elder Gods and their terrible, unceasing conflict with equally primeval Old Ones who bore such names as Cthulhu, Hastur, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, and Nyarlathotep, and who were served in turn by such curious beings as the Tcho-Tcho People, the Deep Ones, the Shantaks, the Abominable Snow Men, and others, some of whom appeared to have been a sub-order of human being, but others of which were definite mutations or not human at all."

This is pure Derleth, an attempt to mimic the few such listings that crop up in some of Lovecraft's stories; but unlike Lovecraft, Derleth doesn't make one feel that these legends are a real threat to humanity, and his repeated listing of such things in story after story becomes utterly monotonous.

"The Survivor" was sold to WEIRD TALES -- but, strangely, most of the tales in this book had their initial appearance in Arkham House books. It has been suggested by some that the tales are so bad that WEIRD TALES wouldn't buy them -- but this seems unlikely, since WEIRD TALES bought the far-inferior stories of the Mythos that makes up the contents of much of the Derleth Mythos book, IN LOVECRAFT'S SHADOW. Another explanation is that by the time the majority of these tales were penned, WEIRD TALES had ceased to exist. If you like the Mythos, this book will certainly entertain you. The stories are part of the early history of the Mythos, and they were written by the man who, more than anyone else, made the Mythos what it is today.

This is certainly a book of pastiche -- and it was meant to be just that. Derleth, with these tales, was TRYING to write like Lovecraft, and that was one of the reasons that Lovecraft's name was conjoined with Augie's in ye byline. Derleth used to boast of his ability to write in Lovecraft's voice, but this was a figment of his rich imagination. People who are unaware of the true nature of these tales often complain that they read like "lesser Lovecraft." Thus they are often criticized as "poor Lovecraft," when if fact they were all written after Lovecraft's death and he had absolutely no hand in their composition. August Derleth sold only one of these to WEIRD TALES -- most, probably all, of the others had their first publication in Arkham House books published and edited by August Derleth. Perhaps he began to write these as sincere attempts to write genuinely Lovecraftian pastiche, but one gets the feeling that the latter tales were composed without much discernment. By the time Augie wrote what has to be one of the worst rip-offs of Lovecraft ever penned, "The Shuttered Room," he seems to have written it specifically for the Arkham House book, THE SHUTTERED ROOM AND OTHER PIECES -- as if he figured, well, I might as well grind out a couple more for this new book.

One story that I had convinced myself was extremely poor, unoriginal, and a complete ripoff of Lovecraft was "The Shadow out of Space," which I had convinced myself was little more than a rewriting of "The Shadow out of Time." Returning to this story when I discussed it on YouTube was a revelation--it is, in fact, a very enjoyable story, a strange combination of certain things Lovecraft penned but with ideas and atmosphere all its own. And this was an experience I had with many others of the tales in this collection--they were far better than I had remembered them to be. Maybe I initially read them with a prejudice against them, since I had been schooled in an anti-Derleth era.

These are good stories, for the most part, and they deserve to be published under their real author's name, August William Derleth. There is absolutely no excuse for current publishers to attach Lovecraft's name to this book, especially in gigantic letters with the real author's name in significantly smaller letters underneath. That is s sham, and a shame.

Given that Lovecraft was dead at least twenty years before even the earliest of these stories was published, you'd be right in assuming that the bulk of these 'collaborations' were primarily Derleth's work. And, given that Derleth was a far more prolific and commercial author in his lifetime than Lovecraft was, you'd be equally right in assuming that the writing style here is much more straightforward than in classic Lovecraftian tales, and that the nihlism has been dramatically toned down.

However, much of this book is surprisingly good if judged on its own merits. Derleth was far more respectful of Lovecraft's legacy than critics claim, and many of the stories included here are thoughtful homages to the types of horror Lovecraft specialized in. Even if their status as "collaborations" is based on just a sliver of Lovecraft's own writing, all of the stories here are strongly indebted to Lovecraft's unique perspective on cosmic horror. The general quality level of the stories is pretty high, and definitely more consistent than in many of the Del Rey paperback compilations of Lovecraft's own short stories. Lovecraft scaled heights in horror that Derleth never reached, but Derleth was a very consistent writer.

I enjoyed each of the short stories that appeared here as lightweight chillers. I particularly liked "The Shuttered Room" the best as it is a crossover between two of my favorite Lovecraft stories, "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and featured some strong characterization and dialogue. I also strongly recommend "The Lamp of Alhazred" which is in the vein of Lovecraft's Randolph Carter stories about lonely dreamers. There really aren't any bad stories in the lot, honestly. "The Dark Brotherhood" might strike some as odd, but its cloning-related plot is something any X-files fan would appreciate, and "Witches Hollow" as an effective tale that's only slightly hindered by the coincidental name Derleth gives one of the wizards in the story (hint - he's a regular at Hogwarts!)Of course, not every story here is a gem - I was annoyed with "Innsmouth Clay" and disappointed that the title story remained unfinished.

It's beyond me why the publisher does not include an essay at the beginning explaining that this volume contains posthumous collaborations, however. It would go a long way toward defusing the ill will that many feel regarding this book as the title layout and cover notes falsely imply that this is primarily Lovecraft's work and nothing could be further than the truth. All the stories in this volume are worth your time, and its a pity the publisher does not show Lovecraft - and Derleth - the requisite respect by explaining these stories' origins.

I must disagree with the more vitriolic reviews of this edition. For one thing, it's great to have all of these stories in one place. I don't have the time or the money to hunt down all of the Arkham House pressings of these stories. Secondly, though these are clearly not quite up to the caliber of "real" Lovecraft stories, they are very enjoyable-certainly for someone who has all of the Lovecraft stuff. And last but not least, though his name is not printed as largely as Lovecraft's, it very clearly says, "and August Derleth" on the cover of the book. I'd say if you're a Lovecraft fan who has everything, this book is a fine addition to your collection. Sure, it would have been nice to have had S.T. Joshi do the annotating on this, but truthfully that's about my only complaint. As I said, very enjoyable.