The small towns of rural Massachusetts are filled with pitched roofs, frog-like residents, and an unhealthy interest in the Necronomicon. In this short story collection, city dwellers and scholars from Miskatonic University try to penetrate the fog of superstition, but discover the Old Ones are very much alive.
Lovecraft scholars have a love/hate relationship with August Derleth. You could call him the Kevin J. Anderson of the 1950s. A fan, collaborator, and friend of Lovecraft, Derleth saw to it that Lovecraft’s work didn’t disappear after his death. When no publisher showed interest in keeping the work in print, Derleth founded Arkham House and started churning out short story collections. Without Derleth’s loving boosterism, it’s unlikely Lovecraft’s stories would have found the same influence and prestige.
On the other hand, Derleth’s role as curator could be heavy-handed; he had a particular interest in nudging the Cthulu Mythos toward a more traditionally Christian good-versus-evil direction, and encouraged and discouraged authors accordingly. His own Mythos stories codified the pantheon and split the gods into rival teams; he made them more like gods and less like aliens. This supernaturalism runs against the grain of Lovecraft’s aggressive atheism – although Lovecraft’s conception of his monsters vacillated over time, he was a scientist, and his fears were linked to the uncertain universe implicit in Einstein, Heisenberg, and Plank. Lovecraft’s horror threw out ghosts, vampires, and werewolves – romantic constructions incompatible with Freud and Darwin – and replaced them with denizens of alternate universes. In so doing, he gave horror authors the tools to stay relevant in a post-romantic age; he himself published most of his work in Amazing Stories, the first science fiction magazine.
Despite what the cover of The Watchers Out of Time suggests, not one of the stories in this collection was written by Lovecraft, and it shows. These are Derleth’s work, and stray increasingly far from the source material. Derleth claimed that these tales – unlike others he wrote in the Lovecraft universe under his own name – were expansions and completions of stories Lovecraft left unfinished, but Lovecraft scholars like J.T. Joshi and Dirk W. Mosig find this claim of “posthumous collaboration” distasteful and downright fraudluent. Even a casual reader familiar with other Lovecraft and other Derleth can quickly discern that Derleth attached Lovecraft’s name for marketing reasons – and that anthologists have gone along with it for the same reason.
So what’s the difference? In many respects, the stories follow basic Lovecraft tenets. Main characters are, by and large, educated and rational men who are forced to confront something irrational and ancient – either a dread force released by the protagonist’s ill-considered explorations, or a looming monstrosity inherited from an ancestor. Monsters are fish-like or frog-like. (Official The Watchers Out of Time drinking game: take a shot every time you read the word “batrachian.”) The plots’ pattern quickly becomes familiar, but knowing what’s coming is part of the stories’ charm, like the comfort of weddings, or episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In writing style, Derleth echoes the traditional ghost story; his work would never be classed as science fiction, nor does he have the ease with science that makes Lovecraft’s stories feel tight and modern. Instead, Derleth works to ape Lovecraft’s style by overusing words like “eldritch” and “gambrel.” He fails to connect with the past in which the stories take place, which gives his writing a stuffy condescension, and makes it feel older than it is. Further, his distance acts as insulation – it makes the stories more cozy, less terrifying.
Derleth’s stories, particularly “The Shadow in the Attic” and “The Dark Brotherhood,” contain significantly more advanced gender politics than Lovecraft’s essentially woman-free work; Derleth’s characters can have girlfriends, and those girlfriends can be scholars and heroes who save the day. Derleth is also a bit of an apologist for Lovecraft’s racism (which Lovecraft regretted in later years, after the advent of Nazism), sometimes going out of his way to stress that half-human creatures are obviously unnatural, and nothing like Polynesians or Indians, who are just like white people except for their skin color. Derleth is also, as mentioned, more interested in the struggle between good and evil, more willing to use Christian imagery, ghosts, skeletons, and traditional witches, and more likely to let religious officials and helpful schoolteachers save the day.
Standout stories include “The Ancestor,” which feels as though it could have inspired the movie Altered States (although it didn’t); “The Survivor,” which ends with a creepy and resonant reverse birth; “The Gable Window,” a tightly constructed warning about looking too long at things you shouldn’t; and “The Shadow Out of Space” – although effectively “The Call of Cthulu” from a different viewpoint, it is wonderfully creepy. The only clunker is the clumsy “The Lamp of Alhazared” – clichéd and distinctly Mary Sue.
Although many of the stories are entertaining in their own right, Ballantine Books should be ashamed of their deceptive presentation. Lovecraft’s name graces the front of the collection in inch-high letters; Derleth’s doesn’t reach a centimeter, and is set in a color designed to blend with the background. The anthology bears no introduction – not even an editor’s note outlining the stories’ context and publishing dates, or the order in which they are presented (chronologically). This omission is at first baffling, given the pattern set out in Ballantine’s other Lovecraft books, which do include introductory essays, and it suggests a deliberate attempt to mislead readers about who wrote the stories, and when. It’s a bit like publishing Harry Potter fanfiction under J.K. Rowling’s name.
The only evidence that the stories are primarily Derleth’s, rather than primarily Lovecraft’s, resides in small print on the back of the title page, where Ballantine was legally required to print the stories’ copyrights – all to Derleth, with dates 20 years past Lovecraft’s death. (Cover artist John Jude Palencar attempts to give us a hint with an image of an overtly Christian demon; compare this to his artwork for Ballantine’s Tales of the Cthulu Mythos.) Readers deserve to know what they’re buying, and shouldn’t have to do outside research to untangle it – particularly in the case of such a respected and studied canon.
In the end, this is a charming book to curl up with in the winter, preferably with a mug of tea. It won’t really scare you, and it doesn’t hold a candle to Lovecraft’s original work, or even expanded universe stuff by Frank Long, but it has the fuzzy slipper quality of a ghost story told a hundred times.
The final story in the collection – the eponymous “The Watchers Out of Time” – was left unfinished after Derleth’s death in 1971. The second-to-last line reads “Read, that you may know, that you may prepare to wait for Those Who Watch, and fulfill that which was meant to be.” Consider it an invitation from a past master of fanfiction, in an age when Lovecraft’s stories are starting to enter the public domain.
To buy a copy of The Watchers Out of Time, click here.
If you liked this book, you may also enjoy:
Lovecraft: Tales, an anthology by the Library of America of H.P. Lovecraft’s best work
Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, by S.T. Joshi
H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, by S.T. Joshi
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (Boxed Set), by Alvin Schwartz
(This review is indebted to the scholarship of S.T. Joshi.)