Dr. Simon Reads
Appendix N Part Nine: August Derleth
This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.
This time around, I have reached the works of:
August Derleth
August Derleth was born 1909 in Wisconsin and seems to
have largely stayed there until his death from heart disease in 1971.
From the standpoint of fantastic fiction, Derleth’s most
noted contribution must surely be the foundation of Arkham House Publishing as
a means to get the work of his friend HP Lovecraft more widely know. Derleth is
also credited with inventing the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe the themes,
creatures, gods and setting of Lovecraft’s work. Derleth’s appearance, a
lantern-jawed brawny-looking guy, stands in fascinating contrast to the lean
and haunted Lovecraft.
Because he’s so widely associated with Lovecraft, it was
a little tricky to track down anything specifically “Derleth”, and the old
Appendix N list doesn’t suggest any particular titles for Derleth. I found a
couple of short stories – McIlvaine’s
Star and A Traveler In Time – on Kindle, and then discovered that the 5th
Edition reading list suggests The Watchers Out of Time, a collection of short
stories billed as a collaboration (posthumous) with Lovecraft. He seems to have written more non-mythos
stuff, though, particularly non-fiction natural history (being a keen hiker)
and some a detective series in the style of Sherlock Holmes (the Solar Pons
stories) and the Sac Prairie Saga, a series of books (originally intended to be
50 books long) about the life and history of Wisconsin, apparently inspired by
Proust and gaining a lot of critical acclaim.
To be honest it sounds interesting and perhaps I’ll add
it to the ever-growing reading list. But for now, back to the more pulpy and
fantastic stories.
McIlvaine’s Star
and A Traveler In Time
These two short stories are very similar to Fredric Brown
(whom I reviewed earlier), in that they are very brief and deal with weird
events set in a real backdrop. They’re both framed by the narrative device of
Tex Harrigan, a reporter who specialises in “
lost people, crackpots or warped geniuses”, telling stories to the
first person narrator in a bar about one of the unusual stories he’s been
covering.
The first, McIlvaine’s Star, concerns an amateur
astronomer, Thaddeus McIlvaine, who discovers a new star, and then learns a way
to communicate with the insect-like creatures that live there (although his
card-playing friends think he’s delusional). The alien insects offer McIlvaine
rejuvenation in return for assistance in conquering Earth, but in rejuvenating
him they return him to a state before he knows about them, leaving just a
confused young man who feels like he should remember something, but can’t.
A Traveler in Time
has a similar theme, where the character Vanderkamp creates a time travel
machine. Vanderkamp seeks to return to the past in order to escape moving into
the future of World War Two and nuclear weapons, and in doing so gradually
takes over the life of an ancestor of his, eventually displacing her in time
with his sister. To those left in the future, it appears that Vanderkamp has
vanished and his sister suddenly has no knowledge of 20th century
life.
They’re both quite snappily written and pass by quickly,
fun little short stories with a time-travel based twist in each. Given that
neither involve the Cthulhu Mythos, these are probably closer to “pure” August
Derleth.
The Watchers Out
Of Time
You’ll notice the “time” motif continuing here. This is a
collection of fifteen short stories written as a “posthumous collaboration”
with HP Lovecraft, supposedly from unfinished notes of Lovecraft’s, but more
than likely they’re simply Derleth playing with Lovecraft’s creation.
The eponymous story, written in 1971, was left unfinished
at the time of Derleth’s death, but the Watchers in question seem to be an old
man and a boy (possibly the same person at different ages) who appear in a
mysterious mirror/lens in the narrator’s house. We don’t learn how the story
turns out, but based on both the short stories mentioned above, and the outcome
of Lovecraft’s Shadow Out of Time,
we can guess that misfortunes with time travel will occur.
Pretty much all of the stories in this book involve the
protagonist either inheriting or renting a ramshackle, sprawling property in
rural Massachussets, in the heart of Lovecraft Country near places such as
Arkham, Dunwich and the Miskatonic Valley. Needless to say, not only does the
property have a gambrel roof, it also has some kind of dark secret that comes
back to haunt the protagonist – an ancestral curse, unfinished work of a
sorcerous ancestor, some lurking monstrosity. There are a lot of stories that
act as sequels to The Shadow Over
Innsmouth (you’ll need to wait until I cover HP Lovecraft if you’re not
familiar with that), and to a certain extent these stories feel a little like
all of the Greek plays and poems written around the heroes of the Trojan Wars.
 |
| A gambrel roof |
There’s even a sense of inter-connectedness to the
stories, partly due to the constancy of the setting (plus reference to Cthulhu
Mythos gods, monsters and books of forbidden lore), due to certain familial
interconnections between many of the protagonists; numerous Whateleys, Marshs,
Potters, Gilmans and so on. The taciturn Arkham store-keeper Tobias Whateley
also becomes a kind of recurring character.
Because of the repetitive nature of most of the stories,
they become a bit samey. The Dark
Brotherhood, with numerous clones of Edgar Allen Poe wandering around, is
possibly one of the more entertainingly different ones; The Shuttered Room is one of the more effective of the “Old Arkham
Inheritance” stories.
It’s been a long time since I read any Lovecraft, but to
my recollection I think Derleth’s prose is less purple and more accessible.
Yes, there are still gambrel roofs and slumbering hills (although I think a
distinctive absence of gibbous moons), but it’s a bit lighter and fresher.
I must admit to finding this kind of “horror” to not be
particularly horrible nor scary, and I’ll cover that again when I get to
Lovecraft. It’s too obviously fantastical I guess; the most disturbing stuff
I’ve ever read have been the retributive tortures by drug cartel enforcers in
Louis De Berniere’s Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, and the
simple line from Lord of the Flies –
“Piggy’s head split open, and stuff came
out”. People turning into amphibious Deep Ones – not so much.
There’s also a slightly dismissive and cursory aspect to
Derleth’s use of the Mythos. We get passing mention of Azathoth and
Nyarlathotep and the Necronomicon, but it feels really like a way of anchoring
the stories in that milieu without any real connection. I read as well that
Derleth’s couching of the Great Old Ones as losing a war with the Elder Gods
undermines the cosmic horror aspect – no longer are they the only force in the
universe, uncaring and implacable, but they’re one half of some kind of cosmic
war of good against evil. It waters the existential dread down somewhat.
Obviously, Derleth’s works discussed here could be of more
use to a Call of Cthulhu adventure, but many could be adapted to a fantasy game
with little fiddling. The Lamp of
Alhazred, and the lens-glass of The
Gable Window, that both grant views (and access) to alien vistas, would
make great mechanisms for travel to other realms and other planes. (The Lamp of
Alhazred, by the way, feels like its central character Ward Phillips is a
stand-in for HPL, writing fabulous stories about the terrifying beings and
realms that he sees by the light of the lamp).
There are also a couple of stories featuring undead, in
the Peabody Heritage and the Horror From the Middle Span, where dead
sorcerers have been buried in such a fashion as to prevent them coming back to
life but, in one case human intervention, in the other, nature, causes those
methods to be undone. I think these could be adapted very easily.
Of all of the authors so far, I’d say that Derleth was
the least essential to getting a good grounding in weird fiction, unless you
wanted to run a fully-researched Call of Cthulhu game.
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