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The shadow out of time,: And other tales of…
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The shadow out of time,: And other tales of horror, (original 1936; edition 1968)

by H. P Lovecraft

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H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.

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Member:mjscott
Title:The shadow out of time,: And other tales of horror,
Authors:H. P Lovecraft
Info:Gollancz (1968), Hardcover, 384 pages
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The Shadow Out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft (1936)

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English (5)  German (1)  All languages (6)
Showing 5 of 5
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  archivomorero | Jun 27, 2022 |
Huh. Not quite sure why, but this one went down a lot smoother than a lot of Lovecraft for me.

I mean, all the hallmarks of Lovecraftian fiction are here:
- Literally one line of dialogue in 89 pages
- Excessive use of multiple adjectives and adverbs
- Pages upon pages of description of buildings and masonry
- No real characters aside from the narrator
- A monstrous, unknowable horror from beyond

I can't read a lot of Lovecraft at any one time because that stuff just piles on incrementally (and, at times, excrementally). So why do I keep coming back? Because, racist or not, the man's imagination was second to none.

And, for whatever reason, this one clicked for me. Hell, ol' H.P. even managed to scare up some real action toward the end. Bonus!

One little side note:
Yes, I know it's not cool to like Lovecraft now—unless you're reading Matt Ruff's and Victor La Valle's takes on his stuff, which faces the racism head on—but he's not the only asshole author in town, so until you start going after other racist authors, or those that demean the shit out of women, or card-carrying homophobes like Orson Scott Card and William Peter Blatty, etc., I ain't interested in debating you. ( )
  TobinElliott | Sep 3, 2021 |
That was kind of a bizarre story, bouncing around in time and space a bit. Then again, it sounds like perhaps the narrator had a bizarre life, bouncing around in time and space. :)

Overall, an interesting read and one of the better Lovecraft stories I've read. It's interesting trying to figure out how much of the story actually happened (in universe) and how much might just be some sort of mental health issues on the part of the narrator. ( )
  jpv0 | Jul 21, 2021 |
If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams.

One of the troubles with Lovecraft is that once he says anything resembling 'it was as though,' you know he's telling you exactly what happened. But then he goes on for reams more pages pretending there's still a mystery in play. This is the sequel to [b:At the Mountains of Madness|32767|At the Mountains of Madness|H.P. Lovecraft|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388341769s/32767.jpg|17342821], and the reader is once again treated to the in depth tour of alien places and a good chunk of commentary on the alien things that are the actual protagonists of the tale. Unfortunately, this story lacks the human suspense and connection of the previous story, and consequently falls rather flat. (And there is no explanation whatsoever why the narrator from Mountains would agree to be part of the expedition in this story. Makes no sense at all.)

(I should note that the Darwin Award on this entry belongs to the Great Race itself, who did not have the sense to exterminate a certain enemy when they had the chance. The narrator of the tale is, for once, largely blameless for his involvement in matters beyond his tolerance.) ( )
  amyotheramy | May 11, 2021 |
I'd read virtually no Lovecraft before taking on this short novel, and as I soon discovered there's a very good reason why this should be so. It's hard to take seriously as literature a text that includes sentences like this one:

Could I still find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls?

Obviously, lots of people find Lovecraft true triff -- The Master of Eldritch Wotzit! -- and even more of them write in imitation of him; it's as if he were the sort of Rocky Horror Picture Show of the printed word. But, me, I had a hard time keeping my eyes open; I kept counting my blessings that I had to read just this one section out of the gorblimey 807 pages of the very elegant Library of America edition of his work (with annotations by Peter Straub).

Nathaniel Peaslee, a prof at Miskatonic University, falls into a strange psychological state for some years: although physically himself, he has suffered an appalling character shift, almost as if his body had been possessed by something . . . other. He can read as fast as he can turn the pages, no matter the language of the book in front of him -- and read he does! devouring all the arcane ans squamous texts he can lay his hands on, to the ill concealed revulsion of the librarians who must supply him with these accursed tomes. Then, late one night, neighbours notice him being visited by a tall, alien-seeming fellow on a bicycle; in the morning, Peaslee is his old self again, albeit himself with no memories at all of the events of the past five years. Oh, and there's a strange-looking machine nearby.

Eventually restored to health, Peaslee remains tormented by strange and vivid lucid dreams. Soon he realizes that these aren't random: if pieced together jigsaw-fashion they form a coherent whole, they form a story. Could they be trying to tell him something? He goes into a frenzy of research, involving not just visits to the libraries where those self-same accursed tomes are to be had (complete with incomprehensible marginal annotations made by his possessed self) but also interviews with the leaders of unspecified occult sects, whose traditions he mines in search of further clues as to what's happened to him.

And at last he's able to put everything together. About 150 million years ago (those occult traditions go back a long way!), the earth's dominant species was the Great Race, a people who took the shape of tall leathery cones with four long tentacles branching out from near the apex and who walked in the same manner a slug does:

This [. . .:] was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.

Since the Great Race died out fifty million years before humankind came onto the scene, I'm uncertain how those legends made the jump, as it were. Still and all, even the Great Race folk aren't quite what they seem; although physically born from this earth, they were long ago possessed by the minds of alien creatures fleeing from their doomed world and seeking a fleshly home elsewhere in the tormented cosmos.

Peaslee slowly works out what happened to him ("Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination"). The people of the Great Race, eager to learn every scrap of information about their own future, use time machines to send minds to possess individuals in every age; the minds of the possessed individuals, meanwhile, are snapped back in time to occupy the conical bodies of their mental usurpers. They're treated with every kindness while in the remote past, but brainwiped at the end of their stay so as to make them remember nothing of it; it's because his brainwiping was imperfect that Peaslee has been having the strange dreams. During their forays into the future, the time-travelling Great Racers, in their human guise (or their giant-beetle guise, if sojourning among the next dominant species after our own), do as much research as possible into the past and present of the relevant era; meanwhile, the abducted mentalities, back in the 150-million-years-ago world, are encouraged to write down as full a history as they can of their own times. The results of both prongs of the research are made into books and stored in a library designed to withstand even the mightiest geological upheavals the future might throw at it (cue muted drum roll: you're getting ahead of the story, aren't you?).

The way the books are made is really, really arcane and alien: they open from the top, rather than the side, and their bindings are metal, not board. Golly. When I came to this example of the writer's imagination not so much vaulting as tripping over its own shoelaces it occurred to me why Lovecraft's work has always had so very little appeal to me. His imagining seems somehow very restricted, and also very clumsy. He hasn't really thought through the Great Race, whose appearance is like something an adolescent would dream up and whose social customs and psychology seem little different from their human equivalents. While 150 million years seems an impressively vast period of time, it's actually too vast for Lovecraft's plot, because oral traditions simply cannot last that long; anyone who tries to tell you historical details that are 150 million years old is either a madman or a Scientologist. And so on.

Back to the story, the rest of which is soon told. Peaslee publishes the results of his research in a scholarly journal, and decides to get on with his life. However, a while later, he gets a letter from an Australian mining engineer who says that he has recognized some of the Great Race hieroglyphs Peaslee sketched for his journal illustrations as identical to those he'd discovered on some ancient, artificial-seeming boulders in the midst of the Australian desert. Off goes Peaslee with an archaeological team to Australia to see what they can find. Out for a stroll one night without his companions, Peaslee stumbles across an opening in the sands exposed by the desert winds and explores down it to find the remains of the ancient library and, you've guessed it, the book he himself wrote while in a Great Race body!!!!!!!!

He flees, because a couple of the Old Ones who preceded the Great Race, and whom the Great Race loathed and feared, have escaped from their "subterrene" prisons and are on the prowl. The next day the sands have shifted yet again, and there's no trace left of the opening to the underground library. Even so, Peaslee flees Australia and leaves this hastily handwritten memoir for those who might come after . . .

That's quite a long discussion of what's only a long novella/short novel, but I feel I'm owed it. The text has, if I recall aright, not a single line of dialogue. It was Lovecraft's conceit -- again an adolescent one, it seems to me -- that it was Fine Writing never to use one short, simple word where several long, obscure ones would do, with the result that I constantly felt as if I were having to hammer my forehead against the page in order to extract meaning from the narrative. Added to this was the effort of trying to take seriously concepts and imaginings that seem to me to be bordering on the puerile. I kept wanting to shout out, Scenes and events and ideas are not world-moving or horrific or portentous simply because you say they are! In fact, if you have to keep saying they are, they almost certainly aren't.

But I didn't shout that, because Lovecraft wasn't there to listen and anyway he's been dead a long time. ( )
2 vote JohnGrant1 | Aug 11, 2013 |
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Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML:

H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.

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