August Derleth (1909–1971)

The more I read science fiction, especially the classic stuff, I realize that I don't quite enjoy that classic stuff....unless it's got an element of horror embedded in the story. This anthology, with entries from Bradbury, Asimov, and Leiber, contained elements, sometimes a hint and sometimes a deluge, of horror. The one that stands out is a story about an alien that is feeding off a large family in a house, essentially wearing a meat-suit, and the children are forced to feed it or see show more their kin eaten. Another features a space exploration flight that crashes and the crew starves to death watching the strange world through a port, and the inhabitants of that world are worshipping them and the craft. It's all fairly macabre, and thereby more palatable than the world building of the classic stuff where it takes pages and sometimes chapters if not the whole book to figure out what's going on.

4 bones!!!! show less

Not properly a novel, The Trail of Cthulhu is more of a "story cycle": a set of five novellas, with linking narratives, in chronological sequence. Each was originally published separately. There are five protagonists, one for each story, but some feature in each other's tales. The humans in this book are much more active in their antagonism toward the Great Old Ones (Cthulhu and his cousins) than Lovecraft's own precedent-setting fictions would have allowed. As the title implies, Derleth's show more heroes take the initiative to track down these beings in an effort to rescue humanity from their inevitable reconquest of Earth. The stories are almost entirely plot-driven, and the characters are tepidly drawn. Derleth has no evident skill at dialogue, and he avoids it as much as he can. Still, it's all digestible fun for those who have a taste for this flavor of nightmare, from human sacrifice in New England to nukes in the South Pacific. The net effect is like nothing so much as an account of a great campaign in the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.

Even for a confessed pastiche with some genuine innovation, the writing is often painfully derivative. The third story begins with this sentence: "It is singularly fortunate that the ability of the human mind to correlate and assimilate facts is limited in relation to the potential knowledge of the universe even as we know it--to say nothing of what lies beyond." Even for the reader unaware that this prose is a virtual plagiarism of the opening sentence of Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu," the fact is exposed when Derleth uses that very sentence as an epigram for the fourth story!

An appendix is Derleth's "Note on the Cthulhu Mythos," in which he attempts to demystify the lore generated by the Lovecraft Circle regarding eldritch prehuman forces. The "immediately apparent" similarity of the Cthulhu stories to "the Christian mythos," emphasized both in this short essay and in the text of Derleth's fiction, is an equivalence of Derleth's own invention, just like his attribution of certain Great Old Ones to the classical elements of fire, water, air, and earth. Although it may be something of ignotium per ignotius in a quick book review, it strikes me that Derleth is to Lovecraft much as Kenneth Grant is to Aleister Crowley. Both are self-appointed successors eager to remake their mentors in their own image. Just as Grant (himself no mean Lovecraft fan) is determined to reduce AC's Thelema to an outre form of Indian Tantra, Derleth is intent on making HPL's Cthulhu into an aquatic Satan on steroids.

While the "Note on the Cthulhu Mythos" carefully points out that Lovecraft never took his own writings as anything other than fantasy, the stories of The Trail of Cthulhu represent HPL as a researcher into the genuine occult who cloaked his findings as fiction. In neither case does Derleth admit to the abundantly demonstrated fact that Lovecraft was a mechanistic materialist convinced that there were no "higher powers" with any fondness for humanity whatsoever. show less

La obra de August Derleth, puesta en duda casi siempre, o por los suelos la mayoría de las veces, me parece más que interesante. No llega a la altura de H.P. Lovecraft, está claro, pero se trata de relatos que tratan sobre Dioses Arquetípicos, Primigenios, libros malditos, y esto de por sí ya me atrae. Sin duda, se trata de buenos pastiches lovecraftianos.

Los relatos son independientes, pero mantienen puntos y personajes en común. Derleth suele partir siempre de la misma idea: la show more próxima llegada de los Primordiales a la Tierra, su antiguo dominio. Los cuentos incluidos en esta antología giran en torno a la figura de Ithaqua, el que camina sobre el viento. Las tramas son muy parecidas, casi repetitivas, aunque a mí no me aburren en absoluto. Cierta persona desaparece de repente misteriosamente, para reaparecer al cabo del tiempo caído del cielo, literalmente. Hasta que esto sucede, el narrador investiga en la zona los hechos, interrogando a los testigos y leyendo los escritos dejados por el desaparecido.

Estos son los seis relatos incluidos en ‘Otros mitos de Cthulhu’:

-El morador de la oscuridad.
-Al otro lado del umbral.
-El ser que caminaba sobre el viento.
-Ithaqua.
-La defunción de Eric Holm.
-Algo de allá afuera. show less

Derleth's work is a homage to, commentary on and even pastiche of his friend H P Lovecraft's works, moulding them very deliberately into a 'mythos' later to be taken up by others and, in the process, completely subverting Lovecraft's own cold and dark philosophical stance.

The book is made up of five interconnected short stories which all appeared initially in Weird Tales from 1944 to 1951, allowing Derleth to introduce the atomic weapon by the end, useless though it may be against the show more crawling chaos that our heroes are dealing with.

Psychologically he understands his audience. He is a mature late thirties when he writes the bulk of this material but he still remembers what it was like to be in his late twenties (the age of his young protagonists) even to the point of ultimately being confused about one's own allegiances.

Although irritating to Lovecraftian purists perhaps, 'The Trail of Cthulhu' may have been underestimated - at least as literature. Derleth is clear that this is an entertainment. He reiterates a probable truth that Lovecraft was also primarily concerned with little more.

All Derleth does is displace Lovecraft's cosmic pessimism and awe with a more Manichean struggle between alien beings with a strong nod to the Christian mythos' struggle between Satan and God - almost certainly necessary to extend the appeal of the genre to the American popular market.

What we are seeing is the first stage in what I call the 'Count Duckula Cycle', that process whereby a concept eliciting awe or genuine horror (Nosferatu or Stoker's Dracula) transforms into thrilling entertainment (Universal's Dracula) to comedy and ultimately to children's entertainment.

Derleth is at the Universal Monsters stage before that declined into 'Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein'. The Mythos is still disturbing and scary but more boy's own adventure and far from the cuddly Cthulhu toys and Cthulhu for President memes of today.

Given this aspect of the case, Derleth's skill lies in weaving a story that can include the key components of Lovecraft's story lines (Cthulhu dreaming in R'lyeh, Innsmouth, the Nameless City, night gaunts and so forth) in order to re-model them as a continuous narrative.

Some may baulk at the repetitions in each story (necessary as months or even a couple of years might pass between publication of each) but I suggest we look at the repetitions as incantatory so that the stories themselves are a form of ritual protection against evil.

All the stories have one leading figure in the mysterious and ambiguous Dr. Shrewsbury (the Van Helsing of the tale) and one young hero (who the Weird Tales reader can identify with) for each so that, by the end, we have a band of brothers with an unexpected twist in the person of the last.

Each story is a written testimony, a Gothic horror meme that goes back to at least Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and so to the eighteenth century epistolary novel - manuscript, deposition, testament, statement and narrative. This literary traditionalism also pays homage to HPL.

The writing is clear and popular, less obviously mannered than Lovecraft but with enough references back to retain a linkage - where Lovecraft repeats 'eldritch', Derleth barely uses it but repeats 'batrachian' instead. He retains the 'tainted blood' theme that worries bien-pensants today.

The skill lies in in the popularisation and re-ordering of something that was fragmented and still speaking to a cultured elite under HPL. There is a hybridisation with the adventure novel - South American jungles, sea-going and what would be regarded now as 'racist' anthropologies.

Enough of Lovecraft's cosmic awe and horror remains even if the idea that we can actually resist such evil with its minions on earth (if it had a mind to our destruction) seems to miss HPL's point. Such a shift can never truly be in the spirit of Lovecraft's vision.

Nevertheless, Derleth writes much better than his critics have allowed. The journey to the Nameless City in the Arabian desert, though it has its unexplained absurdities, is a brilliant piece of subterranean horror which Tim Powers will have drawn upon in his 'Declare'.

A knowledge of Lovecraft aids our enjoyment because (other than the grand philosophical betrayal) Derleth is immensely skilled at co-ordinating the 'facts' of HPL's stories into some sort of cohesion - not excluding travel between 'non-Euclidean' dimensions.

The stories and their tight relationship with each other and with their Lovecraftian sources deserves more consideration not as great literature but as a genuine innovation in popular fantasy that has helped fuelled enormous creativity since.

Are we horrified by what we read? Rarely - too much time has passed since its writing. Are we excited by what we read? Much more frequently because adventure is equally what these stories are about. Are we nostalgic for its world? Certainly. show less