THE DEEP ONES: "The Lonesome Place" by August Derleth

"The Lonesome Place" by August Derleth

Discussion begins November 6th.

First published the February 1948 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticMysteries-1948feb-00114

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?91793

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

American Gothic Tales
Ghosts That Haunt You
Horror Times Ten
American Supernatural Tales

MISCELLANY

http://www.arkhamhouse.com/augustderleth.htm
http://www.arkhamhouse.com/augustderleth2.htm
http://www.derleth.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Derleth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIKzpdknNWI

I'll have to hit up the public library for this one.

I've got that Penguin American Supernatural Tales.

I'll be reading it out of More Ghost Stories when it comes in at the library.

ETA:
>1 gwendetenebre:

I'm assuming that's a Virgil Finlay cover. Nice!

That is a fine cover.

American Gothic Tales for me.

This is a short one. I read it (in American Supernatural Tales) at the public library today without bothering to borrow the book.

I was really hoping to like this one, but I found it to read like second rate Bradbury with rather bland evocation of childhood. I actually liked the feel of the "lonesome place" itself, one of those ugly industrial stretches that invade residential areas according to the whims of local zoning laws. I found Derleth's repetition of "lonesome place" to be distracting rather than poetic, as I'm sure was his intention.

This works very well for me. It invokes those feelings you have when wandering through Lonesome Places as a child exceedingly well, and spins a very decent story from it, allbeit a short one. I can't really comment on whether it is second rate compared to Bradbury as my Bradbury reading so far has been very limited.

I'm hoping to pick up the 4 volume paperback set of Derleth Weird fiction issued by The Derleth Society/Arkham House/Battered Silcon a few years back before it goes away.

With Bradbury I do intend to cobble together what would have been 'Dark Carnival' (Lets Face it who can afford the original) by reading the stories in other collections (I believe many are in 'October Country')

That will probably have to wait until after my pile of Wellman, and Derleth has been ploughed through :-)

>8 cosmicdolphin:

The October Country is a great place to start with Bradbury. It does have a hefty chunk of Dark Carnival in it. Have you read Something Wicked This Way Comes? As far as the history of horror, that novel is essential.

For me, Derleth's "lonesome place" really called to mind Stephen King's Derry, Maine. It would have fit right in.

I thought this was decent with a reasonably good twist. Like Kenton, I was reminded of Bradbury although without the skill at prose. Bradbury would have made the repetition work.

I was also reminded of King not because of the setting but because of the child protagonists. We haven't seen too much of that with our readings.

>10 lucien:

Good point about child protagonists. I like the illustration for the story from Famous Fantastic Mysteries:

http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticMysteries-1948feb-00114

Run!!!!

ETA

Since the illustration comes complete with an "electronic distribution prohibited" message, I replaced it with the link to unz.org. Want to play by copyright rules.

I too was reminded of Bradbury. The story seemed to work well enough for what it was: a homey Midwestern account of the dangers of imagination. There's an implicit moral with which I disagree, and the setting is something I've seen too much of in real life to be grateful for any literary version of it.

Since I've spent my life in the American Midwest, the small town with the piles of lumber and the grain elevator brought some specific images to mind.

But, apart from that, the story didn't do much for me. Given the publication date, I'll refer to it as on a parallel track with work of Bradbury around the same period -- and Derleth was a regional writer as well as working in the fantastic.

As for moral, I have to say I didn't care enough about the story to examine it in that light. I never got beyond the "There really was a monster" development. I hoped for something more interesting than this story's end given the ominous opening.

I was another reader reminded of Ray Bradbury by this story. Possibly, what I was remembering was the first story in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, "The Night" insofar as it features a child scared in the night - although the plot and outcome are very different.

I think Derleth does a fair job of conjuring up a world where young children are, on one hand expected to play a much bigger practical role around the home - and, I imagine, the farm - whilst not being taken seriously as individual persons in their own right.

The twist - that childhood fears can be so focused in a particular locale that they can manifest in reality - struck me as being very much of its time and place - the high-point for psychoanalysis and (in certain circles) a belief in ESP and other so forth - ideas that would go "overground" in the '60s.

Joshi says this is the cream of Derleth's horror writing. So.

> 8-9

I suppose everyone's noticed that member bluetyson has listed the contents of Dark Carnival in his review - so it can be "reconstructed" by finding the stories in other collections. It's worth noting, though, that Bradbury rewrote the stories that he carried over into the "refocusing" of Dark Carnival, The October Country.

(There's an article about Ray Bradbury as a horror writer, with an emphasis on Dark Carnival/The October Country, by Joel Lane, in the Autumn 2005 volume of Wormwood. "Refocused" is his description. By the way, Touchstones didn't find the right volume of Wormwood, but number 6 contains part 2 of Lane's essay).

Derleth doesn't add much nuance to the characterizations beyond Steve's. They're kind of like automatons simply designated "mother", "Mady", "father" so they can mouth their lines. Friend Johnny fares a little better, but he really serves no purpose in the story beyond garnering a co-creator credit as far as the monster in the lonesome place goes. Could either boy have conjured the entity on his own? If not, what was special about the two of them together that enabled it's existence? Lots of kids have vivid imaginations, after all. I wish that Derleth would have examined that aspect.

>15 paradoxosalpha:

Thanks for the warning, S.T. I still might dip into to more AD at some point, just to be sure.

>16 housefulofpaper:

Wikipedia also has some information:

For many years, Bradbury did not permit Dark Carnival to be reprinted, since updated versions of many of the stories were collected as The October Country. However, a limited edition of Dark Carnival, with five extra stories and a new introduction by Bradbury, was printed by Gauntlet Press in 2001.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Carnival_%28book%29

The 2001 Gauntlet special edition goes for crazy prices itself. I wonder if there might still be a chance for a special Dark Carnival re-creation in the future?

18>

So the story versions in October country were revised/altered from the earlier Dark Carnival versions?

>19 cosmicdolphin:

The afterword to my PS Publishing edition of The October Country notes that some of the stories have been "heavily revised and reworked" from the earlier Dark Carnival versions. It doesn't specify which.

ETA

Here is a bit more detail on the revisions:

http://books.google.com/books?id=rnWY_tjp9WgC&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=br...

Just finished this this morning. Agreed that is strongly reminiscent of Bradbury, although the understated prose style is much closer to Ernest Hemingway, I think. Also agree with Kenton et al that it seems to be a precursor of Stephen King's work. This passage in particular strongly recalls King:

What do grown-up people know about the things boys are afraid of? Oh, hickory switches and such like, they know that. But what about what goes on in their minds when they have to come home alone at night through the lonesome places? What do they know about the lonesome places, where no light from the street corner ever comes? What do they know about a place and time when a boy is very small and very alone, and the night is as big as the town, and the darkness is the whole world? When grown-ups are big, old people who cannot understand anything, no matter how plain?

I seem to recall a passage that is very similar to this in King's 'Salem's Lot.

20>

Thanks for the detail. It seems extensive revisions took place.

There's also a similar plot point in the Val Lewton film "The Leopard Man". There's a young woman whose mother sends her on an errand to buy food, she's frightened to go but the mother ignores her concerns or is out right hostile, and there's a pair of famous scenes where she's afraid to walk through a isolated underpass beneath train tracks. I don't think there's any influence at play but since I watched it recently the similarity jumped out at me.

>23 lucien:

Excellent analogy to The Leopard Man, Lucien!

You love him, you hate him, you can't do without him. Happy 105th birthday, AWD!