THE DEEP ONES: "Witches' Hollow" by August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft

"Witches' Hollow" by August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins on August 15, 2018.

First publication in Dark Mind, Dark Heart (1962).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.hplovecraft.hu/print.php?type=etexts&id=703&lang=angol

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?975819

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Shuttered Room and Other Tales of Terror
Witches & Warlocks
The Watchers Out of Time and Others
The Penguin Book of Witches and Warlocks

MISCELLANY

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/derleth.aspx
https://sentinelhillpress.com/2016/04/09/derleth-country-6-witches-hollow/
https://lovecraftzine.com/2016/01/10/august-derleth-and-the-cthulhu-mythos/
http://tinyurl.com/yboj7top

Oddly enough, the local library actually had Dark Mind, Dark Heart still in the stacks, so I checked it out.

Hmm. There's more than one collection entitled he Shuttered Room. I picked up a 1960s vintage UK paperback a while back, but this story isn't in it. Online for me.

You've got two identical links under MISCELLANY, the pair re-directing to Sentinel Hill Press. Uncertain if you meant there to be another link or if it was simply duplicated unintentionally.

>4 elenchus:

Accident & fixed. Thanks!

>3 housefulofpaper:

It should be in the Ballantine paperback releases of The Shuttered Room.

I'm guessing this was largely Derleth's work? It doesn't feel like Lovecraft's, and it's not included with the revisions and collaborations in the Arkham House The Horror in the Museum.

Either way, not particularly impressed by it literarily speaking, but reading it it did occur to me it would be easy to convert into a decent Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game scenario: easier than most of HPL's solo work.

It struck me as a tad incongruous that Wilbur should credit that the Potters could kill the cattle like that, but not that they could be aware of the conversation with Williams without the latter having spilled the beans.

Ah, I see from the miscellany links that Lovecraft's contribution was merely having penned a few lines in his commonplace book which inspired the story. Crediting him as a co-author seems like a vulgar attempt to cash in on his name.

On the subject of the dubious, is the 1928 date correct? Acc'd the H. P. Lovecraft Archive piece, it's a "posthumous collaboration" written after Lovecraft's death.

(If 1928 is correct, it's worth noting that Derleth was just 19 when writing it.)

Amusingly, I wondered if Rowling copped the Potter and Whateley family names for her own Potter and Weaseley families, but perhaps merely coincidence. There are, apparently, many nasty Wizard Potters!

I found the idea of "calling down" an alien force to be suggestively powerful and intimidating, unfortunately undercut at the end: "Then it hurtled like a lightning bolt aloft, into the stars, in the direction of the Hyades ...." If it can cross such vast distances, why not look for another host on Earth? I found the central ideas of this story to be interesting enough, even if the whole package seems a little soft. Everything ties up a little too neatly.

I listened to about a third of the Lovecraft Zine discussion of August Derleth, quite interesting to consider how much revisionism might be going on with respect to his professional reputation. I've long thought of him vaguely as someone striving to cash in on Lovecraft whenever possible, with an inflated view of his own contributions. Not sure how I arrived at that idea, though.

One of the main criticisms that I've heard of Derleth, especially of the stories found in The Shuttered Room paperback, is that while HPL is credited/highlighted, he really only wrote a line or two for each. "Inspired by" would have been a more accurate - and less misleading - byline.

Derleth himself could be a fine regional writer, but generally that was when the story had little to do with Lovecraft. I thought that his explanation of the Necronomicon - CliffsNotes-style - in "Witches' Hollow" was pretty amusing.

I'll check my copies of I Am Providence and Essential Solitude later to see if they shed any light on the writing and publication dates of this story.

This might have made for a halfway-decent roleplaying game scenario as @AndreasJ suggests, or a 1960s AIP or Amicus film, but as a prose narrative it fell flat for me. The mythos elements seem so perfunctorily matter-of-fact.

I had a much better time with the Sentinel Hill Press review linked to in the miscellany, and I'd find it hard to argue with its criticisms.

>9 gwendetenebre:

Well, no mention of "Witches' Hollow" in either I Am Providence and Essential Solitude. Understandably, to be sure.

It seemed like a by-the-numbers Derleth-Lovecraft "collaboration": tie in to Lovecraft stories ("The Dunwich Horror", of course" and the ending reminded me of "The Colour Out of Space" with the horror shooting skyward), magical talisman (stones of R'lyeh), and mention of Derleth created members of the Cthulhu pantheon.

No suspense or wonder in it at all for me.

Though I did rather like the shriveling Mrs. Potter.

Where’d we get the 1928 date from in the first place?

>13 AndreasJ:

Good question. I'm going to remove that for now. Maybe just an accidental carryover from last week's HPL story?

Looks like it was my bad in creating the schedule from the polling thread. It should have been 1962.

This story is certainly representative of the ebb-tide of pastiche and trope-assembly that followed the pulp genesis of yog-sothothery. The focus on successful exorcism makes it more kin to "The Dunwich Horror" than anything else by HPL, I think. Derleth's prose style is inoffensive, but there's next to nothing innovative here.

Metaphysical vigilante Keane is rather a hazard, I think. Look out for anyone who claims to have committed The Necronomicon to heart.

>16 paradoxosalpha:

I seem to recall reading that "The Dunwich Horror" was Derleth's favorite HPL story.

>16 paradoxosalpha: trope-assembly

As such, Derleth offers a clear presentation of a certain perspective on the Mythos. Personally I'm finding that instructive, naturally every perspective emphasises certain aspects while diminishing or eliding others but Derleth provides one take. And he's welcome to his perspective, of course. It's clarifying to the extent I'm faced with an offer, in effect asking me: Do you agree?

I'd disagree with Derleth's conception principally in two arenas: the prose is simply not evocative of cosmic indifference at all; and the plot is constrained, the story is a box in which everything fits and nothing leaks out, there's no breaking of the fourth wall. Finishing the story, I'm not left with any abiding tension or sense of a wider threat than I felt before reading the story. That's quite the opposite of what I get reading the best HPL stories.

>17 AndreasJ:

That wouldn't be surprising at all, since his concept of "The Cthulhu Mythos" is rooted in a sort of Manichean good-vs-evil framework that is present in "The Dunwich Horror," but absent in what many readers consider to be the most distinctively Lovecraftian stories such as "The Colour Out of Space" (HPL's own favorite).

"Witches' Hollow" makes for an interesting comparison and contrast with "The Colour," I think. In both cases, there's a putatively extraterrestrial incursion at an isolated house, corrupting a family. But the Colour is both more inexorable and less evidently conscious than the entity manipulating the Potters. And again, there's the scholar-savior figure imported from "The Dunwich Horror," pointing to a parallel/counterpoint between "The Colour" and "The Dunwich Horror": in each case there are three Miskatonic University professors--clueless spectators in "The Colour" and heroic magi in "The Dunwich Horror."

Even Armitage et consortes from "The Dunwich Horror" seem less effortlessly (and therefore more heroically) successful than Keane does here. One doesn't get the impression that Keane is seriously perturbed by what's going on - the air is less metaphysical vigilante and more metaphysical repairman.

I'll the opportunity to About the LT work for the story: Witches' Hollow

As the original nominator, I apologize to anyone who thought this story was a waste of reading time. It's certainly of a lower caliber than our usual fare. I'll admit I knew that going in, but I thought it would be interesting to tackle one of these soi disant "mythos" stories that take a more mechanical approach to the material.

Also: My error with the dates put this one badly out of sequence. I'm sure that positioning it between an actual HPL story and a CAS one does it no favors.

>21 paradoxosalpha:

The Derleth-completed stories are a part of Lovecraftian literary history, too. Shady though their presentation might be, they're worth examining. I still suspect that there is good to be found in Derleth's fiction. HPL certainly gave him no end of encouragement.

>21 paradoxosalpha:

While, as said, the story didn’t impress me, I am happy to have read something about Derleth, an author I’d heard a lot about, but hadn’t actually read before.

>24 AndreasJ:

My sentiments too. Very happy to have read this story and interested in reading others, frankly. Whether I like the story is only one consideration, there's also the author's or story's contribution to the tradition, as well as using a story to help identify what I do like about other stories.

ETA I'm motivated enough about Weird to be interested in the tradition itself and not only those examples I'll enjoy. Realise that's not true about other genres I read in, such as Science Fiction or Fantasy. Much pickier about selecting works I have a high confidence in appreciating. Partly that's about having read much, much more of the latter two in my youth. And for that matter, I'm not much interested in Horror generally, just the Weird variant.