Mr. George and other odd persons
by August Derleth
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This was a long time coming. I bought When Graveyards Yawn in 1978 and have just got a round to reading it (2014). Whilst my life hasn't been impoverished by its previous absence, Derleth's collection of ghost stories is still a good one.
There aren't any overtly gruesome shocks, hints and suggestions being more Derelth's style, dictated, no doubt, by the mores of the time in which he was writing - the 1940s - and there is nothing of the cosmic horror of his literary hero, H.P. Lovecraft. What there is is a set of atmospheric stories dealing mainly with returns from "the other side". There is usually some malevolence, though often against a deservingly unpleasant victim. Endangered children, in particular, seem to be protected by the show more shades of the departed in Derleth's world, although youth is no guarantee of escape from a spectral slaying.
The first story, Mr George is probably the best of the bunch, but it's not a downhill ride from there, as there are plenty of other interesting tales. I liked the narrator's voice in The Man on B-17, told by the driver of a locomotive who seems oblivious to the supernatural element of his story, evident to the reader.
Dead Man's Shoes is an interesting WWI revenge story involving haunted boots, and The Tsantsa in the Parlour is a very well done supernatural murder plot.
I wasn't so keen on Parrington's Pool, which gave me more information on fly fishing than I felt I was in need of, but all of the other stories had something to commend them.
I think that my 9p investment 36 years ago has repaid itself. show less
There aren't any overtly gruesome shocks, hints and suggestions being more Derelth's style, dictated, no doubt, by the mores of the time in which he was writing - the 1940s - and there is nothing of the cosmic horror of his literary hero, H.P. Lovecraft. What there is is a set of atmospheric stories dealing mainly with returns from "the other side". There is usually some malevolence, though often against a deservingly unpleasant victim. Endangered children, in particular, seem to be protected by the show more shades of the departed in Derleth's world, although youth is no guarantee of escape from a spectral slaying.
The first story, Mr George is probably the best of the bunch, but it's not a downhill ride from there, as there are plenty of other interesting tales. I liked the narrator's voice in The Man on B-17, told by the driver of a locomotive who seems oblivious to the supernatural element of his story, evident to the reader.
Dead Man's Shoes is an interesting WWI revenge story involving haunted boots, and The Tsantsa in the Parlour is a very well done supernatural murder plot.
I wasn't so keen on Parrington's Pool, which gave me more information on fly fishing than I felt I was in need of, but all of the other stories had something to commend them.
I think that my 9p investment 36 years ago has repaid itself. show less
Proof that Derleth could write a decent pulp horror story as long as he stayed away from anything Lovecraftian. I'm not sure, and don't really care, why these were all written under the pseudonym of Stephen Grendon unless Derleth's name had just gotten a bad enough name as a writer that he felt he had to hide it. Knowing Derleth it probably was because he wanted to put his own stories in his edited collections and didn't want it so obvious that he was including two of his own stories (one as Derlth and one as Grendon). Instilled with a little more grue then the average Derleth story.
This is a collection of horror stories that Derleth wrote for Weird Tales in the '40s. Fairly high quality pulp horror, though Derleth does have the unfortunate habit of recycling plots, with tales of posthomous revenge making up at least half the stories in this collection. Another prevalent element is that of loneliness, often that of a child who has lost an important parental figure. Derleth paints this quite skillfuly, so the air of sadness it lends to those stories feels more like a personal touch than a recylced trope. Only a story or two really achieve something novel enough to place them above quality pulp horror.
A set of shorter horror stories by a competent practitioner. Definitely the kind of thing Arkham House published.
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August Derleth was born on February 24, 1909 in Sauk City, Wisconsin. He sold his first story to Weird Tales at the age of 16. He received a Bachelor's of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin. After college, he went to work for Fawcett Publications as an editor for Mystic Magazine. In 1932, the first of his Sac Prairie stories was show more published in various local papers. In 1935, his first book, a collection of related novellas entitled Place of Hawks, was published. In 1937, his first Sac Prairie novel, Still is the Summer Night, was published. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1938 to help him continue the Sac Prairie saga. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 90 books including The Milwaukee Road, Still Small Voice, H.P.L.: A Memoir, Restless Is the River, The Hills Stand Watch, Sweet Genevieve, Evening in Spring, The Moon Tenders, The Captive Island, and Father Marquette and the Great River. He had upward of 3,000 works published in over 350 magazines including The Catholic World, The Yale Review, The New Republic, Redbook, The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, and The American Mercury. He died on June 6, 1971. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Mr. George and other odd persons
- Original title
- Mr. George and other odd persons
- Alternate titles
- When Graveyards Yawn
- Original publication date
- 1963
- First words
- The tales in this book were written all in one month twenty years ago specifically to swell the log of Weird Tales.
(Introduction)
Now that the sunlight of late afternoon slanted across the lawn, Priscilla took the flowers she had gathered and tied a little blue ribbon around them. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I hope that readers of these tales will not find it too difficult to agree.
(Introduction) - Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 813.0873
- Disambiguation notice
- When Graveyards Yawn is a variant title of Mr. George and Other Odd Persons. Please do not separate the editions.
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Horror, Fantasy
- DDC/MDS
- 813.0873 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Horror fiction; Ghost fiction
- LCC
- PZ3 .D445 — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction in English
Statistics
- Members
- 80
- Popularity
- 395,841
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.18)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 1
- ASINs
- 6
