August Derleth's "The Shadow out of Space"



S. T. Joshi has a review of John D. Haefele's excellent book, A LOOK BEHIND THE DERLETH MYTHOS, on his blog, and he makes some interesting points, although he is wrong when he dismisses Derleth's entire Mythos writing as garbage.  I was delighted by this, near ye end of the review: "Only the critical naive--or inept--could find virtues in this mass of sub-literary rubbish.  (The genial W. H. Pugmire, in his preface, now also vaunts Derleth's Mythos tales, but no one takes him seriously as a critic.)"  I am now tempted to collect all of my critical writing into a volume to be entitled . . . Not To Be Taken Seriously.

In the first video below, it should be pointed out that I am very suspicious about the solo Lovecraft byline.  Derleth never (to my knowledge) published these collaborations as anything other than "by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth."  -- and DARK THINGS was his final anthology, perhaps brought out just after his death.  I want to believe that some other hand, some last-minute editor other than Augie, is responsible for the grotesquely vile solo Lovecraft byline

Comments

Popular Posts