August DerlethKirja-arvosteluja

F/SF

This is the longest 'collaboration' I've read between August Derleth and HP Lovecraft and turns out to be almost wholly Derleth based on a few short fragments of HPL's. It does read that way, although seems better than most of Derleth's efforts until the last third where it degenerates into his usual tendency of throwing in everything including the kitchen sink in his efforts to name check all the Old Ones, their minions and the various forbidden books about them. The main issue though is the rushed conclusion which for me spoils what should be a great scene of enormous suspense and scariness. So definitely going back to HPL for the real deal, although this effort is not awful and there are some novel elements - the old tower, stone circles, Native American beliefs etc - that I haven't so far encountered in the other collaborations.

A series of five linked novellas with characters in common, in the usual Derleth style of extending Lovecraft. So we have updates here including nuclear weapons. The trouble is, Derleth has an obsession with the Deep Ones and Cthulhu so we don't see any other aspect of the mythos apart from the hero professor's ability to use minions of Hastur, an enemy of Cthulhu, to let him and his latest helper escape at the end of each. Each story is a journal left by the latest helper but they are all rather cardboard cutout in personality and it's easy to confuse them especially in the last novella where all are reunited with the professor. So can only really give it a 2 star as it does get very samey and boring with the continual very similar storylines.

On the plus side, it has an attractive cover by Bruce Pennington, as a companion piece to his cover for 'The Mask of Cthulhu'

Well, unlike August Derleth's Lovecraft pastiches, I was able to read it to the end. Overall, I liked it but there were stories that dragged in the middle or where the mystery seemed a bit trite for a Holmesian story. The stories also seemed to find and adhere to a formula fairly early on but I didn't really mind that all that much. I'm all for pulp Holmesian stories and these for the most part fit the bill. However, they lack any real atmosphere (as does any of his writing that I've happened upon) and the characters were interchangeable, there are no real memorable characters of note here even the Broken Faced Man! So, would I recommend this one to someone seeking a little lighter Holmesian fair, sure, it's not stellar but it is pretty close to the real thing. I did get jolted more than once expecting to read Watson rather than Parker.

August Derleth was an American author working in the genres of fantasy, horror, mystery, crime, regional and science fiction. He founded the publishing house Arkham House and published the writings of H P Lovecraft.
The Outer Reaches is a collection of science fiction short stories published in 1951. I read the paperback version which states that 'This edition contains 10 of the 17 stories that appeared in the hard-bound edition' There is no introduction by Derleth and so it appears he did not have to work too hard to put this together. The collection features stories from the usual suspects writing in 1951:

Co-operate or else - A. E. Van Vogt
Goodnight Mr James - Clifford Simak
Critters - Frank Belknap Long
Death Sentence - Isaac Asimov
This is the Land - Nelson Bond
Ylla - Ray Bradbury
The Green Cat - Cleve Cartmill
Pardon My Mistake - Fletcher Pratt
The Plutoniam Drug - Clark Ashton Smith
Farewell to Eden - Theodore Sturgeon.

Its quite an impressive array of science fiction story writers from that era and the quality of the writing is fairly good for this genre. The stand-out story is Ylla by Ray Bradbury from his Martian Chronicles collection, this one really does contain that sense of wonder that one finds in the best science fiction. Bradbury creates an alien environment that leaves the reader wanting more. Like most of the stories there is a twist, but Bradbury doesn't pull something out of the drawer at the last minute, but builds his story nicely to its climax. This cannot be said for the story by Isaac Asimov. Clark Ashton Smith's 'The Plutonium drug' has an interesting scenario built around the idea that discoveries on other planets will result in finding new wonder drugs. Nelson Bond's 'This is the Land' is an atmospheric creation of one of the last human burials on earth and Farewell to Eden by Theodore Sturgeon is a good story about a couple escaping from the doomed earth to start afresh.

The Green Cat by Clive Cartmill contains the phrase "It was writing, but not as we know it", which just may have been the first time this phrase was used. Of course the similar misquoted phrase from star trek has taken on a life of its own since then. Nothing sensational in this collection and as I have previously read the best story I rate this as 3 stars.

Overall, these stories are pretty lame, and I'm fairly sure That they are written by Derleth. Lovecraft does a MUCH better job. Shame on you, Derleth.

I don't remember any of these stories. The most famous of the stories, heavily rewriten by August Derleth include : The Survivor , Wentworth's day, The Peabody Heritage, The Gable Window, and The Shadow out of Space. For the fan of Derleth-Lovecraft colaborations.

Five Stars for the lovely entry into August Derleth's love of nature and beauty (in Italics)
- zero to 3 stars for the Character studies.

Each of these stories end with the usually painful death of the person that he knew long ago.

It would have been good to have a balance with the solitary men and shirking women -
he rarely offers any redemption so that readers may advance with dread to the latest Sac Prairie
resident beset with madness, murder, suicide, major depressive loneliness, lunacy, poison,
and - finally - horror.

Why did the religious people and their leaders, the doctors, the nurses, the teachers,
caring and compassionate neighbors or storekeepers...not reach out to all these lost souls?
Why did they continue to be excluded?

And why did he not want to document any of those who tried to help?
Or was this community of madness really just awful?

Maps would have been welcome, as well compassion for "stock"
leaving on trains and choosing to use worms instead of handmade flies.

Readers may well wonder what Henry David Thoreau would have thought about
this sad and disappointing vision.

August Derleth was always a good anthologist. These twenty stories are part of a trio of anthologies that Derleth did for Rinehart during and after WWII. They are all culled from Weird Tales or from British writers that had not seen much print in the US. All would end up in Arkham House books somehow. You get twenty stories and two Lee Brown Coye illustrations for each tale, what could be bad? Derleth includes one of his own hidden stories under the pen name of Stephen Glendon.

I never cared for Derleth’s sf or Mythos writing but his straightforward spook tales are gruesomely good. Beyond his masterful editorship he was also a successful regional writer. If you appreciate midwestern US regional writing, you might try to find his less uncanny scribblings.

Usual Derleth dreck about Lovecraft where in a bizarre way he refers to himself in the third person. I'm beginning to think Derleth wasn't all that instrumental to Lovecraft's legacy, he just beat others to it. I'm think he did more to create some strange unsubstatiated rumors about the Gentleman From Providence.

Derleth sucked as a writer of Lovecraftian pastiches, probably one of the worst. His straight horror is okay, usually, but where he really showed he could write was in his biographical pastoral books about his native Sac Prairie valley. This is an excellent little book, reminiscent of a Ray Bradbury minus the supernatural elements. It is probably a bit too Norman Rockwell at times for modern tastes.

This book looks exactly like an Arkham House release except for the imprint.

Piece of shit!
"Tex" Harrigan is about the dumbest reporter there ever was. People bring him all sorts of interesting stories about time travel, space aliens, monster, Martians and similar ilk and he never believes any of it. Never. He's not above putting it in the paper if it sells, but he never believes it himself.

This volume purports to bring all of Derleth's sf writing together in one volume. Thank God he didn't write any more. The shtick is for Chicago reporter "Tex" Harrigan to provide the framing story, sort of like Dunsany's Jorkens club stories, to reminisce about some outlandish occurrence in the past as a seed for the plot. The stories are about as tedious and unimaginative as any pulp sf dreck ever dredged up. I know that in the pulp days, and these are later pulp sf stories, they wrote fast for money.

This book was issued just a few years after Derleth's untimely death so it was probably cobbled together when Arkham House was going through a certain amount of disarray. It might also have been something on Derleth's plate when he passed. In any case these stories are better off forgotten in the crumbling pages of the obscure magazines they originally appeared in than they are collected in this book.

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.

4/6/22

4/6/22

A Full Five Stars and more for the incredible Wood Engravings by Frank Utpatel!

The poetry and prose of the three gentlemen, August Derleth, Jesse Stuart, and Robert E. Gard,
while finely tuned and often beautiful in their depictions of nature, are also heavy on death and depression,
rating between 2 and 5 stars.

Not up to Lovecraft's standard, but entertaining enough and interesting to see the improvement in the handling of the themes between the first and last story in the anthology.

Dentro del concierto novelístico mundial, los cuentos cortos o una antología de cuentos del más variado estilo, concitan el interés del público lector. Por ello, brindamos "Cuentos del mas allá", debidos al conocido escritor norteamericano August Derleth.

I think HP Lovecraft did it better. The Cthulhu Mythos (or Yog-Sothery, as HPL put it) were not about good vs. evil or distorted retellings of the fall of Satan/Lucifer, so that whole schtick which Derleth repeated in every story was kind of annoying. Ditto the focus on the elemental classifications of Cthulhu et al. As HPL described these cosmic beings, they were beyond the understanding or judgement of mere humans, certainly beyond matter, space, and time as we know it.

The third annoying thing in these stories was the listing of every entity in the pantheon in every story. It's almost as though Derleth didn't have confidence in his own ability to write a creepy story without seasoning it with a large dollop of HPL sprinkles.

Having said all that, some of the stories were quite good (shorn of the derivative trappings). I enjoyed The Whippoorwills in the Hills especially, and the stories set in Wisconsin. These seemed to be good additions to the canon, expanding the scene from the New England settlements to the darksome forests of the north. I also liked the focus on Ithaqua in these stories.

The last part, the novel "The Trail of Cthulhu" was told by five different narrators, but each one was essentially the same type of character, and because they each had to learn about the cosmic nastiness of Cthulhu, there was a lot of repetition.

So, overall, worth reading if you like Yog-Sothery (as I do), but definitely of a different flavor.½

dnf @ 11% it really is just sherlock holmes with another name

First published in 1949 this is an early anthology of short SF stories. All are from the 1940s, easily a decade before the "Golden Age of SF" in the 1950s-1960s. Some of the stories are just fantasy and some are more mystery. Several were written by new authors who went on to make a name for them selves. These include Ray Bradbury, A. E. van Vogt, Frank Belknap Long, and William F. Jenkins (as Murry Leinster). Some of the stories are in the fading style of earlier decades and some show promise of the SF to come.

"El que acecha en el umbral" se centra de un modo explícito en ese auténtico punto focal del horror lovecraftiano que es el símbolo de la "puerta". Una puerta que, cuando se abre, no provoca la mera irrupción de los monstruos del otro lado, cual si del portillo de una simple jaula se tratara: en las inmediaciones del umbral blasfemo, la substancia misma del espacio-tiempo resulta íntimamente transformada, y el mundo parece empezar a disolverse en el maligno vaho de sus arcanos.
Máximo logro de la fecunda colaboración de Lovecraft-Derleth, esta novela es una pieza clave del ciclo de los Mitos de Cthulhu.

This collection is a mixed bag, but there is probably nothing else like it, so grab a copy if you can find one. The highlight for me was James Thomson's "The City of Dreadful Night", which is truly a masterful achievement in creating an atmosphere of absolute gloom and despair. The collection covers a wide period of time, and includes some familiar classics by Keats, Poe, de la Mare, and others. The latter part of the book is dominated by what I'll call the "Weird Tales" poets, most prominently H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's poetry is quite good, in fact, and much more under control than his fiction, as I guess would be expected, since poetic forms impose certain rules on an author. His sonnet collection, "Fungi from Yuggoth", is memorable, and much less silly than the title would indicate. The poems of Robert E. Howard (author of Conan and lots more in his short life) also stand out.

This is a book to be taken in doses over a period of several weeks. Recommended.½

Fiction Literature's Salieri

I love me some Sherlock so was quite excited to get all? the volumes of the Solar Pons books. When Doyle stopped writing Sherlock, Derleth contacted him and asked if he (Derleth) could continue the series, but Doyle said "No." So Derleth did anyway, shifting the setting a bit later but keeping all the characters (albeit with non-infringing names). Unfortunately, he's no A. C. Doyle.

The mysteries are easier to solve than Sherlock's and the characters are forgettable. The stories are formulaic and seem dry somehow. Derleth's Sherlock, er, Solar seems more like amateur fan-fiction than a continuation of Doyle's work or anything that could have stood on its own.

Derleth also continued Lovecraft's work (after his death) with his own shallow attempts, producing a number of unsatisfying works that could dilute the very work he sought to "honor".

I made it through the entirety of Pons Volume 1 but won't be reading any of the others unless I hear that he radically improved somewhere along the line. My advice: Save the effort, and re-read the original Holmes.

Better than his Sherlock Holmes knock-off Solar Pons, this attempts to carry on Lovecraft's series of horror. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have Lovecraft's knack for characterization and keeping the reader off-balance. Derleth also works in clumsy marketing attempts (having characters discuss a Lovecraft collection he published and sold alongside other fictional books as required reading). He also feels the need to re-interpret some of Lovecraft's stuff, classifying the ancient evil creatures in terms of "elementals".

I couldn't get enough Lovecraft while I was reading him, but this... I got partially through this collection and kept putting off picking it up again. I'll shelve it for now, partially read, in the hopes that I'll soldier through the rest one day.

It's not that it's all that bad; it's just not all that good and pales in comparison to Lovecraft's stuff.