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• Wentworth’s Day A fellow figures his debt to a dead man is null and void, until he discovers just how terrifying interest rates can be.
• The Shuttered Room A sophisticated gentleman must settle his grandfather’s estate, only to find that the house shelters dark secrets.
• The Dark Brotherhood A beautiful woman and her companion meet the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, in a tale as terrifying as anything Poe himself ever created.
• Innsmouth Clay A sculptor returns from Paris to create a statue not entirely of this world–and not at all under his control.
• Witches’ Hollow A new schoolteacher puts his soul in peril while trying to save one of his students from a ravenous creature.
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August Derleth was a perfectly competent writer capable of producing an impressive story every now and then. For the most part, however, his work is overly formulaic and repetitive, and, while he tries very hard to write the kind of stories Lovecraft wrote, his stories just don’t captivate the reader or come alive with the type of overwhelming, cosmic menace that seemed to live in the very words Lovecraft put to paper. The fifteen stories collected here are remarkably similar in plot and presentation, and that helps make this a somewhat tedious read at times; sometimes the only real spark of interest generated in my mind was a curiosity to see just how commonplace a spin a given story would place on Lovecraft’s otherworldly cosmology. When Derleth did dare to color outside the lines, his attempts come off rather strangely and almost comically. A case in point is The Dark Brotherhood, a tale in which a band of strange men bearing an incredibly strong resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe introduce a character clearly based on Lovecraft himself to a vision of another world. Having these alien creatures adopt the image of Poe makes the story memorable to the reader at the expense of the story’s effectiveness.
You really won’t find anything here that did not originate with Lovecraft; Derleth seems to have a literary mold in which he mixes Mythos beings and characters in random fashion from one story to the next. As I say, though, Derleth is a competent writer, so few of these stories are painfully hard to read; judged outside of the context of Lovecraft, they are effective albeit repetitive. As a Lovecraft fan, I enjoy Derleth’s stories (and I might note that his best are to be found not here but in The Mask of Cthulhu and The Trail of Cthulhu), but they are just so lifeless that the memory of them begins to fade as soon as I finish them. I believe there is material here capable of entertaining both the Lovecraft devotee as well as the general horror fan. The important thing to keep in mind, though, is that these stories really should not be attributed in any way to Lovecraft, no matter what the book cover might want you to believe.
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