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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fifteen of August Derleth's less inspired Mythos tales, 7 Jun 2003
It is most unfortunate and wrong in more ways than one that this collection of stories is passed off as the work of H.P. Lovecraft. All of these stories were written by August Derleth, who was inspired by various little notes Lovecraft left behind, but the only indication of the true ownership of the tales comes in the list of sources from which these stories were assembled, a section quite easy to overlook by the general reader. Any Lovecraft disciple must have mixed feelings about August Derleth. His contribution to the Lovecraft legacy is undeniably significant; in the years after Lovecraft’s death, Derleth almost single-handedly kept his memory alive, forming the historic Arkham Press to publish the master’s stories himself. Derleth’s contribution is much more controversial when it comes to extending the Cthulhu legacy, however, for his conception of the Mythos is significantly different from that of Lovecraft; Derleth tended to see things in black and white, good vs. evil. This bifurcation of the Mythos legacy is in sharp contrast to Lovecraft’s original vision of a world where good and evil do not exist per se. Reading Derleth’s Mythos stories poses a danger of the reader conflating Derleth’s ideas and conceptions with those of Lovecraft, and I for one strive to keep the original legacy intact in my mind. This danger is exacerbated by Derleth’s frequent citation of events and characters from Lovecraft’s original writings. Dunwich and Innsmouth serve as frequent settings for these stories; familiar names such as Wilbur Whateley and the Whateley clan, Obed Marsh and his batrachian (which seems to be Derleth’s favorite word) descendants are encountered at every turn; and all manner of dark tomes are referred to, those introduced by members of the Lovecraft Circle as well as others Derleth invents himself. 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 hims |
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