Introduction
A Dream of Years
The Cave of the Immortals
The Private Estate
Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology | ROBERT GUFFEY
The Beast Comes to Brooklyn
Just the Weight of God
Malygris Never Died
Nineteen Minutes
Every Path Taken
Genghis at the Gate of Dreams
Moonlight Over Mauritania
Out of Time
“The Colour out of the Shadow”
Kingsport Tea
Crom-Ya’s Triumph
The Rocks of Leng
The Moth in the Dark
About the Authors
About the Editor
SHADOWS OUT OF TIME
I hope the title of this book is not misleading. If you are expecting an entire volume of spinoffs from Lovecraft’s
But the focus of this book is a lot broader. In his 1933 essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft wrote:
The reason why
Italics are his, by the way. Contributors were given that quote and told, “Go. Great Race of Yith optional.” This book is the result.
Most Lovecraftian fiction, by Lovecraft and his numerous successors, could actually be titled “The Shadow Out of Time.” Surely the commonest theme in supernatural fiction— describing, for example, the entire corpus of M.R. James — is that of some menacing force that lingers longer than it should, in the grave or elsewhere, which reaches out to touch the present. Dracula is a shadow out of time as much as any Yithian, or any Jamesian lich, or any dinosaur awakened by atomic testing in a 1950s monster movie. Ancient things that lurk and wait.
Lovecraft’s whole philosophical and aesthetic outlook emphasized the precarious nature of humanity, that our existence is but a transitory incident of no great consequence in the universe at large, a universe which remains forever out of reach. Today, as space telescopes reveal the presence of thousands of planets (and by implication, billions) revolving forever out of reach in our own galaxy alone, and the existence of billions of galaxies, Lovecraft’s work resonates more than ever. Somewhere in his letters he remarked that if the Earth ceased to be, “Arcturus would twinkle as before.” In “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” he also remarked on his “persistent wish” to achieve “the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.”
I write this as the Webb Space Telescope has just been launched. Given his lifelong fascination with astronomy, Lovecraft would no doubt have been thrilled, as the radius of our sight and analysis have increased exponentially, first with the Hubble telescope, and now this, but it would not have relieved him of that crushing sense of cosmic insignificance. We can see so very much. We may be able to see far back into time, near to the creation of the universe. But we still can’t go there. In the event of our extinction, Arcturus will indeed go on twinkling.
The theme of conflict with, or transcendence over, time does not always evoke fear in Lovecraft. It usually does, because he was a horror writer, and that’s what he did, but “The Silver Key” is a time story, in which the hero seeks to escape back in time to the pleasant refuge of his childhood. Rod Serling wrote several
On a much more sinister note, there is “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which is the most traditionally gothic of Lovecraft’s major fictions, and which has something in common with all those M.R. James stories about things from out of the tomb which ought to be dead but aren’t. Here a sorcerer, killed by a mob in the late 18th century, has laid a trap in time designed to be sprung on a descendant, which allows for his resurrection in the 1920s. Joseph Curwen (the bad guy) and his colleagues have indeed triumphed over time and are able to resume their cosmically sinister labors, at least until they come to a fortuitous end.
