Re: seeking an assessment of Derleth, as a writer of fiction
Posted by:
jimrockhill2001 (IP Logged)
Date: 2 November, 2017 04:21PM
Derleth experimented with different narrative voices, producing pastiches of many different authors he admired; thus you are going to find pastiches not just of Lovecraft, but also M.R. James, L.P. Hartley, Le Fanu, Blackwood, and Marjorie Bowen, among others. The regional supernatural stories, beginning as pastiches of the sort of thing written by Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett are actually quite good, with strong characterization and settings that don't seem to have been stamped into place (as they do in most of his Lovecraft pastiches. The stories he wrote under the pseudonym Stephen Grendon (one of the characters in his Sac Prairie saga) are probably the best place to start, but these are fine stories sprinkled throughout his collections. I recommend reading the following before dismissing him: "Th Panelled Room" and "The Shuttered House" (note: not "the Shuttered ROOM") in SOMEONE IN THE DARK: "The Satin Mask" and "Motive" in SOMETHING NEAR; "The Drifting Snow" and "Mrs. Lannisfree" in NOT LONG FOR THIS WORLD; "The Lonesome Place" and "The Dark Boy" in LONESOME PLACES; and nearly anything in MR. GEORGE AND OTHER ODD PERSON. Some of his worst stories are those he and Mark Schorer churned out together on alternate nights, collected in COLONEL MARKESAN AND LESS PLEASANT PERSONS.
When Derleth was willing to deviate from pastiche, and think on his own, even his Lovecraftian stories could be interesting, if not anywhere near the level of Lovecraft, cf. the two Lovecraft/Blackwood Wendigo pastiches "The Thing that Walked on the Wind" and Ithaqua", the very un-Lovecraftian "Witches' Hollow", the touching Lovecraft tribute "The Lamp of Alhazred" and the rather bizarre melange of elements from Lovecraft and M.R. James, "The Horror from the Middle Span".
THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD is one of the most frustrating things Derleth wrote. It starts out strongly, then changes direction sharply (and drops several interesting threads) with the appearance of Derleth's dull supernatural sleuth Laban Shrewsbury. The Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price recognized this and wrote a different version of the novel's second half ("The Round Tower [Being the Narrative of Armitage Harper] reprinted in THE DUNWICH CYCLE), which is a great improvement on Derleth's.