OK, I'll start a thread on the theme of the artistic legitimacy of weird fiction.

I wanted to say that I did notice & think about the comment on Chandler's Marlowe and Conan. Would a difference be that Marlowe is a disillusioned hero, a "tarnished knight" as I think maybe somebody called him, who does still want to live ethically, where Conan never aspired to ideals at some point in his life?

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> I wanted to say that I did notice & think about
> the comment on Chandler's Marlowe and Conan.
> Would a difference be that Marlowe is a
> disillusioned hero, a "tarnished knight" as I
> think maybe somebody called him, who does still
> want to live ethically, where Conan never aspired
> to ideals at some point in his life?

As to specific character attributes this is correct: Marlowe did indeed have a core of traditionalist integrity and decency, whereas Conan had no conception of them as human values, and if introduced to them, would laugh them off as ridiculously weak.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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"The Trail of Cthulhu" is the nadir of Derleth's Lovecraftian fiction. It's juvenile, episodic "novel" or not. As a historical and regionalist, journalist, he was a great writer. I attended one of the annual Derleth Society meetings in Sac Prairie. An actor portrayed Derleth reading his poetry and so forth. As a weird fantaisist he is a bit underrated due to the relative mediocrity of the Lovecraftian pastiche.

Is there a difference in quality, or in separate subject category, between the stories found in the early collection The Mask of Cthulhu and the later omnibus collection The Watchers Out of Time? There is no overlap.
Neither did the story "The Trail of Cthulhu" (or any of its sequels) find its way into The Watchers Out of Time. I wonder why.

Knygatin Wrote:
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> Is there a difference in quality, or in separate
> subject category, between the stories found in the
> early collection The Mask of Cthulhu and the later
> omnibus collection The Watchers Out of Time? There
> is no overlap.
> Neither did the story "The Trail of Cthulhu" (or
> any of its sequels) find its way into The Watchers
> Out of Time. I wonder why.

The Watchers out of Time is limited to "posthumous collaborations" with Lovecraft.

Martinus Wrote:
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> The Watchers out of Time is limited to "posthumous
> collaborations" with Lovecraft.

I thought all of the Cthulhu mythos collaborations were in fact made after Lovecraft's death.

Also, by the way, most of the stories in The Watchers Out of Time had been printed earlier in other collections.

Martinus Wrote:
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>
> The Watchers out of Time is limited to "posthumous
> collaborations" with Lovecraft.


Ah, now I see - unless I am mistaken again - the stories in The Mask of Cthulhu and The Trail of Cthulhu were not collaborations, but all of them Derleth's own. I hadn't made that distinction before, but thought of everything touching on the Cthulhu mythos as borrowings from Lovecraft.

Perhaps I should also admit that I am not really much interested in Derleth's work, except from fan boy nostalgia concerning anything touching on Cthulhu mythos, having owned a Panther edition of The Mask of Cthulhu in my youth, but getting rid of it for some unremembered reason. It may also be interesting comparing what it is that makes one writer great, and the imitator not so great; from a writing course perspective.

"The Return of Hastur" actually got several suggestions from Lovecraft, which were incorporated, so it may qualify among the revisions.

I wouldn't go quite that far. Lovecraft didn't exactly rewrite entire paragraphs as he did for other revisions.