Lovecraft, H. P. The Shadow Out of Time: The Corrected Text. Ed. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2001. c. 1936. 136 p.
While this restored "The Shadow out of Time" is not dramatically different from earlier editions, it is still a worthwhile addition to any Lovecraft collection. The introduction and footnotes have information that may be new even to seasoned Lovecraft readers, and the cover illustration reproduces the original cover of Astounding, where the story first appeared. More importantly, the story itself is a high point of Lovecraft's writing that deserves the attention that a separate publication, such as this, can bring.
To restore the original quality of Lovecraft's writing has been editors Schultz and Joshi's aim for more than two decades. This effort culminated in the three volumes of corrected text of Lovecraft's works published by Arkham House. Clichés like this being "a monumental task" come to mind when I look at the amount of the material and the heavily corrected manuscripts they had to work from. Yet the editorial tampering done to this tale was slight compared to others. Aside from the paragraphing, the story will seem the same to most readers familiar with older editions. An experienced pulp fiction reader learns to ignore punctuation and creative spelling anyway. But to clarify matters, the textual notes at the back of the book show that most of the changes were spelling variations, punctuation and capitalization.
Textual tampering notwithstanding, the Harry V. Brown cover from Astounding deserves comment because it is so faithful to Lovecraft's description. His creations are imposing on the printed page, but often appear comical when transferred to the visual arts. Cthulhu has those silly vestigial wings and entities like Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, are too vague to render well. Brown made the creatures of the Great Race look plausible with their trumpet-shaped sense organs, tendrils, claws, and three eyes. Few other illustrators could have made such a striking and serious composition.
As for the text, the net effect of the story is the same. It is a slow moving, discovery plot, with heavy emphasis on the suspension of disbelief. The beginning reads like a first-person psychiatric case history. Perhaps the well-known unreliability of mentally unstable narrators needs to be counterbalanced by documentation. Lovecraft fills his tale with dates, letters, expert testimony, newspapers clippings and other reputable third-party corroboration. With this steady flow of details, the reader slowly spirals into the story's vortex. Lovecraft gives only glimpses at first, then dizzying panoramas, and then massive Cyclopean encounters. In this case, he is careful to hold back and not to resort to pulpish hysteria, greatly reducing the cluttered barrage of adjectives that mar his earlier work.
Stylistically, Lovecraft resists the temptation of pulling out all the stops. He shows restraint here with emphasis on systematic suspension of disbelief and strong construction of the narrator's history. Occasionally bits of the pulpish purple, including the word "eldritch," surface, yet he stills retains his habit of pairing adjectives separated by a conjunction. On the other hand, Lovecraft has the praiseworthy, anti-modern habit of mining the rich veins of the powerful, rarely used words of the English language, which are courteously footnoted by Joshi and Schlutz. That is one reason why his literary voice is unique and easily distinguished from Derleth and the other imitators.
If only Lovecraft weren't quite so wordy. From the complex opening sentence onward, this novella is a bit trying. As the story unfolds, the fantasies and dreams are interesting, but the narrator, Nathaniel Peaslee, is not. He is just a dull economics professor disrupted by the fantastic. Obviously, Lovecraft was not interested in character development or dialog; they utterly bored him. Strange themes were a different story.
Transference of personality was a developing literary theme in the early part of the 20th Century, this idea finding its way into the writings of the British Psychic Research Society as well as innumerable fantasy novels. Even highbrow French writer Julien Green wrote If I Were You, a 1927 novel about a man whose personality could exchange bodies at will. In the introduction, Joshi and Schlutz mention the literature that influenced Lovecraft in this regard, as well as a popular movie, Berkeley Square. Besides the personality transference concept, The Shadow Out of Time connects many of Lovecraft's major themes and alludes to most of the previous works set in the Lovecraftian universe, referencing real stories and fictional books. It even allows peeks of the Necronomicon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Eltdown Shards, which the footnote explains comes from a Richard Searight story. It also touches on the so-called Cthulhu Mythos tales of Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert "Psycho" Bloch. Unfortunately, here Lovecraft takes no direct quotations from any forbidden sources. The words of the dreaded Necronomicon are often a highlight of his tales.
What Lovecraft's fans will really find fascinating is that the themes raised in this story occur in much of his fiction and even in his letters. One is the universe's utter indifference to mankind: humanity is just a blip in the Lovecraftian cosmos and is inevitably doomed by weakness and mental defects. Furthermore, the gods and mythological creatures that mankind reveres are just glimpses of greater beings who can transcend time and who only view humanity as a hard to understand curiosity. Finally, momentary concerns seem insignificant on the cosmic scale; therefore mankind needs to rationally examine its place in the universe. Man needs to abandon his mythological parents, reject the idea of supernatural salvation and stand on his own.
Like Lovecraft's later writing on the whole, this novella is not frightening. His aim is to be unsettling. He wanted to change the reader's perspective by opening great vistas of time and space, so the supernatural is wholly absent. The reader also learns from a footnote that Lovecraft had a fear of very large, enclosed spaces. The cyclopean architecture and vast underground complexes of the Great Race exemplify this. He often places his action underground, or in the "subterrene" as he colorfully put it, to make it more emotionally intense. The terror of huge objects goes back to the giant helmet that inspired Walpole to write The Castle Otranto. If the reader does not share this fear, the terror reverts to a sense of wonder: the Great Race's architecture is fascinating, not frightening. Unlike At the Mountains of Madness, the cyclopean beings stay offstage, neatly separated by time, if not by space, so the terror is confined to the final revelation.
In the end, this revelation is not the shock Lovecraft apparently intended. At least The Shadow Out of Time does not end with one of his hysterical last lines, italicized and littered with exclamation points. After all the convincing evidence that came before, the reader is fully prepared to completely anticipate and accept the conclusion that is so carefully constructed. Though not frightening, it is a satisfying ending to finely wrought tale.
In the world of literature, no judgment is ever final. Thanks to the efforts of Joshi, Schlutz and other followers, Lovecraft continues to rise above his early status as a mere pulp writer. The discovery of the original handwritten manuscript of "The Shadow out of Time," the basis of this book, makes an interesting addendum to the Arkham House volumes and justifies his continued recognition in the literary world.
In the final analysis, this tale shows that Lovecraft came full circle
in his literary wanderings. Here, he returns to his childhood love
of astronomy and his fascination with time and history. He is closer
in spirit to H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon than to Poe or Machen.
After all, Weird Tales rejected this tale, but Astounding snapped it up
and gave it an honor never bestowed by Weird Tales, a cover illustration.
Perhaps someday, an outsider will dare to publish that hideous, mind-wrenching
volume, The Science Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.