"The Dweller in Darkness" by August Derleth
Weird Tales, November 1944, Cover by Matt Fox, Image from ISFDB.
I mentioned over on Jagged Orbit, that I recently purchased a dvd of pdf's of some earlier issues of Weird Tales. While I would have liked more of the earliest issues, there was a good selection. One of the first stories I read was "The Dweller in Darkness" by August Derleth, I have read it before, a number of times but how could I resist this cover. Derleth occupies a strange position within the mythos. Derleth along with Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House in 1939, thus keeping alive not just Lovecraft's work but also his letters, and the work of many of his circle, including Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith. But he is also considered to have introduced some none Lovecraftian elements to the Mythos, including adding a somewhat Christian World View and the casting of the Old Ones as elementals that can be played off against each other.
Here I am quoting from John Linwood Grant's somewhat (I assume ) tongue in cheek, THE CTHULHU MYTHOS FOR BEGINNERS, Because we don't want to be taking this to seriously.
"August Derleth, having worked in a canning factory, liked everything neatly packaged and labelled, so whilst he added his own beings, he also tried to sort the others into orderly groups which could be represented by elements, nature, and weight of contents when drained."
"Hence his identification of Cthulhu as a water deity, despite Cthulhu’s known dislike of its enforced holiday in the oceanic depths. And Derleth’s creation of Cthulhu’s bad-tempered brother-in-law, Cthugha, when it was pointed out that he’d missed Fire out."http://greydogtales.com/blog/the-cthulhu-mythos-for-beginners/
I will try to do a more detailed post on Derleth in the future but in this post I want to look at only two works "The Dweller in Darkness" and "The Fisherman of Falcon Point". I plan to include spoilers for "The Dweller in Darkness" so I will look at "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" first. ISFDB indicated that "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" was first published in the Arkham House collection The Shuttered Room rather than making it's initial appearance in Weird Tales.
I was surprised to find that "The Fisherman of Falcon Point". did not appear in several collections that purport to contain all Derleth's mythos stories.
However it can be found in both of the collections below.
"The Fisherman of Falcon Point" is the story of Enoch Conger who lived on the Massachusetts coast not far from Innsmouth. He is not one of the Innsmouth folk, but a powerfully build man with a barrel chest and long arms. He wears his hair and beard long. He is not gregarious, though he will join the other men in the tavern after he sells his fish;
"He was a taciturn man, given to living alone in a house of stone and driftwood which he himself had constructed on the windswept point of land, where he heard the voices of the gulls and terns, of wind and sea, and, in season, of migrants from far places passing by, sometimes invisibly high. It is said of him that he answered them, that he talked with the gulls and terns, with the wind and the pounding sea, and with others that could not be seen and were heard only in strange tones like the muted sounds made by great batrachian beasts unknown in the bogs and marshes of the mainland."
And all is well, it seems with this strange solitary man, until one night he lifts the nets he cast off Devil's Reef and brings up a creature that pleads for her life. Not a mermaid, as he tells the tavern hangers on, because she has legs though her feet are webbed. But something else. Conger is of course mocked for this story, but more importantly haunted by this experience. I will leave this story here. I loved this story, perhaps because my enjoyment of Lovecraft's work is not limited to his more canonical stories, like The Call of Cthulhu, or the Dunwich Horror, but also extends to works from his Dunsany phase. "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" reminds me more of Lovecraft's "The Strange High House in the Mist" or even Dunsany himself with perhaps a nod to The Arabian Nights. Nothing momentous happens, no mountain walks, not deities are evoked to battle one another in an incandescent firestorm above Devils Reef. It is a story of mood and atmosphere, that evoked the sounds of the sea and the gulls above it, the feeling of wet sand and the smell of salt in the air.
To listen to the story you can try the link below, but the text contains spoilers. My rating for the story would be totally different because I really enjoyed it. Again it is probably one of my favourite of Derleth's contributions to the mythos, although perhaps very understated for some tastes.
https://sentinelhillpress.com/2016/04/01/derleth-country-5-the-fishermen-of-falcon-point/
"The Dweller in Darkness" is set in Derleth's native Wisconsin, perhaps he is following the advice he gave to a young Ramsey Campbell, to forgo setting his stories in Lovecraft's New England and instead pick a location he knew. This advice led Campbell to rewrite his earlier stores and launched his Severn Valley Tales, collected in the Arkham House collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964) (PS Publishing released a new edition with lots of additional material), https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/the-inhabitant-of-the-lake--other-unwelcome-tenants-paperback-by-ramsey-campbell-new-cover-1340-p.asp
If so, however Derleth's resolve must have wavered because as far as I know he revisited his Wisconsin setting only once more in his mythos fiction with his 1941 story "Beyond the Threshold", which I will try to do another day. The "Dweller in Darkness" begins with a couple of introductory paragraphs describing the physical landscape where the story takes place. Standard stuff, not as well written as the landscapes described in the first paragraphs in Lovecraft's stories, "The Colour Out of Space", "The Picture in the House" or "The Dunwich Horror" but okay. The setting is the empty lodge on Rick's Lake, the lake is shunned because there are strange winds, unearthly music and a tendency for people to disappesar. sometimes they are just gone. Sometimes they reappear, alive but far away, sometimes dead with their bones broken as if they have fallen from great heights, well, you get the idea. Kind of a strange place. But the lodge attracts the attention of Prof Gardner, when he is summoned to the local museum to view a recently discovered mummified figure tentatively identified as Fr. Piregard, a missionary who disappeared in the area three centuries earlier. The problem was, the body was not mummified but frozen and it appeared to have been dead no more than five years. This piqued Gardner's interest and he was off to the lodge to see what he can find. And well, he disappears too.
After a through search by the local sheriff the mystery of his disappearance is abandoned. Until two of the professor's graduate students, Laird and Dorgan (wonderful mythos name that) spurred on by some of Gardner's letters to Laird. decide to investigate. Equipped with a dictaphone to record any evidence, they travel to Rick's Lake. At the lodge the sheriff gives them some notes Gardner left behind and they also meet Old Pete, a "half breed" prospector who is familiar with the area. They hear spooky wind sounds and scary music and take a brief side trip to visit Professor Partier, who was retired from the university, because he was crazy. I guess they did not have tenure in those days. He fills them in on all the details of the Deleth/Cthulnu mythos and suggests they go home. Later, because that is how these things are done in the pulp magazines of the 1940's, they will ply Pete with "firewater" and force him to take them to see a strange carving of a giant figure accompanied by two smaller figure that is on a rock near the lodge. Pete is rightly, terrified to approach this location after dark and they return him to the highway. When they listen to the dictaphone there is a message from Gardner telling them to flee, but only after summoning Cthugha, remember we heard about him earlier. Then Gardner himself shows up, accidentally destroys the dictaphone recording and Laird and Dorgan visit the rock carving.
This was an okay mythos tale, certainly better than Derleth's very repetitive adventures of Prof. Laban Shrewsbury in The Trail of Cthulhu. But I did have some quibbles, first off, even though I had read it before, I was convinced based on the hints that the creature would be Ithaqua, the setting and behaviour was consistent with his portrayal in other stories by Derleth, Lumley and others. That it was Nyarlathotep the crawling chaos, baffles me. I have always pictured him as a bit more urbane, it may be made up nonsense, but I have standards.
"He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude." from Nyarlathotep by H.P. Lovecraft.
I also see shades of Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in the Darkness" in the resolution. While I enjoyed the cosmic bits of "The Whisperer in the Darkness"I find certain aspects of the plot very weak. The pussyfooting around that the Mi-Go go through with Wilmarth to get hold of the evidence for one, (and don't get me started on Basil Cooper's tribute The Great White Space) has always seemed unnecessary. In this case Nyarlathotep has even less to lose if exposed than the Mi-Go so why all the deception. Come to the point, pick them up, carry them off to Leng or R'lyeh and make them walk home. I do get a little frustrated when I feel people emulate the weakest rather than the strongest aspects of Lovecraft's work. Mythos tales have always been uneven, even some of Howard's so maybe i expect to much. The setting and atmosphere in this story are okay, the plot fairly standard. And I do like the rather silly cover from Weird Tales.
Illustrations and covers
In Lovecraft's Shadow and directly above Stephen E. Fabian for Mycroft & Moran
A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos cover by Leo Grin
The Shuttered Room cover by John Holmes
The Watchers Out of Time and Others cover by (the great) Herb Arnold
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