Of
course, one way to fend off the ravages of time is to diligently study
forbidden books like von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen
Kulten or The Pnakotic Manuscripts,
and then through a series of self-administered surgeries, convert one’s
physique to one more closely resembling that of a reptile. This daunting process is the subject of The Survivor (1957), an earnest
recycling of Lovecraftian motifs by a man credited with ensuring his dead
mentor’s place in the pantheon of classic horror writers, as well as pilfering
Lovecraft’s work to establish his own career.
Two
decades after his death, Lovecraft apparently collaborated with August Derleth
to produce The Survivor and several
other stories in the late 1950s, though his contributions and revision work are
not nearly as evident as in the joint efforts he completed while still alive. (He seems to have slowed down some.) The version discussed here, along with one
other Derleth-Lovecraft collaboration, can be found in a horror anthology from
the early seventies, Beyond the Curtain
of Dark (1972), edited by Peter Haining.
Haining
considered the two collaborative pieces as coming “from the joint pens of H.P.
Lovecraft and August Derleth”, and profusely thanked the latter through whom “a
cache of forgotten tales came to light.”
According to the editor, Derleth had managed to obtain notes and
outlines—“some of which were almost complete plots”—from the estate of
Lovecraft’s close friend R.H. Barlow.
Haining, in his introductory notes called The Survivor and one other Lovecraft-Derleth collaboration “the
gems of the collection.”
Lovecraft
enthusiasts can depend on his able hagiographer, S.T. Joshi, to set the record
straight. The complex relationship
between Derleth and Lovecraft is deftly analyzed by Joshi in volume two of his
excellent biography of Lovecraft, I Am
Providence (2013). According to
Joshi, one of the reasons Farnsworth Wright rejected work by Derleth as early
as 1931 was because, quoting Wright, “you have lifted whole phrases from
Lovecraft’s works, as for instance: ‘the frightful Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred…’”—Wright goes on to
list several more examples.
To be
fair, Joshi acknowledges that Lovecraft himself was unconcerned about
this. He even enjoyed the fact that he
and his colleagues—Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, among them—routinely
shared “my Azathoths and Nyarlathoteps” as they created background material for
their stories.
But what
Joshi cannot abide regarding Derleth’s contribution to Lovecraftian mythology is
his imposition of an essentially Christian world view on Lovecraft’s other
worldly beings, one that sees Cthulhu as a kind of fallen angel like Lucifer,
and the Elder Gods and the Old Ones as avatars of good and evil. The notion of the Cthulhu Mythos is believed
to have originated with Derleth, after Lovecraft’s death. Joshi feels that The Survivor is not a true collaboration but primarily Derleth’s
work, fashioned out of “some very sketchy notes (mostly dates) written on a
newspaper cartoon.”
The Survivor begins rather tediously for
several pages. Derleth emulates
Lovecraft’s habit of providing interminable backstory before a final climactic italicized ending. However, The
Survivor will still be interesting to dedicated Lovecraft fans. It is crammed with references and phrases
taken from several of Lovecraft’s stories, and these are entertaining to spot
in the text.
The
smelly old house—“it was a musk I had encountered several times before—in zoos,
swamps, along stagnant pools—almost a miasma which suggested most strongly the
presence of reptiles”—recalls the odiferous residence in Lovecraft’s The Shunned House (1928). The mysterious Dr. Charriere, who apparently
has contrived to live for centuries, is probably a close colleague of the refrigerated
Dr. Muñoz in Lovecraft’s Cool Air
(1928). (See also Lovecraft’s
Haunted Houses and The
Importance of Reliable Air Conditioning).
Before
descending into weird paleontology, Derleth’s pastiche surveys the “bibliography
of doom” often consulted by Lovecraft’s characters, and substantiates the
presence of a worldwide secretive cult associated with Cthulhu and Dagon, as
depicted in Lovecraft’s well known The
Call of Cthulhu (1928) and The Shadow
Over Innsmouth (1936).
There
is a cringe-worthy depiction of Lovecraft himself in the story, which may have originally
been intended as a touching tribute to Derleth’s mentor. The narrator consults his fellow antiquarian,
the ailing and bedridden Gamwell—probably named after Lovecraft’s maternal
aunt, Annie Gamwell—regarding the old house he is about to inhabit. Periodically he returns to the older gentleman in hopes of ferreting out additional detail about the house and its mysterious occupant.
It may
be that one of the ravages of time, at least one experienced posthumously, is
to see an author’s creative product decomposed—deconstructed?—and reincorporated into lesser
works by the literary equivalent of saprophytes and detritivores. The content of The Survivor, drawn heavily from works Lovecraft completed in the late
1920s, suggests that it was penned much earlier than when it was published. Derleth may have ignored the admonition to “wait
until the body is cold” before beginning to siphon off some of Lovecraft’s more
noteworthy ideas.
Yet
Derleth stands in a long line of genre writers who seek nourishment from the
remains of his predecessors—living or otherwise. Because contemporary pop culture is so focused
on recycling and re-using the work of the past 100 years or so—as opposed to
creating much that is original—Lovecraft’s unique contribution to horror will
continue to endure and shamble about, not unlike Dr. Muñoz and Dr. Charriere.
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