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There's nothing very bad about this book, other than it feels extremely familiar. I already felt like I'd read it before. Wiki states ST Joshi said of this novel's 50,000 words, only 1,200 were actually written by Lovecraft. This is probably why I didn't find it a very gripping or original read. Many ideas and even characters feel regurgitated from previous stories. I even feel that some previous lines of Lovecraft's have been paraphrased here.So I guess my problem lies more in that Lovecraft's
While I enjoyed this book, it does have a bit of a "August Derleth writes Lovecraft fanfic" vibe to it. Very little of this novel was actually written by HPL and it has a number of the issues that you see in AD/HPL "collaborations" - the Elder Gods as (absent) "white hats" and less of a feeling of hopelessness than you get in pure HPL stories; also, Derleth seems to have thrown in every aspect of HPL's Mythos, including the tentacled, other-worldly kitchen sink. The story is split into three sec...
This is a decent story if you can refrain from comparing it to Lovecraft(which I can't entirely) but it seems like a short story stretched to novel length. Most of the third part is a long boring imaginary academic lecture.
First of all, let's be clear -- this book is about 99% August Derleth, 1% H P Lovecraft. That said, I enjoyed this book, it's atmosphere, setting, creepy touches here and there. But this isn't a book I could highly recommend to others who aren't into Lovecraft in particular. I've read Derleth's short story collection "The Watchers Out of Time" (also falsely marketed as being by Lovecraft) and the majority of stories there follow the following plotline -- A man inherits a long-abandoned house of
Ambrose Dewart inherits an old mansion in rural Massachusetts and as he investigates his family history, the sinister estate begins to take hold on him...This novel is actually mostly written by August Derleth from a few fragments left by Lovecraft after his death. As a result, the prose is somewhat less...impenetrable (apart from a few passages written in olde English)...and, there's dialogue! But if you've read much Lovecraft already, the story and content is going feel like more of the same.
Started good, but then it sorta got away from me.
I read this a long time ago in bed while alone in the house. I was not a child, rather a young adult and never particularly hypersensitive, nonetheless, as I read, I slowly became aware of each and every strange noise in and outside the house and was not long before I closed the bedroom's door - though in fact that made things worst when needing to go to the bathroom. No matter how much the mind insists it is all fiction (and nothing more), a part of us cannot help but feel that something (just
I'd heard some bad things about Derleth's posthumous collaborations with Lovecraft, how he had a tendency to over-categorise the Mythos and apply a simplistic Christian morality on creatures whose very power to chill stemmed from the fact that they were utterly beyond human notions of good or evil. Despite that, I found this quite an effective and well written work, and Derleth's vision, if not entirely in keeping with Lovecraft's own, was not wholly incompatible either. There's a lot of good, i...
This book starts out well enough but runs too long through dull exposition to a formulaic finish. An experienced reader will suspect early on that this book wasn't written by Lovecraft but his publisher August Derleth. Maybe the first give-away is the uncharacteristically heavy use of period and regional dialects, or maybe it is the 1945 copyright for August Derleth in the front matter. Whatever tipped me off, I then used the all-knowing Wiki to read up on the book and sure enough, less than 2.5...
Overall, I enjoyed this more than my three-star rating would suggest, although not as much as my recent Lovecraft read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. However, this is written in three sections from different points of view, and the final, shortest one from the suddenly-introduced professor's assistant is abrupt and have a pretty abrupt ending. A lot of slow build up and then not much.
Most of the reviews that have been posted so far seem to be from Lovecraft purists who object to Derleth's creation of a novella from a 1200-word sketch by HPL. We should maybe bear in mind the debt that Lovecraftians owe to Derleth. He founded Arkham House specifically to keep HPL's memory alive and to bring his work to a larger audience than the readers of Weird Tales Magazine.So, let's try to approach Lurker from another angle. Of course Derleth is different. But he's good too. The character
Derleth took notes Lovecraft made, wrote this story himself, and put Lovecraft's name on it.The theme begins Lovecraftian, but the whole binding of the Old Ones with elements begins here, and the last half of the book is a lovely example of Derleth driving Lovecraft's brilliant ideas into the ground. In a later Derleth story, R'lyeh rises to the surface again, which is ridiculous since it rose in 1927 for the first time since it's sinking, which occurred before the advent of the Dinosaurs. Even
This novel, though sometimes billed as being written by H.P. Lovecraft, is really instead almost entirely authored by August Derleth, working from notes and story fragments left by Lovecraft. It does have the feel of Lovecraft for the most part, though with maybe a little less of his sometimes purple prose and also included actual dialogue, something Lovecraft wasn’t known for, but did indeed include other Lovecraftian tropes, such as characters reading historical records of mysterious happening...
This novel was published posthumously, and, according to rumor, written more by August Derleth than Lovecraft himself. Some see it as a watered down version of classic Lovecraft horror. I don't think it's that bad, but it's not the best of the books.Just outside Arkham Massachusetts lies Billingtons' Woods, where many strange sounds come at night. In the middle of the woods lie a great old house, a mysterious stone tower, and a circle of stones like Stonehenge, but not quite. Many tales of horro...
I tend to defend Dereleth but this was disappointing. A rushed ending that comes in the final 2 pages, and not a terribly original one.
I get why Lovecraft fans are critical of these faux collaborations, but I personally enjoyed this starting point for them. No, it doesn't have the grandeur and intensity of Lovecraft's writing, and I feel unifying the creatures of the Cthulhu mythos into a shared family of element based horrors who shift in appearance as you view them through a dimensional barrier showed a deep misunderstanding of the cosmology HP created, where all these beings are separate individuals from different worlds and...
I have an ambivalent attitude towards Lovecraft. His imagination was extraordinary, his concepts highly influential and occasionally he wrote beautifully - though more often than not, stodgily and pretentiously. The Lurker at the Threshold owes as much to August Derleth as it does to Lovecraft and is the only original full-length novel after Charles Dexter Ward. I tried to read it many years ago and quickly gave up: I guess I just wasn't in the mood because this time I got into it. It's rather o...
This is a special book. I started reading it when my daughter was born. I remember sitting in our family room in Santa Fe, the snow falling outside, holding this new baby wrapped in a warm blanket, way too early in the morning, while reading a page or two at a time. Over the last few years I would - every once in a while - pick up this book and read a few pages. It’s not particularly great... it’s a fun read for a cold winter’s night that captures the sense of mystery and investigation inherent
Derleth's posthumous "collaborations" weren't bad as short stories. Despite being derivative of Lovecraft and resorting to turgid writing, most of them managed to maintain some goofy charm. Not "The Lurker at the Threshold," whose writing is so terrible it becomes some sort of endurance test. Worse, Derleth fills the final third of the book with pointless exposition, thereby destroying what meager sense of suspense or urgency managed to remain from the previous two-thirds of the story.
Worse and slower than most Lovecraft books. Probably because this is more a Derleth book than a Lovecraft book. If this turned you of from Lovecraft, please give him another shot. That said, it was mostly in line of what Lovecraft's stories are about, just less skillful and far slower. It is disingenuous to put Lovecraft's name on this, but it is a passable piece of Lovecraftian horror.