The Shadow Out of Time

By H. P. Lovecraft

An extraterrestrial species travel through space and time by switching bodies with hosts from the intended spatial or temporal destination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781627559607

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of science fiction and horror stories. Born in Providence, Rhode Island to a wealthy family, he suffered the loss of his father at a young age. Raised with his mother’s family, he was doted upon throughout his youth and found a paternal figure in his grandfather Whipple, who encouraged his literary interests. He began writing stories and poems inspired by the classics and by Whipple’s spirited retellings of Gothic tales of terror. In 1902, he began publishing a periodical on astronomy, a source of intellectual fascination for the young Lovecraft. Over the next several years, he would suffer from a series of illnesses that made it nearly impossible to attend school. Exacerbated by the decline of his family’s financial stability, this decade would prove formative to Lovecraft’s worldview and writing style, both of which depict humanity as cosmologically insignificant. Supported by his mother Susie in his attempts to study organic chemistry, Lovecraft eventually devoted himself to writing poems and stories for such pulp and weird-fiction magazines as Argosy, where he gained a cult following of readers. Early stories of note include “The Alchemist” (1916), “The Tomb” (1917), and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). “The Call of Cthulu,” originally published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, is considered by many scholars and fellow writers to be his finest, most complex work of fiction. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft became one of the century’s leading horror writers whose influence remains essential to the genre.

Book preview

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

By H. P. Lovecraft

Wilder Publications

Copyright © 2014 Wilder Publications

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-1-62755-960-7

Table of Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

I

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of 17-18 July 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.

If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.

It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.

Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable evidence.

When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definite statement—not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.

These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Professor Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night.

I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey.

He can do anything that he thinks best with this account—showing it, with suitable comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.

My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908-13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurked behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources.

It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.

I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University as instructor of political economy in 1895.

For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and Hannah were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.

It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that some one else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.

The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.

My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.

It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my home at 27 Crane Street, and given the best of medical attention.

At 3 A.M. May 15 my eyes opened and began to speak and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity and my past, though for some reason seemed anxious to conceal his lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.

Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast.

Of the latter, one in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that

Reviews for The Shadow Out of Time

[wilum-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This wee book was the first publication of this remarkable and excellent story since the discovery of Lovecraft's original handwritten manuscript. Leading Lovecraft scholars S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have provided an exhaustive introduction and commentary on this rich evocative story. S. T. Joshi is mistaken when he writes, in his biography of Lovecraft, "...his life as a fiction writer ends, and ends fittingly, with 'The Shadow out of Time'" -- such a statement seems to dismiss Lovecraft's final solo effort, "The Haunter of the Dark," which is a Gothic masterpiece. But "The Shadow out of Time" is certainly magnificent in every way, conjuring as it does, brilliantly, an incredible past and those "alien" races with whom the insect Man shares history. Lovecraft's imagination was original in every way, and although his creations are fantastic (his aliens are authentically so), he writes of them with conviction and verve."Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiseled certain pictures on the blank spaces of walls? Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of alien minds, be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity -- a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eitheen million years in the future -- had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay."In that excellent passage we find much of what is superb in Lovecraft. One of the amazing gifts that makes him still relevant is his ingenious combining of supernatural horror motifs with what was then the new and budding genre of science-fiction. I leave to others the discussion of the social commentary implications of THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME and how such relates to a shift in Lovecraft's politics. For me, the grandeur of THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME comes from the staggering implications of the worlds that it conveys, and the perfect prose in which the story is written. The story shews Lovecraft as an absolute master of his narrative style.One of the story's finest representations is as a radio drama available on audio cd from the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. This stunning recording is close to perfection, and that part of the story wherein its accursed hero feels the lurking menace of the creatures that were intensely feared by the Great Race itself is one of the most effective moments of pure horror that I have ever experience. "I dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking -- be it ever so weak and dying -- down there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints -- of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them."The horror described in that effective passage is brought to eldritch life in the radio drama. Again, this small booklet is the definitive publication of Lovecraft's masterpiece, published here, for the first time, exactly as Lovecraft wrote it, sans editorial "corrections" and modifications. This corrected text may also be found in the Penguin Classics edition, THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES. It is appropriate that the story shou'd be included in editions publish'd by Penguin and The Library of America, and soon to be publish'd in a new folio edition, THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT, from W. W. Morton -- for H. P. Lovecraft is Literature, excellent in every way.

[Cristian Buița · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book that makes you curious about the mind and dreams. But also, about how insignificant we might be in comparison to other beings.

[randystafford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While this story wouldn't be the entry I'd recommend to Lovecraft, it is definitely one of his major works. And this edition is worth reading for the beginning and hardcore fan. The editors' introduction details how long Lovecraft had been considering this story, his inspirations, and how he, as before in his great creative year of 1927, undertook a reading program to sharpen his style and improve his writing before starting it, his most science-fictional, tale. They also offer some intriguing observations about the specific dates in protagonist Peaslee's life and their significance to Lovecraft's. As to the annotations, it's not the largely unnecessary vocabulary lessons that Joshi and Schultz offer that are valueable, but how they point out similarities in motifs and language to other Lovecraft works, specific factual sources Lovecraft used, and the many links between this and other Cthulhu Mythos stories of Lovecraft and his friends. Even fans who have read this story more than once will probably learn something new in these notes. I can't say as I noticed any difference between the corrected text and earlier versions of the story, but then I didn't look at the appendix showing all the textual variations. But it's there for the really hardcore Lovecraft fan and scholar.

[mrtall_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Shadow Out of Time is a brief novella, but its span is great: through vast reaches of time and space, all guided by H P Lovecraft’s inimitable, portentous prose.The premise here is quite complex: an American university prof has experienced an inexplicable period of amnesia, throughout which his body continued to function, but seemingly under alien control. In retrospect, having recovered his faculties, our protagonist is haunted by bizarre memories of strange creatures living in dark, unnerving cities that he somehow recognizes were part of Earth’s deep past. And then a discovery is made in the Australian outback . . . .If you like scifi/horror combos (a la some of Stephen King’s books such as The Tommyknockers), then going back to the ur-texts from one of the early masters such as Lovecraft is good fun.Recommended.