Mindboggling masterpiece by Lovecraft

books:


	• The Shadow out of Time: The Corrected Text H. P. Lovecraft Hippocampus Press, 2001 - 136 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A must-have for Lovecraft fans

"The Shadow textlinks">Out of Time" is one of Lovecraft's finest tales, and this version is a collector-quality edition. The story itself is found in many Lovecraft anthologies, including an excellent presentation in Arkham House's "The Dunwich Horror and Others." However, there are many features that mark this volume as the definitive edition of "The Shadow Out of Time."

The corrected text from a recently discovered manuscript is the highlight. This is the tale as Lovecraft envisioned it. Anyone familiar with "The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft" will appreciate S.T. Joshi's meticulous notes and annotations. He adds another layer of insight to these familiar stories.

My favorite feature, however, is the restoration of the pulp cover from Astounding Stories 6-36 where the story first appeared. It is nice to see the pulp roots of H.P. Lovecraft being honored.

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Dreams or reality?

Professor N. W. Peaslee, from 1908 to 1913, suffered a form of amnesia or did he? After waking up he stuffers from dreams of an other time, in a city built before history and a race of creatures long gone. Is he going mad or is it real? The answer can be found in Australia, where in one of the deserts explorers have found ruins over 150,000,000 years old. The question is, does he WANT to find the answer or not?

If you liked 'At The Mountains of Madness' you should enjoy this book AND already know what the answers are!

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Valueable for Any Lovecraft Fan

While this story wouldn't be the entree 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 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 abtextlinks">out 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.

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A great book

When Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee is seized by a sudden mental transformation, the psychologists diagnose it as the advent of a second personality. But, it is a strange personality, interested in dark and forbidden occult studies. And when Professor Peaslee returns to his own mind, some six years later, he must pick up the pieces of his shattered life.

However, when dark dreams begin to haunt him, dreams that take the form of impossible memories, Prof. Peaslee begins to study himself, so that he can shake off these strange pseudo-memories. However, when archaeologists discover a ruin in the Australian textlinks">Outback, a ruin of impossible antiquity, Prof. Peaslee's memories begin to haunt him all the more.

This is the first Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) book that I have ever read, and I must say that I am quite impressed. The author did an excellent job of creating and sustaining in the reader the horror that the main character felt throughout his adventure. Pretty much all my life I have heard of H.P. Lovecraft and his horror stories, and I found this one to be a great book to read. I really enjoyed this book, and highly recommend it.

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Mindboggling masterpiece by Lovecraft

This is one of Lovecraft's best and most fascinating (and longest) stories. It tells the story of a scientist who faints in class one day, only to wake up withtextlinks">out any memories of who he is. As the story goes on, the incredible, awful and mindboggling truth is revealed. It begins on a small scale (an individual with memory loss) and ends on a cosmic scale. Less horror story and more some kind of cosmic SF/Fantasy I think... Well, this shouldn't be discussed in advance, just read it. The Shadow out of Time is included in other Lovecraft collections. This edition, though, is not only beautiful (with original cover art) but also includes the corrected text with many commentaries made by Lovecraft-scholar Joshi.

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reviews: page 1, 2

?The Shadow textlinks">out of Time? is H. P. Lovecraft?s last major story, written in a four-month period from November 1934 to February 1935. It was first published in Astounding Stories for June 1936. And yet, this text has never been published as Lovecraft wrote it ? until now. The recent discovery of Lovecraft?s handwritten manuscript allows readers to appreciate this magnificently cosmic story exactly as originally written. All previous editions of the story contain hundreds of serious errors, including errors in paragraphing, omissions and mistranscriptions of many words and passages, and erroneous punctuation. But now, the breathtaking scope of this novella ? the story of the Great Race?s conquest of time and space by means of mind-projection, and the hapless fate of Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee as a victim of the Great Race?s quest for all the secrets of the universe ? can, for the first time, be fully understood. Leading Lovecraft scholars S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have provided an exhaustive introduction and commentary on the story, elucidating names, places, and other elements in this richly evocative story. A must for all devotees of Lovecraft and weird fiction.

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