Review: A Traveler In Time, by August Derleth
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 21, 2013
August W. Derleth was an amazingly prolific author of genres such as historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, horror, and biography. He may even be better known for having founded a printing house called Arkham Press to make the works of H.P. Lovecraft and other authors of supernatural fiction more easily accessible to readers in the United States, as such stories had previously been published only in England."A Traveler in Time" is a very clever little story, featuring newspaperman Tex Harrigan. Derleth writes charming short stories about Harrigan, who maintains a File of Queer People that he tends to reminisce about. He is usually to be found telling the story of one of his stranger interviews to a friend, oftentimes in a bar. In this story, Harrigan tells of the time he interviewed a man who claims to have built a time-traveling machine. The time traveler informs Harrigan that there is to be a war in the not-too-distant future that will destroy New York City, and his method of avoiding this war will be to go back to a time where he will be long dead before here's any chance of the war affecting him. This story is written for the humor, and it is very humorous indeed! It hardly takes a half hour to read and this edition is free, so I say, you should try it!I feel lucky that some of Derleth's short Harrigan stories are being digitized, but I sure wish that some of his longer, more serious works would be converted. It's so ironic that he founded a printing house and yet he himself is out of print.