H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time
Culbard’s latest Lovecraft adaptation is no big deal—it merely takes on the entire history and future of the universe. Yes, this is one of Lovecraft’s whacked-out existential stories, in which our hero, this time the brilliant Professor Nathaniel Peaslee, travels to the utter apex of insanity to know the unknowable. Peaslee’s mad journey begins with an arresting collapse midlecture and a subsequent delirium from which he does not emerge for five years. Gradually, the nightmares begin. Nightmares? No—memories of his time spent 150 million years ago among the Yithians, the ultimate race of Old Ones, who gobbled up alien knowledge through vessels like Peaslee, at least until the Yithians were eaten by the hungry flying polyps. It’s a trip, to say the least, with Culbard working overtime to give us glimpses of the hideous—Lovecraft, after all, is all about glimpsing—among scenes doused in thematic colors (brown for the college, yellow for the desert, and so on). Watching Culbard’s fussy gents go stark raving nuts is always a blast, and this one may be his best yet. Grades 7-12. --Daniel Kraus