Title: In Lovecraft's shadow
First published: 1998
Description: This special illustrated and annotated edition of August Derleth's complete Mythos stories (aside from the Lovecraft collaborations) makes available for the first time all of the author's solo writings on the subject. It includes as well the three 1931 Mythos tales ("Lair of the Star Spawn," "Spawn of the Maelstrom," and "The Horror from the Depths") which Derleth wrote jointly with his Sauk City boyhood friend Mark Schorer. Along with "The House in the Oaks," left unfinished by Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Cimmerian and King Kull), completed and published by Derleth in 1971, the year of his own death.

The bulk of In Lovecraft's Shadow, however, consisting entirely of Derleth's own Mythos stories, gives clear evidence of his skill and ingenuity at devising fresh - even provocative variations on Lovecraft's original idea. For instance, in "Those Who Seek" (the author's very first Mythos tale) and "Something from Out There," he sets the Mythos abroad, discovering Cthulhu horrors in English abbey ruins. By contrast, in both "Beyond the Threshold" and "The Thing That Walked on the Wind," the locale remains American, with Ithaqua, the Great Old One, stalking the North Woods of Wisconsin and Canada in pursuit of his prey.

But, by far, most of Derleth's Mythos stories take place on familiar Lovecraft soil, in or near the decaying New England seaport towns of Arkham and Innsmouth. As do "The Return of Hastur" and "The Sandwin Compact" - both examples of his early work - in which canny old New Englanders, not so futilely, try to renege on obligations to the Great Old Ones, and - from the author's later period - the five-part Dr. Laban Shrewsbury series recounting the "blind but sighted" scholar's efforts to find and destroy Cthulhu's secret island lair, by means of an atomic bomb, if that proves necessary!

Also included here are the 1962 essay, "A Note on the Cthulhu Mythos" (Derleth's succinct "last word" on the Mythos phenomenon) and some rare but relevant poetry: the never before reprinted "Incubus" (from a 1934 issue of Weird Tales); "Providence: Two Gentlemen Meet at Midnight" (a 1948 double homage to both Lovecraft and Poe); and "On Reading Old Letters. For H.P.L.," a newly discovered heart-felt tribute to his dead mentor, found among Derleth's papers and published here for the first time.