"The Survivor"

by August Derleth
Originally published Weird Tales, July 1954

Brace yourself, loyal readers (all zero of you), for we are about to enter the most treacherous waters of the whole Cthulhoid ocean, the dreaded and much-maligned world of the August Derleth/H.P. Lovecraft posthumous collaborations....

These are a series of sixteen tales written by August Derleth, based on, usually a couple of sentences found in HPL's notes - stories he thought about but never actually wrote.  

This is where the controversy comes in.  Because, you see, Derleth published these under the byline "H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth", suggesting that Lovecraft had a much bigger hand in them than he actually did.  

This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the various paperback editions collecting these stories generally carry a byline that reads H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.

    
This makes fanboys absolutely insane, presumably because they fear others will make the grave mistake of picking up these collections, thinking they are true Lovecraftian works (a mistake, in fact, that many HPL fans have made early in their relationships with Mr. Providence - including yr. obedient blogger hisself).   Said fear further complicated by the fact that most of these stories aren't very good (and some are real bow-wows).  

Overzealous nerd Lovecraft fans like to foam at the mouth over the very existence of these works, and especially the continued use of the Lovecraft byline, and curse Derleth's ghost to all manner of hells for ever doing such a thing.  Of course, the main reason these collections get published with Lovecraft's name prominently on display is that Lovecraft sells books and Derleth doesn't.  

As to why Derleth allowed this to happen in the first place (versus the simple step of publishing them under his own name, with a note stating that the story was inspired by Lovecraft's notes), said fans have ascribed all manner of evil evilness to Derleth's motivations.  Myself - I don't have a clue, but I can only rule it a regrettable case of poor judgment on Derleth's part.  Derleth himself was hardly a bad writer (his supernatural stories are generally mediocre and his Lovecraft-inspired writings are among his worst, true - but his true metier was straight fiction - and several of his non-Lovecraft-based horror stories are excellent, even classic), nor a hack (he was an accomplished literary figure in his time, though never a best-seller nor a Great Man of Letters), and his admiration of Lovecraft seems unquestionably genuine, despite all the perfidies S.T. Joshi would have him guilty of. 

Frankly, reading through most of the "collaborations", one gets the impression Derleth didn't take them very seriously and was mostly just having a little fun.  This might not have been the best idea he ever had, but I imagine even Derleth never expected hungry Lovecraft fans would still be seeking them out in the 21st century.  

So, nevertheless, they are here, and we shall deal with them.  And so, without further ado, let us plunge into one of the earliest, "The Survivor"....

Our narrator (unnamed) is an antiquarian (which I think is only a career in Lovecraftian stories) who leases a mysterious, very old house in Providence known as the Charriere House, so named for the mysterious, very old surgeon who occupied it.  No one around seems to want much to do with the house, and no one seems to know much about it, or about Charriere.

The narrator's diggings into the history seems to point to Charriere having been alive from the 17th century up to his "death" in 1927.  In the library, the narrator finds books on reptiles and dinosaurs, and a few of the usual items.  And notes left by Charriere regarding the longevity of reptiles, and certain people he has studied who have reptilian/amphibian physical qualities.  

And did I mention the place smells like a reptile house?

One night, someone breaks into the laboratory and takes some of the journal notes.  This person trails water on the floor and leaves oddly-shaped, wet footprints.  The narrator surmises that someone must have decided to burglarize the place after having a swim --- cause that makes sense, right???  

Further researches seem to suggest that Charriere was researching the longevity of reptiles/amphibians and trying to somehow grant said longevity to humans by transforming them.  It appears he had hit on a way in which a human, mutated by surgery and perhaps a bit of sorcery, could prolong their life, hibernating for long periods then re-emerging, at the cost of becoming more and more reptilian.

The nocturnal visitor returns, and the narrator shoots him.  He follows the fleeing figure into some tunnels which lead to where Charriere is buried in the garden.  There the narrator finds the reptilian body of Charriere.

I warned you Derleth doesn't seem to have taken these stories very seriously.  Thus, the absurd moment in which the narrator decides someone would take a swim and then go break into someone's house.  "Hmm, I was just takin' a dip in the backyard pool and I suddenly thought - `Hey - why don't I go break into that spooky old house and steal some notes from the guy living there!'"  

And then the further absurdity that the narrator never thinks to call the cops on what he's trying to convince himself is a mundane burglar.

Wet footprints all over the lab floor, and the notes stolen are just the ones the narrator's been studying?  I'm thinking the cast of CSI or Law and Order: SVU would make short work of this one.  But oh well.

What we have here is a competent albeit dumb (okay, really dumb) story with some decent atmospheric touches that make it not a total waste of time.  But nothing more.   There will be better Derleth stories ... although (sigh) there will be worse ones, too...