Shadows Out of Time

An anthology of Lovecraft Inspired Horror

Darrell Schweitzer hopes the title of this book is not misleading. If you are expecting an entire volume of spinoffs from Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, complete with consciousness-swapping across the aeons, cone-shaped scholarly beings compiling their archives while dinosaurs roam outside their cities and some nameless doom threatens them from below, this isn’t it. He did indeed include a few stories of that sort, as such titles as Robert Guffey’s “Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology” and Robert M. Price’s “Crom-Ya’s Triumph” imply. (Crom-Ya, as aficionados will recall, was a Cimmerian chieftain that Lovecraft’s protagonist met when imprisoned in one of those alien bodies during his sojourn in the past.) But the focus of this book is a lot broader. In his 1933 essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft wrote:

"The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression."

Italics are his, by the way. Contributors were given that quote and told, “Go. Great Race of Yith optional.” This book is the result.

CONTENTS

• Introduction — DARRELL SCHWEITZER
• A Dream of Years — ANN K. SCHWADER
• The Cave of the Immortals — DON WEBB
• The Private Estate — JAMES CHAMBERS
• Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology — ROBERT GUFFEY
• The Beast Comes to Brooklyn — GORDON LINZNER
• Just the Weight of God — BRYAN D. DIETRICH
• Malygris Never Died — JOHN R. FULTZ
• Nineteen Minutes — FREDERIC S. DURBIN
• Every Path Taken  — NICHOLAS KAUFMANN
• Genghis at the Gate of Dreams — TIM LEES
• Moonlight Over Mauritania — ADRIAN COLE
• Out of Time — GEOFFREY HART
• The Colour Out of Shadow — HARRY TURTLEDOVE
• Kingsport Tea — WILL MURRAY
• Crom-Ya’s Triumph — ROBERT M. PRICE
• The Rocks of Leng — KEITH TAYLOR
• The Moth in the Dark — DARRELL SCHWEITZER

Limited to 100 signed (I'm assuming only the editor, but PS website did not specify) copies