Books'n'Bytes

The Review

The Watchers Out Of Time

by August Derleth

The Watchers Out Of Time

Buy this book

Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.

The Watchers Out of Time is the 1974 Arkham House posthumous collection of August Derleth's further Lovecraft 'posthumous collaborations,' published after Derleth's 1971 death. The collection includes The Watchers Out of Time, The Survivor, Wentworth's Day, The Lamp of Alhazred, and seven other pieces in the same Mythos-extension mode as The Lurker at the Threshold.

Quality varies more than in the earlier Derleth-Lovecraft work. The stronger pieces (The Watchers Out of Time, The Lamp of Alhazred) earn their place. The weaker ones lean too heavily on the formulaic Derleth-era Mythos pattern (Massachusetts village, ancestral curse, basement laboratory, blasphemous tome). Read for completionist reasons or for fans of the wider Cthulhu Mythos canon.

Recommended for Mythos completists and for readers looking for books like The Watchers Out of Time in the Lovecraft-circle extension tradition. Three stars, with The Lurker at the Threshold as the stronger Derleth-Lovecraft starting point.

More by this author

Read more from August Derleth