First are his Solar Pons stories. They are a pastische of the Sherlock Holmes stories and could be easily dismissed, but I found them rather fun. I like to think, in a rather comical and completely unfair fashion, that all the negative stereotypes attributed to Holmes come from Pons. That is not true of course, but it amuses me. In truth I sometimes found Pons more approachable than Holmes.
But that is not really the topic of today.
Second, it is largely due to Derleth that we know H.P. Lovecraft. He republished his works and contributed a lot (of good and bad) material to what has been dubbed The Cthulhu mythos.
While Derleth did a good job with pastiches of Holmes, despite his personal connection to Lovecraft, his "pastiches" of the Cthulhu mythos never quite lived up.
Now, Derleth was a very prolific writer, and I can't even pretend I have gone through all his works.
He has written with Lovecraft and with Robert E. Howard, I suppose that garners him enough literary "street cred" to be on the Appendix N list. But despite all the horror he had written, I can't find much about witches. He did write one story though that does concern witches...sort of.
Published in Dark Mind, Dark Heart and presented as a “posthumous collaboration” with Lovecraft, the story is set in rural Massachusetts, in the familiar shadow of Arkham country. The premise is simple and folkloric: there is a hollow, a depression in the woods, where witches once gathered. Something of their rites still clings to the place.
In “Witches’ Hollow,” Derleth does not give us a witch so much as the memory of witches. The hollow itself becomes the character. It is a place where covens once gathered, where rites were enacted, and where something of those rites has never quite dissipated. Unlike Lovecraft’s Keziah Mason, who manipulates forbidden geometry and traffics with alien beings, Derleth’s witches are anonymous and historical. They exist as residue rather than agency.
Yet this is not without value. In folkloric witchcraft, place matters. A grove, a crossroads, a hollow in the woods. Derleth accidentally stumbles into something very old here. Witchcraft is not merely about spells. It is about land. And land remembers.
This story feels a little like "The Dunwhich Horror" meets "The Colour out of Space." Indeed the Whatleys of the Dunwhich Horror are mentioned here and might even be related to the Potters of this tale. Yeah, hearing "Wizard Potter" a lot is funny.
But there are three things in my mind that set this apart as a Derleth story and not a Lovecraft one. First is that everything is connected to everything else. This isn't just a lone standing story about a weird family in the country, everything is connected to something else in the mythos. Which takes me to my second point, the "star signs" or "elder signs" are used in abundance here. Too much. They get used like holy waffers do in Dracula and that is certainly not what Lovecraft would have intended. Our school teach goes from being a potential witness to cosmic horror to RPG monster hunter. Lastly, and this is a nitpick more than anything, the ending is a happy one. Look, almost no one ever survives a tangle with the cosmic horrors Lovecraft wrote about, but here the Potters manage to survive and even leave the area no worse for the wear. That doesn't really feel very Lovecraftian to me.
Still. Lovecraft, like Moorcock, helped define the D&D Warlock and goes back to very roots of the hobby. And if it wasn't for Derleth we might not ever know who Howard Philips Lovecraft was.
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