Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor of economics, falls under a bizarre seizure during his lecture. Before losing his conciseness, he sees odd colours and shapes in the air, then he drifts out to odd dreams of out of body experiences. When he wakes up, he learns that several years have passed and his wife had divorced him on the grounds of him having turned into a different person after his seizure.
After waking up, Peaslee doesn't find economics attractive anymore and turns his energy towards psychology, from which he hopes to find the answer to his peculiar amnesia and the dreams that still haunt him. He has vivid memories of having spent time in a different time, on a body of an alien being. He remembers the cyclopean cities populated by monstrous-looking aliens, who seemingly had mastered travelling in time by exchanging bodies. the Great Race, as Peaslee calls them, are gathering the histories and the knowledge of all races in existence. The Great Race lives hundreds of thousands of years in the past, occasionally migrating entirely to a new race in the future, if the planet they happen to be on turns inhospitable to them.
After several years of study and published papers on the matter, Peaslee has learnt that human history has several recorded cases like his. All his works gain very little attention, but then he gets a letter from Australia, telling of findings of ancient stones with similar hieroglyphs on them like what he has described. This is enough for the Miskatonic University of Arkham to send in a group down under to see these archaeological findings.
During a night walk near the excavation site, Peaslee finds an entrance to underground ruins. He feels they are familiar. A deep memory guides his steps to a well-preserved building, where he knows a locked cabinet exists. Somehow, he manages to open the intricate lock. He finds an ancient book, which he decides to take with him. But before he manages to get to the surface, he realizes something is chasing him. In a panic, he loses the book, but still decides to write a letter to his son, in which he finally bares it all, even what he found from the ruins. If what he found is genuine, it proves without any doubt, that Peaslee's dreams are not dreams, but distant memories of his time travel, as the book he found and lost, was the history of the Earth, written in his own handwriting.
While The Shadow Out of Time is nowadays often considered as one the best works by Lovecraft, its reception was initially less than favourable. Lovecraft himself was dissatisfied by it and the readers didn't think much of it either. So, considering the reception, it's somewhat interesting how much the perception has changed over the years. Then again, a good many of Lovecraft's writings meshed poorly with his contemporaries.
As a whole, The Shadow Out of Time is an interesting story. It might not be terribly surprising, but it does explore in a deeper and intriguing manner Lovecraft's themes. I do think, it manages to do so much better than At the Mountains of Madness does and manages to keep its structure together better.
Some called the Shadow Out of Time the last great text Lovecraft wrote. That's hardly a surprise, as he did die in 1937, so there wasn't that much time left for him. That said, It's easy to see why this story has gained a kind of redemption among modern Lovecraft fans, as it is a well-written story, that displays more of his prowess as a sci-fi writer than as a horror writer. And that's how you should approach it, as a sci-fi story with a hint of cosmic horror mixed in.
The Haunter in the Dark (1935) Painter and an artist Robert Blake is found dead from his lodgings, face distorted in a frightened expression. The coroner believes the man died of an electric shock caused by lighting while he was sitting on the front of a window, penning his journals.
Blake's journals reveal his last moment and the event which lead to them. For some time, he had been interested in an old church with a sinister reputation. The main cause of this reputation was the Church of Starry Wisdom, which was looking for knowledge beyond human understanding.
One day, Blake enters the old, abandoned church and finds a skeleton of a journalist. From his remains, Blake finds a notebook, in which he had jotted down his observations of Starry Wisdom and its members. Then Blake finds evil magical tomes, like the Necronomicon, which give more clues on what had been going on in the church. Finally, he finds a shining crystal, a Trephazedron. By accident, he summons out an evil entity through it. While he escapes, he can feel the entity searching for him.
With horror, Blake awaits an upcoming storm, as he is sure it'll cut out all the electricity of the city. When that happens, the Haunter in the Dark is finally free to escape the church, as it shuns light. The next day, frozen in front of his window, Blake's body is found. The last lines of his journal shine some light on the cosmic horrors that engulfed him.
The Haunter in the Dark was written in 1935 and published in 1936. Only a few months later Lovecraft died in March 1937 and as such, this was his last known publication while he was still alive. As far as last works go, it isn't a bad one at all. While it offers very few surprises, it is a well-written story, one which many consider among Lovecraft's best. It is a story well worth reading, especially if you are interested in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
Is an interesting titbit, Lovecraft wrote the story as a response to Robert Bloch's story The Shambler from the Stars, who then later wrote a 3rd tale Shadow From the Steeple in the 1950s. While The Haunter in the Dark works as a story of their own, these three can be read as a connected trilogy.
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