The Shadow Out of TimeOn a drive to Boston I decided to listen to the audio book of H P Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time." After driving for a while my wife and I switched and she drove. It was then, that I decided to listen to the audio book. It is rather interesting that even in my adult life I find myself falling asleep in the car, though only when riding in the passenger seat. The story was not boring, far from it. The mix of my natural sleepiness when riding shotgun, having terrible sleep beforehand, and the soft voice of the narrator was a perfect storm for slumber. It started off great but then my weariness lead me to nod off. When I awoke I had missed a chunk of the middle of the story and had to rewind a chapter. I later listened to it again just to make sure I didn't miss anything. This anecdote is just meant to be funny so do not read too much into it.
Now, onto the summary:
The story, like most of Lovecraft's, are from the writings of the central protagonist recanting the previous events. Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, is coming back from an adventure in Australia. Peaslee was a professor at Miskatonic University, some sort of economics expert if I remember correctly. Many years ago, while midway through teaching a lecture he fainted. He came too after a day of bed rest. When he came too everyone noticed he was rather off. He had a hard time walking at first, couldn't control his facial muscles, and also had amnesia. Despite the amnesia he seems to know things impossible for him to have known before the spell. Languages, books, locations, etc. His wife gets tired of his ramblings and swears that the man who awoke was not her husband. She took the kids and left him. Peaslee, now alone, started studying anything and everything he could find, and meeting cultists and other ne'er-do-wells. Then he started taking trips all over the world going to odd remote locations. Eyewitnesses report that he seemed depressed when returning from these voyages. After several years Peaslee met with some stranger privately in the middle of the night. The next day the police were called by a mysterious person indicated they should go check on him. Peaslee was found unconscious in a chair. After another day’s worth of rest he woke up, continuing his lecture from years prior. He was very confused at first, not remembering anything that happened in the previous few years. His wife and 2 of his 3 children refused to see him even after "coming back." His middle child though, still kept in touch.
Peaslee started re-re-adjusting to his surroundings. He started studying psychology in effort to figure out what happened to him. He found other people in the past had similar symptoms. During his research he found that he was checking out strange books that apparently his former self also check out from the library. His son started studying too and they both became professors in Psychology. At night he started having dreams of people and places not known to him, and yet somehow familiar. He recalled tales of a great race from thousands of years ago that could project themselves through space and time and swap bodies. They came to earth eons ago and colonized it after their home world was destroyed. They used their powers to travel time and to record and learn as much as possible. They were a scholarly race. When swapping minds, the victim was treated as a guest and made to record their own memoirs and history for the great race while the alien borrowed their body. He dreamed of meeting other victims and conversing with them. These were people, and aliens, from different times on earth. Peaslee had more dreams about these "Yith." Including how they fought some other aliens that can only be described as giant flying polyps. The Yithians had special lighting weapons they used to drive the polyps underground and sealed them away. Using their time travel powers, the Yithians knew that one day the polyps would return and slaughter them. Knowing when that would happen, they would then mind swap with the great beetle people in the far flung future that inherited the planet, after both the humans and the giant flying polyps had become extinct.
Peaslee wrote an article about these dreams and decided that they were just side effects from his madness years ago. One day he receives a letter from a prospector in Australia that said they found some ruins that matched the description from his dreams. Peaslee, along with his son, and a few Miskatonic Professors find the funds to pay for an archeological expedition to Australia to investigate these ruins. When they arrive at the ruins, Peaslee instantly recognizes them from his dreams, and has a strange understanding of the ruin city's layout. One night he finds himself going from a stroll alone and finds a way into the city. He explores the interior of one of the buried structures. Everything is flooding back to him. He finds a book with information that would prove that everything that happened was real. On his way out he notices that the seal to keep the flying polyps trapped are destroyed. He is chased and attacked by one of them. Peaslee narrowly escapes but loses his flashlight and the book in the process. He stumbles back into the camp and makes up a lie about falling asleep in the desert and demands to go home. His son flies him back to the port so he can go home. He then reveals that the book that he found and lost, the contents where written in his own hand writing.
This was surprisingly a fun read with great concepts and ideas. Like a lot of the recent stories I’ve read, the narrative seems complete with an organic growth to the story. The mind swapping time aliens, ancient wars, and continuity with several other of Lovecraft's stories made it great. A small cameo by Professor Dyer (The protagonist of
At the Mountain of Madness) was a bit of a treat. As was one of the starfish headed aliens also being a captured mind swapped victim. You even learn about how the Yithian society functions, which was very interesting! Unlike other alien stories, these ones are not out to conquer, experiments, or devour anyone. They are just historians and intellectuals. They even have a time squad that go after criminals that jump through time to escape the law! All in all it was an excellent read and I would definitely recommend this one.
On top of that, I also found a small 15 minute movie of “The Shadow Out of Time.” I still recommend reading the book first, but this film is amazing! It not only tells the story really well, but has incredibly cheesy effects with green screen that is just incorrigibly bad (in a good way). The monster animations are also just amazing and fun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7jp1CT1h6c
