Two other “influences” can be noted if only to be dismissed. It has frequently been assumed that “The Shadow out of Time” is simply an extrapolation upon Wells’s The Time Machine. HPL read the novel in 1925, but there is little in it that has a direct bearing on his story. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men(1930) has been suggested as an influence on the enormous stretches of time reflected in the story, but HPL did not read this work until August 1935, months after the tale’s completion (see HPL to August Derleth, August 7, 1935; ms., SHSW).
Perhaps a significant literary influence can be found in HPL’s own works. The story could be thought of as an exhaustive expansion of the notion of “possession” by an extraterrestrial being as found in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). Minor allusions to other older stories appear, since many were being published only for the first time at the time HPL was writing “The Shadow out of Time.” The story’s amnesia motif makes for a provocative autobiographical connection. Peaslee’s amnesia dates from 1908 to 1913, the exact time when HPL himself, having had to withdraw from high school, descended into hermitry. The inability of the alien inhabiting Peaslee’s body to control its facial muscles may correlate to the facial tics that HPL suffered at that time.
HPL experienced considerable difficulty in writing the story. The core of the plot had been conceived as early as 1930, emerging from a discussion between HPL and Clark Ashton Smith regarding the plausibility of stories involving time travel. HPL noted: “The weakness of most tales with this theme is that they do not provide for the recording, in history, of those inexplicable events in the past which were caused by the backward time-voyagings of persons of the present & future” ( SL3.217). At that time he already envisioned the cataclysmic ending: “One baffling thing that could be introduced is to have a modern man discover, among documents exhumed from some prehistoric buried city, a mouldering papyrus or parchment written in English, & in his own handwriting.”
By March 1932 HPL had devised the basic idea of mind-exchange over time, as outlined in another letter to Smith:
I have a sort of time idea of very simple nature floating around in the back of my head, but don’t know when I shall ever get around to using it. The notion is that of a race in primal Lomar perhaps even before the founding of Olathoë & in the heyday of Hyperborean Commoriom—who gained a knowledge of all arts & sciences by sending thoughtstreams ahead to drain the minds of men in future ages—angling in time, as it were. Now
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& then they get hold of a really competent man of learning, & annex all his thoughts. Usually they only keep their victims tranced for a short time, but once in a while, when they need some special piece of continuous information, one of their number sacrifices himself for the race & actually changes bodies with the first thoroughly satisfactory victim he finds. The victim’s brain then goes back to 100,000 B.C.—into the hypnotist’s body to live in Lomar for the rest of his life, while the hypnotist from dead aeons animates the modern clay of his victims. ( SL4.25–26) This passage is quoted at length to show both that HPL made significant alterations in the finished story—the mind of the Great Race rarely remains in a captive body for the rest of its life but only for a period of years, after which a return switch is effected—and that the conception of mind-exchange over time had been devised beforeHPL saw Berkeley Square,the only other work that may conceivably have influenced this point.
HPL began writing of the story in late 1934. He announces in November: “I developed that story mistily and allusivelyin 16 pages, but it was no go. Thin and unconvincing, with the climactic revelation wholly unjustified by the hash of visions preceding it” ( SL5.71). It is difficult to imagine what this sixteen-page version could have been like. The disquisition about the Great Race must have been radically compressed, and this is what clearly dissatisfied HPL about this version. He came to realize that this passage, far from being an irrelevant digression, was actually the heart of the story. What then occurred is a little unclear: Is the second draft the version we now have? In late December he speaks of a “second version” that “fails to satisfy me” ( SL5.86) and is uncertain whether to finish it as it is or to destroy it and start afresh. He may have done the latter, for long after finishing the story he declares that the final version was “itself the 3d complete version of the same story” ( SL5.346).
HPL was highly dissatisfied with the story and was disinclined to type it. In a highly unusual maneuver (HPL never circulated his drafts) he sent the manuscript to August Derleth and then expressed irritation that Derleth apparently made no attempt to read the crabbed text. Then, while visiting R.H.Barlow in Florida in the summer of 1935, HPL asked Derleth to send him the manuscript, as Barlow wished to read it. In fact, Barlow surreptitiously typed the story. When HPL sent the typescript for circulation among his correspondents, the first recipient, Donald Wandrei, instead took the story to F.Orlin Tremaine of Astoundingafter he learned of Julius Schwartz’s sale of At the Mountains of Madnessto the magazine. Tremaine accepted it forthwith, apparently without reading it.
The manuscript of the story—formerly in the possession of Barlow, to whom HPL had given it— surfaced in 1994. Consultation of the text reveals that, in spite of HPL’s assertions to the contrary, the story was significantly adulterated in its appearance in Astounding Stories,specifically in paragraphing. Other errors appear to be the result of Barlow’s inability to read HPL’s handwriting. See Robert M.Price, “The Mischief out of Time,” CryptNo. 4 (Eastertide 1982): 27, 30; Darrell Schweitzer, “Lovecraft’s Favorite Movie,” LS Nos. 19/20 (Fall 1989): 23–25, 27; Will Murray, “Buddai,” CryptNo. 75 (Michaelmas 1990): 29–33; S.T.Joshi, “The Genesis of ‘The Shadow out of Time,’” LS No, 33 (Fall 1995): 24–29; Paul Montelone, “The Vanity of Existence in ‘The Shadow out of Time,’” LS No. 34 (Spring 1996): 27–35.
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“Shadow over Innsmouth, The.”
Novelette (22,150 words); written November-December 3, 1931. First published as a book (Everett, Pa.: Visionary Publishing Co., 1936); rpt. (abridged) WT(January 1942); first collected in O; corrected text in DH;annotated version as a separate booklet (Necronomicon Press, 1994; rev. ed. 1997) and in CC