“The Shadow Out of Time”

To me this is clearly the weakest of Lovecraft’s eight great interlinked tales.

It shares the same flaw of the entire second half of “At the Mountains of Madness”: a tendency to degenerate into a mere list of the amazing powers and deeds of alien races.

That’s probably not a bad definition of pulp, in fact. In pulp fiction the pen outruns the mind, and there’s an often completely arbitrary production of alien super-races (sci. fi.) or gunfights and tough-guy actions (detective).

What Lovecraft normally does so well is:

(a) make it very clear that his monsters escape the very categories of language and space-time that we would normally use to describe and understand them. He doesn’t merely assert this, which is what bad writers would do. Instead, he subjects his language to a powerful feeling of strain, all while letting us know that everything he has said is still not enough to grasp the horror in question.

(b) brings the readers along with him, leading them step-by-step to believe one thing, then another, then a still worse thing.

By contrast, “The Shadow Out of Time” feels more like notes for someone’s D & D campaign. It’s not a bad central idea that alien races would be projecting themselves forward and backward in time, becoming incarnated in the bodies of different past and future species in order to learn as much as possible about the world. However, in this case the reader is not led gradually to follow a slow revelation of this horror (Lovecraft’s highly effective trademark); it is simply asserted, and one is not inclined to accept the assertion.

In “At the Mountains of Madness” the dissonance is even harder to swallow, since the first half of the story is set up so brilliantly.