Review: Culbard's "The Shadow Out of Time"

LOVECRAFT, H.P., & I.N.J. CULBARD, “The Shadow Out Of Time”, SelfMadeHero, London, 2013.

Octavo-sized duodecimo; perfect-bound in gatefold illustrated wrappers; unpaginated (120pp.), with many illustrations. Very good.

I came across this quite by accident in the local new book store in Leura. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular – just checking the new releases so that I could seem to talk intelligently with the customers in the shop where I work – but once I spotted it I knew that it would be coming home with me.

Essentially, this is a graphic novelisation of Lovecraft’s novella, stretching from dream-haunted Arkham to the land Down Under. The comics format is especially good for telling such tales of the weird and fantastic, because – fundamentally – it is not limited by annoying factors such as a budget. The recently-aborted attempt by Guillermo del Toro to film “At The Mountains Of Madness” demonstrates exactly why filmic interpretations are so often destined to fail, either never leaving the drawing board, or dying due to woeful execution. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve said often enough in the past that sometimes economic constraints serve to create ingenious work-arounds, as in the case of the HPLHS’s “Call of Cthulhu”; but the graphic novel approach shifts the whole exercise onto a different playing field, unlimited by such restrictions.

The really BIG Lovecraft works – “Mountains”, “Shadow over Innsmouth” “Haunter of the Dark” – require a Peter Jackson-like approach to film: there’re so many essential notes that have to be struck, before even thinking about adding anything extra, that your resources are used up right from the start. Smaller works such as “Cool Air”, “From Beyond”, even “Whisperer”, require fewer fundamental elements, most of which are available to hand, that there is scope to polish and embellish around the edges of what are – in essence – simple tales. (For my money, as a fan of del Toro’s “Cronos”, I think he’d do a wonderful job of “Cool Air”.)

Graphic novels overcome the need to search for exotic locales, or rare and expensive equipment and set pieces, with the stroke of a pencil. Need huge cyclopean ruins? Done. Want soul-shattering expanses of outer space? Done. It’s that easy.

Of course, like any transliteration from one medium to another, the material has to be massaged to fit the new format. In the present case, most of the descriptive passages of the original text can be done away with – the illustrations step in and fill that objective. What’s left are the pacing and the delineations of character. In the present instance, this is a commanding performance: action and reaction flow seamlessly across the narrative, encapsulating the thoughts and emotions of all the players.

The other chore that the interpreter of such material has to address, is hitting all of the beats. If something is left out, there’s a world of fans out there that will definitely wail and moan about it. Again, the graphic format can subsume a lot of this effort and the author/illustrator on this work has done an excellent job. After these things have been accomplished, all that remains is for the creator to embellish and place emphasis. For the first time here, we start to run into some issues.

In the original story, the narrative moves inevitably to a specific conclusion; that is, the thing that Dr Peaslee finds buried in the sands of Australia’s western deserts. Reading HPL’s tale, it’s easy to see that this event, and what it entails for the protagonist, are his motivations for writing the narrative, indeed for putting pen to paper: this is the gimmick; the trick of the story, if you will. Culbard moves the focus away from this; it still happens – and takes place in the narrative stream where it is supposed to – but its impact is greatly watered down. Perhaps, after such a long period of time since the first publication of the story, Culbard felt that this revelation was too pat for today’s sophisticated reading audience; he’s not the first writer to have altered an original tale for such reasons, as any number of recent adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple stories will demonstrate.

To my mind, this is a weakness. If the story is worth re-telling, then the intentions of the original author should be preserved. Without these, it becomes a different story with different goals. I don’t mind if a later adaptation places emphasis on unexplored themes which are already extant in the material, that’s fine: that’s merely embellishment, not a re-working.

In this case, Culbard places emphasis on the relationship between Peaslee senior and his son Wingate. We see the disintegration of the Peaslee domestic arrangement, and the further family disharmony which forces the younger academic from the home of his mother and her new husband. This certainly does not paint the former Mrs Peaslee in the light of an ideal parent, but it does add a layer of complexity to the narrative which does nothing to detract from it. Unfortunately, this theme of single fathers and their relationships with their offspring becomes the point of the story for Culbard and, sadly, deflects the hammer-blow of HPL’s final, dreadful revelation. The horror lies in what the Great Race is doing; not the incidental damage that they accrue to the families of individual people whose lives they affect. The ramifications of the Yithians’ time-hopping are profound, across the whole of humanity, and shouldn’t be equated with the effects of, say, a fatal car crash on one family unit. It may be that Culbard was reaching for a way to make the cosmic horror more personal and identifiable; if that’s the case, I don’t think it entirely worked.

There are other things which Culbard slips in which are cute and very entertaining. In one scene, the Yithian Peaslee and his guide perform a ‘drive by’ past the snoozing Cthulhu: Peaslee asks why the Great Race didn’t occupy this titanic creature? The guide dismisses the notion by saying sniffily that “it does nothing but sleep”. Other references to Mythos lore pop up here and there – the Mi Go; the Elder Things – and these work well within the context of the story, laying a backdrop, or timeline, of Mythos encroachment upon the Earth.

My final comments are to do with the artwork. For the most part, this is workman-like stuff, adequately fulfilling its purpose. Culbard has obvious fun with various cosmic horrors and manages to break the mould a little in places: his Yithians are entirely unique and add a benign pathos to what are essentially unknowable monsters. I was less interested in his Flying Polyps which seemed a little sketchy and lacking menace. At its best, the art is great at conveying the scope of the environments and the pace of the action; at worst, it can seem somewhat flat.

That being said, the whole project manages to capture the essence and spirit of HPL’s work (despite the tinkering mentioned above): there is serious skill involved in adapting something like this and doing it so seamlessly. Culbard has also penned versions of “The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward” and “At The Mountains Of Madness” (for which he received the British Fantasy Award in 2011); I’d be keen to check out either of these on the strength of this offering.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.