"The Drifting Snow" short-story review

Even sitting next to a warm fireplace, it’s as cold as a frozen-over hell in here. My plants are dead, my cats appear to have the flu, and there’s frost all over the ground. That’s what you get during wintertime, however. I can’t think of a better story to review now than “The Drifting Snow”. This review of Drifting Snow is taken from the reprint from Alan Ryan’s anthology Vampires (which is a superb collection, by the way). My copy has a (surprisingly not very good) Edward Gorey cover.

 Synopsis: It’s wintertime in (what I assume is) rural Wisconsin and newlywed Clodetta is disturbed by her husband Ernest’s Aunt Mary. Mary insists at all times that the windows be closed, but never specifies why. Ernest chalks this up to the fact that his grandfather died out there many years ago. Clodetta gets a brief glimpse of two people out there, and Ernest and nephew Henry go to investigate but find no one. Slowly the truth is revealed why Aunt Mary is so frightened: Years ago, grandfather had caught a servant girl with one of the brothers, and he booted her out during the freezing cold, not knowing that she had actually been raped. She froze to death, but has returned, as a vampire, during every hard snowstorm since, with grandfather eventually joining her. Henry refuses to believe any of it, and is dead-set on rescuing whoever is out there. He goes out, and then comes back dazed and moaning, obsessed with the woman from outside and determined to go back to her. Will this generation break the cycle, or will there be another snow vampire?

 My thoughts: Re-read that plot synopsis again. Sounds pretty corny and cliché doesn’t it? Although it does employ an atmospheric setting and takes quite a while to reveal what’s going on, no sane person could call this a subtle or atmospheric story. It’s as spelled out and blatant as vintage horror stories get. Hugh B. Cave was more subtle than this! Aunt Mary just comes out and says “She had become a vampire. We all saw her.” (Actual line). Except for not ending in italics, this story commits every sin that Derleth’s detractors throw at him.

 But do you want to know what the funny thing is?

 This story is considered (by people who hate Derleth’s writing) to be his best story! Whaaa!!?? It’s considered a minor classic of vampire fiction, and every article you can find online about the Japanese legend of the Yuki Onna (snow woman) goes out of the way to mention this story as a “subtle variation” on the myth. Pretty funny, as there really isn’t any hint of that, in fact, other than the fact that she adds to her own kind, there really isn’t any indication in this story that the undead servant girl is a vampire at all; she is more like a ghost than anything. Political correctness really has gone too far.

 With a story like this held up as an example of Derleth at his best, no wonder the poor guy’s reputation has suffered! Thankfully, the other Derleth story which is held up even by Derleth’s detractors as a masterpiece (The Lonesome Place) actually is.

Final word: An overrated, predictable, and totally flat tale whose novel setting for a vampire story has been used better since (notably in The Fearless Vampire Killers and 30 Days of Night). Not complete garbage, but you can bet that if there was some random insertion of Lovecraftian elements in this story, then Derleth’s detractors would throw a fit over it like they do all his other works. 2.5/5.

"The Survivor" short-story review:

Here’s my first review of an individual story, and this one is quite a gem. It’s been reprinted quite a few times, even headlining two anthologies; The Watchers out of Time and (obviously) The Survivor and Others. Since this was one of the stories Derleth passed off as a “collaboration” with Lovecraft, which really rises the ire of Lovecraft’s detractors being that these are the most frequently seen of Derleth’s mythos tales, I’m surprised this story isn’t more well-known, especially given its aforementioned frequent reprinting.

 Synopsis: It’s 1930, and while en route to New Orleans, vacationing antiques expert Alijah Atwood decides to spend some time in New England (quite a trip buddy). He soon becomes intrigued by the abandoned house of the three years-dead Dr. Charriere, which has already acquired a negative reputation, and not necessarily because the locals think that it’s haunted.

 Atwood rents the place and soon tries to inquire about the late doctor, only to be met with indifference and scorn by most of the locals, but after inquiring abroad, he learns that there is no way Dr. Charriere could have been living there unless it was some undocumented descendant, you see, he was born in the mid-1600s! Atwood also learns that Charriere was an extremely reclusive man who was rarely seen by anyone, only communicating through mail and by bribing people with huge sums of money. One man who saw him describes him by saying “Take a newt, grow him a little, teach him to walk on his hind legs, and dress him in elegant clothes” (yeah, you know where this was going). Atwood finds a painting of Charriere showing that he was a hunchback with a goatee.

 Atwood also discovers that Charriere was fascinated by the lifespans of reptiles and amphibians, and sought out people who seemed to have reptilian qualities (do I even need to say that some of the people he sought out were from Innsmouth?). It becomes apparent that Charriere wanted to make himself immortal by extracting glands from reptiles and applying them to himself, thing is, it seemed to have worked a lot better than expected. There is a musty smell permeating the house, break-ins late at night, wet, reptilian footprints, and glimpses of a bent over figure with shiny skin and a goatee…

My thoughts: Well, if Lovecraft had written this, it certainly wouldn’t be up there with The Color out of Space or The Call of Cthulhu, but it would definitely rank with The Shunned House and Cool Air as an impressive, unpretentious little spooker. By Derleth’s standards, this is close to a masterpiece. Although his attempts to imitate HPL’s trademark purple prose fall flat a little (there are a few too many run-on sentences and misused words), this is one of the few of the “collaborations” I could see actually being written by Lovecraft without detecting Derleth’s hand in it.

 As a story it’s fairly predictable, there are a few cheesy moments (Atwood hears a “distinct sound, as of someone bathing in the garden”, yeah, that’s a sound we’ve all heard, I’m sure) and Derleth makes no real attempts at mood, but it’s a fun little monster yarn regardless, with a few moments that would translate excellently to film, like when Atwood closes his pocket watch container only to see Charriere’s face reflected in it as he sneaks up behind him. In fact, speaking of film, the Cool Air segment of that Necronomicon anthology movie seems to have taken a few hints from this story. There’s also a 1950’s film called The Alligator People which seems to have drawn on this story as well in it’s concept of a mad scientist splicing people with reptile genes. That film, in turn, inspired a Spiderman villain called The Lizard, who is set to make his film debut in 2012. Some Wold-Newton fanboy could have fun tying this story into all of that.

 Not bad Derleth, not bad. Too bad the rest of The Survivor and others isn’t this good.

 Final word: A perfectly enjoyable monster story which actually could be passed off as something Lovecraft wrote. 5/5.