The Gable Window is a "posthumous collaboration" between August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft. As with other Derleth posthumous collaborations, it's basically a Derleth story.
It was first published in May 1957 in Saturn magazine under the name "The Murky Glass".
Synopsis[]
Fred Akeley inherits a house from his late cousin Wilbur Akeley, a scholar from Miskatonic University who was “a student of archaeology and anthropology”. Wilbur spent years overseas and his travels included visits to “Mongolia, Tibet, and Sinkiang Province” and “South and Central America, and the southwestern part of the United States”.
Fred Akeley moves into his inherited house, which has a great circular window of cloudy glass installed as a gable window. Wilbur’s papers mention how the window is made of a special glass from “Leng… possibly Hyadean in origins”.
It transpires that the special window is a interdimensional portal, connecting the house directly across space and time with the vistas it shows.
Fred and Wilbur are related to Henry Wentworth Akeley, a character from H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Whisperer in Darkness", whom Fred refers to in "The Gable Window" as "our fathers’ cousin, Henry Akeley, of Vermont". Some of the books in Wilbur's library of Mythos-related tomes were sent to him by Henry.
Behind the Mythos[]
As detailed in the posthumous collaboration controversy article, Derleth took several tiny story ideas or the briefest of notes, wrote stories related to them or somehow inspired by them, and used Lovecraft's name on them. These are not Lovecraft stories, albeit they are indeed Mythos stories.
External Link[]
- "The Gable Window" complete text at Librarium Cthulhuvius