APART FROM HIS SUPERNATURAL fiction and Solar Pons stories, August Derleth (1909–1971) is not widely read today, which would undoubtedly have surprised those familiar with his early writing career. Already an accomplished writer while still in his teens, he was given accolades by such contemporaries as the novelist Sinclair Lewis, the poet Edgar Lee Masters, the great editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Maxwell Perkins, and was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to being a prolific short story writer, Derleth was a novelist, poet, essayist, historian, biographer, dramatist, critic, and children’s book writer.
It may well be, however, that his greatest legacy in the world of literature is the founding, with Donald Wandrei, of Arkham House. Created in 1939 to preserve the work of H. P. Lovecraft’s magazine stories in hardcover book form, this little publishing house almost single-handedly defined the development of horror fiction in America. Although Derleth wrote Lovecraftian stories using the landscape and many of the characters of the first great American horror writer of the twentieth century, they were designed to maintain interest in what became known as the Cthulhu mythos and were not very good. Derleth preferred the more traditional kind of supernatural and ghost story as practiced by M. R. James and produced many tales of that type, suspenseful and proficient enough so that they are relentlessly anthologized today.
“Pacific 421” was originally published in the September 1944 issue of Weird Tales.