The Shadow Out of Time

The Shadow Out of Time is a science fiction horror novella written by H. P. Lovecraft published in 1936, one year before Lovecraft's death.

It is one of the eight fundamental stories within the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. Mixing desire and terror, it perfectly shows Sigmund Freud's thesis that the uncanny is that which, previously known, now lies repressed.

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee is the first-person narrator. He is a professor of Economics at Miskatonic University and he suffered for a few years from amnesia and an apparent personality disorder without a clear explanation. Because of this, everyone close to him leaves him except his son, Wingate Peaslee. Nathaniel will try to discover the explanation of this mystery despite how terrible he can find out and the consequences that have left him: strange dreams that haunt him every night and that get worse.

The dreams become more and more clear and he discovers the reason for his screams when he wakes up: the existence in the past of a race of strange aliens, the Great Race of Yith, who disappeared from the Earth a long time ago due to the revenge of an ancient race that the Yith had locked beneath the surface of their advanced civilization. Nathaniel is overwhelmed by the possibility that his mind had been transferred to the past of the Great Race while a Yith mind occupied his body to learn of their society...

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was legally published within the United States (or the United Nations Headquarters in New York subject to Section 7 of the United States Headquarters Agreement) before 1964, and copyright was not renewed.