Watchers on the Other Side

The Watchers on the Other Side is statted out in the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Rulebook, and probably originates as an offhand reference from August Derleth's short story "The Keeper of the Key, being the Statement of Nayland Colum".

Description

A short story written for a pulp magazine by Nayland Colum following his recruitment into a secret war against the Cthulhu Mythos by Doctor Laban Shrewsbury, containing references to the monsters, tomes, and places that Naland had seen.

Pulp Magazine

• author: Nayland Colum
• language: English
• date: originally circulated in the mid 1940s
• number of known copies (if rare): (unknown, presumably uncommon)
• last known location of surviving copies (if rare): (copies might be lurking in dusty attics and soldiers' footlockers and used book shops around the English-speaking world)
• study: 2 weeks
• sanity loss: minor
• mythos lore: minor
• occult lore: minimal
• spells: (probably none)

Physical Description: A story told in serial form in a minor pulp magazine with a lurid cover depicting a buxom naked woman on a stone altar being menaced by zombies.

General Content: A wild yarn about a globe-trotting investigator who encounters all manner of strange and unlikely adventures involving curious monsters, lost civilizations, evidence of ancient aliens, weird tomes of black magic, and the like. Some of the references are merely the usual repurposed cliches of pulp speculative fiction that would usually be found in this sort of magazine, but other references are to very real Mythos creatures, locations, tomes, and cults.

Paperback Anthology

This paperback anthology version from the 1950s, The Watchers on the Other Side and Other Tales of Terror, with minor editing, contains the serial it is named for with essentially the same content as the original, with some minor rewriting of repetitive parts from the original format for reading as a single story; the serial is collected with a number of shorter stories by Nayland Colum, written in a similar theme, with "Watchers..." providing the most organized and detailed version of the content; the references in all the other stories are more or less the same as the serial, with only small variations. Studying the entire anthology would take several weeks, yielding barely more Cthulhu Mythos lore than "Watchers on the Other Side" alone. This anthology was published in English, with translations in smaller numbers into French, Italian, and German; these translations are workmanlike with minor errors, but remain reasonably faithful to the English original.

Appearances

• fiction: August Derleth, Trail of Cthulhu (fiction) (Part IV: "The Keeper of the Key, being the Statement of Nayland Colum")
• sourcebook: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Rulebook