McIlvaines Star

August Derleth

Sep 2011 · eStar Books

About this ebook

Old Thaddeus McIlvaine discovered a dark star and took it for his own. Thus he inherited a dark destiny--or did he?excerpt"Call them what you like," said Tex Harrigan. "Lost people or strayed, crackpots or warped geniuses--I know enough of them to fill an entire department of queer people. I've been a reporter long enough to have run into quite a few of them.""For example?" I said, recognizing Harrigan's mellowness."Take Thaddeus McIlvaine," said Harrigan.""I never heard of him."""I suppose not,"" said Harrigan. "But I knew him. He was an eccentric old fellow who had a modest income--enough to keep up his hobbies, which were three: he played cards and chess at a tavern called Bixby's on North Clark Street; he was an amateur astronomer; and he had the fixed idea that there was life somewhere outside this planet and that it was possible to communicate with other beings--but unlike most others, he tried it constantly with the queer machinery he had rigged up."Well, now, this old fellow had a trio of cronies with whom he played on occasion down at Bixby's. He had no one else to confide in. He kept them up with his progress among the stars and his communication with other life in the cosmos beyond our own, and they made a great joke out of it, from all I could gather. I suppose, because he had no one else to talk to, McIlvaine took it without complaint. Well, as I said, I never heard of him until one morning the city editor--it was old Bill Henderson then--called me in and said, 'Harrigan, we just got a lead on a fellow named Thaddeus McIlvaine who claims to have discovered a new star. Amateur astronomer up North Clark. Find him and get a story.' So I set out to track him down...."

About the author

August Derleth was born on February 24, 1909 in Sauk City, Wisconsin. He sold his first story to Weird Tales at the age of 16. He received a Bachelor's of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin. After college, he went to work for Fawcett Publications as an editor for Mystic Magazine. In 1932, the first of his Sac Prairie stories was published in various local papers. In 1935, his first book, a collection of related novellas entitled Place of Hawks, was published. In 1937, his first Sac Prairie novel, Still is the Summer Night, was published. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1938 to help him continue the Sac Prairie saga. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 90 books including The Milwaukee Road, Still Small Voice, H.P.L.: A Memoir, Restless Is the River, The Hills Stand Watch, Sweet Genevieve, Evening in Spring, The Moon Tenders, The Captive Island, and Father Marquette and the Great River. He had upward of 3,000 works published in over 350 magazines including The Catholic World, The Yale Review, The New Republic, Redbook, The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, and The American Mercury. He died on June 6, 1971.