Unearthing primal horrors: A Review of HP Lovecraft’s ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’
Despite his racism and his prejudices, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has remained immensely popular after his death, and his work has inspired a massive amount of literature, games, movies, and TV shows; companies have adapted his work into graphic novels and comics as well, and his monsters have spawned many fictional works that feature deep-sea creatures. His works are so unique as to be classified as its own sub-genre of writing, and his style of horror is known as “Lovecraftian horror”. His rise to fame has brought his other prejudices to light, and he does not hide his obvious racism or disdain for people of colour; it does make it difficult to reconcile his enormous body of work with his overtly racist views. His fiction, thankfully, is far-removed from his political stances; he wrote about the bizarre, about monsters, cannibalism, murder, aliens, and creatures that were literally too weird to describe. His stories were sold to pulp magazines, and he made money revising the work of other authors.
The novel, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, is written in first-person narration, where the narrator and the reader together explore the eerie, haunted feeling that hangs over Innsmouth. The narrator, Robert Olmstead, sets out to explore New England when he was 21 and stumbles across the town of Innsmouth. While he waits at Newport, he hears about the superstitious rumours surrounding Innsmouth, and takes what he describes as a ruined, empty bus to the small town; he is the only visitor aboard the bus — the driver himself looks haunted. As he explores Innsmouth, everyone he encounters is silent, shifty, and walks with an odd limp — the only one open to conversation is a grocery store clerk from a neighbouring town. The clerk points him towards Zadok Allen, the town drunk and the only one who may be willing to share some information on the history of the town. The novella bursts open with Zadok; he provides the horrific explanation behind the town’s haunting, and introduces the Deep Ones, a race of fish-like humanoids that offered large fish hauls and unique jewellery to the town, in exchange for human sacrifices. Obed Marsh, the patriarch of the elite Marsh family, establishes a cult known as Order of Dagon; however, when Obed and his followers are arrested, the Deep Ones attacked the town and massacred half the population. Innsmouth inhabitants were forced to breed with the Deep Ones, resulting in hybrid offspring that were born human but slowly transformed into Deep Ones themselves. The narrator is unnerved, but ultimately dismisses these stories as tall tales. As the plan was to leave the town come nightfall, Robert is forced to spend the night as the bus breaks down. The story takes a turn for the worse in the second half, with Robert discovering that someone is attempting to enter the room while he sleeps; he escapes the run-down hotel and tries to from the search parties. Eventually, he makes his way to a railroad and hears a procession of Deep Ones walking on the road before him; seeing these monsters, he faints. He wakes up the next day and makes his way to the neighbouring town. Over the years, he researches his family tree and discovers (to his horror) that he is a distant relative of Obed Marsh, and that he, too, is a hybrid offspring and is changing into one of the Deep Ones. The novella ends with Robert accepting his fate, and plans to break his cousin out of an asylum, and take him to the city of the Deep Ones, beneath the sea.
The novella is another establishment in the Cthulhu Mythos, and Cthulhu is mentioned in passing as Zadok describes the Deep Ones; the novella is ingrained into the overarching mythology that Lovecraft created in his works. The novella is a great example of Lovecraftian horror, of the mounting eeriness and horror that occurs while reading his work. Though Lovecraft was highly critical of this book during his time, Shadow Over Innsmouth has become popular and inspired a stream of movies, TV shows, and games (both analog and digital). The work is ominous, and Lovecraft’s strong descriptions of the fishy-looking monsters with bulging eyes and gills form a strong base for the Cthulhu mythos and adds to the creepy, hair-raising feelings experienced by the reader.
Though Lovecraft himself was highly critical of this work (he never submitted it for publication, and claimed that it would stand ‘no chance of acceptance’), the work was published as a novella in 1936, and Lovecraft was not happy with the production; the work only became popular after his death, and was published in the 1942 issue of Weird Tales. Thanks to his meteoric rise in popular culture, his works have been immortalised in a number of items, from board games to clothes, to plush toys and posters. Shadow Over Innsmouth, in particular, was a fascinating novella that offers a sneak-peek into his weird world and must be read to be truly enjoyed.
References:
Barnett, David. “HP Lovecraft: the writer out of time”. The Guardian. June 2013. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/03/hp-lovecraft-writer-out-time
Eil, Philip. “The Unlikely Reanimation of H.P. Lovecraft”. The Atlantic. August 2015. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/hp-lovecraft-125/401471/
Lovecraft, Howard Philip. The Shadow Over Innsmouth. April 1936. Fantasy Publishing Company. Kindle.
