Reading The Shadow Over Innsmouth
H.P. Lovecraft is another long-time winter reading favorite. Like Thoreau mentioned previously, Lovecraft is a nice, if strange, change of pace; my only foray into horror these days (other than living through the Trump presidency). Oddly, Lovecraft-style existential and atmospheric horror compliments my experience with recent reading Thoreau this time (see previous post). The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a logical choice for me, one of his longer short-stories. It is one of Lovecraft’s best pieces and serves as a satisfying example of the Lovecraftian aesthetic.
Coming in at about 60 pages, Innsmouth is about 15-20 pages longer than his more famous story The Dunwich Horror. The overall concept of the narrative and many of its paragraphs makes for a top-notch disquieting read. Ancient myths, mysterious cults or persons, grotesque circumstances, and sinister implications for humanity are all traits of his best writing but rarely does the weird fiction author put all of these elements into play as in this story. This one even adds the nice touch of making the horror more intimately related to the narrator than we would at first suspect.
To begin with, Lovecraft supplies us with a plethora of “facts” about raids and “a prodigious number of arrests” made in the winter of 1927-28. No one ever came to trial. Instead there were rumors of “disease and concentration camps.” The military got involved and a “deep-diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss of Devil Reef.” “Liberal organizations” objected to such heavy-handed treatment but were quieted when “representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons.”
Such information gives a ring of reality and solidity upon which Lovecraft will build his fantastic tale. The story’s narrator reveals that all this was the result of frenzied information he provided to the government. “It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927…” He has remained silent about the matter until now. "...I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing." In this way, Lovecraft hooks you. What in the world happened to this guy to cause such a strong legal and military response?
Our nameless young adventurer (the author reveals his name only in his notebooks) has just “come of age” and he is enjoying a sightseeing tour of New England (funny how Thoreau and Lovecraft wrote about the same geographic section of America) with particular interest in “antiquarian” architecture and genealogy. Although he considers himself familiar with the region, he has never heard of Innsmouth and is curious to see it.
Innsmouth is an old Atlantic port and fishing town, now mostly dilapidated with only a few people living there. It is cut off from civilization by miles of marsh and swamp. A solitary road serviced by “motor-coach” is the only way into the village. Small as it may be, its population is strange. They have “queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut.” Their skin is “rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shriveled of creased up.” Our narrator decides to visit for the day and take the bus out that evening. There are several wonderful paragraphs of the changing landscape on the bus ride, similar to what is found in Lovecraft’s travelogues. This reinforces the feeling of authenticity about the story.
Three encounters initially drive the story, and serve to supply all the background for the bizarre events he witnesses. The first involves the train station ticket teller of perfectly ordinary Newburyport. He supplies our hero (and we readers) with the basic background on why Innsmouth became so strange over the course of a century or so. The last is a young grocery clerk who works day shifts in Innsmouth but doesn’t live there. He provides information about what Innsmouth is like and how peculiar its people are today. It is this lad who tells us about the aged town drunk, Zadok Allen.
In between, there is also a trip to the Newburyport Historical Society where the narrator is able to examine “strange jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth.” “A sort of tiara” particularly catches his eye and we are treated to a marvelously antiquated Lovecraftian paragraph over a close examination of its carvings. This ratchets up the foreboding sense of tension the story creates. Lovecraft’s archaic style plays into the sense of foreboding history he establishes.
“The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity – half achthyic and batrachians in suggestion – which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral.”
Informed by the grocery clerk as to where the old drunk can usually be found, the narrator nervously walks through decrepit Innsmouth and, indeed, happens upon Zadok who he promptly supplies with liquor. The drunker the old man gets, the wilder his telling of Innsmouth’s past becomes. In its more coherent beginning, Zadok speaks of Obed Marsh, who, after the War of 1812, sailed to the south Pacific. There he sort of “went native” as the British say and brought back to Innsmouth the cultish religion of one of the island tribes.
Innsmouth is home to several houses of worship which supposedly practice strange ceremonies. The Esoteric Order of Dagon is the chief temple. “Dagon” is the name of an earlier, well-done short-story and is used here as part of the fascinating mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. I have blogged on this aspect of the writer before. Just offshore, near Innsmouth, lies Devil Reef. Supposedly, some of the villagers swim out there on certain nights to perform various rites and incantations.
But you don’t need to understand any of the broader mythos to appreciate The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The fishing village had fallen on hard times with its primary industry imperiled by meager catches. Basically, Obed Marsh, due to his island travels, made a pact with god-like supernatural frog-fish - worship and human sacrifices in exchange for bountiful fishing and wealth. There is also the abominable detail that worshipers breed with the Deep Ones, which is why everyone in Innsmouth looks so strange. Their hybrid offspring look human when born, but as youth fades into old age these horrid progeny take on the appearance of the monstrous abyss dwellers and return to the depths of the sea to live forever, which is why Innsmouth is almost devoid of old people. Except for the town drunk, of course.
96-year-old Zadok works himself up into a frenzy about the strange religion and demonic fish-frogs. The reader is left to wonder how much of what is being said is due to the liquor and how much is due to the fear Zadok holds for incoming tide as the waves crash upon the shoreline. Zadok is terrified of the truth about the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Lovecraft gives the old drunk a thick provincial accent:
“Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it’s this – it ain’t what them fish devils hez done, but what they’re a-goin’ to do! They’re a-bringin’ things up aout o’ whar they come from into taown – ben doin’ it fer years, an’ slackenin’ up lately. Them houses north o’ the river betwixt Water an’ Main Streets is full of ‘em – them devils and what they brung - an’ when they git ready…I say, when they git ready….ever hear tell of a shoggoth?”
With that old Zadok screams incoherently and vanishes running through the streets leaving our narrator (and us) rather confused and unsettled. Come evening our protagonist discovers that the “motor-coach” is broken down and needs repairs (like the rest of the town). So, the narrator checks in to the only hotel for the night, the Gilman House. Get it? Gill-man. Little joke there. He doesn’t stay very long.
Lovecraft proceeds to offer us pages of steadily increasing tension as the narrator hears all sorts of creaks and footsteps in the old hotel. Suddenly, someone tries to break into his room. Despite his heightened fear, he manages to logically plan and execute an escape just as his door is being forced open. This is actually one of Lovecraft’s most suspenseful “action” sequences, ranking up there with some passages of At the Mountains of Madness. We are inside the narrator’s head, intimately aware of his struggle to escape and remain hidden from his unseen assailants. He ends up prowling the dark streets alone, attempting to avoid some sort of frenzied gathering that oozes into the town from the sea and from various dilapidated houses along the shore.
“Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind terror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.”
“It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne upon me – the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town, and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.”
Lovecraft’s incomparable talent for using suggestion and mere glimpse to fill the reader with existential dread and heighten our sense of alarm is fully on display in these paragraphs. Without actually seeing much of anything (what he does see is usually poorly lit or from a distance), the story builds an unceasingly vague but nevertheless unsettling undertone of tangibility. After more passing glances and unleashed ramblings of a frightened mind, the narrator finally makes it to the edge of the marshes where he hides as the wild horde keeps coming closer.
For several paragraphs, the narrator plays cat and mouse with the maddening crowd that is coming after him. He is careful to make his way toward the marshes (his only possible route of escape in the one-road town, he is sure the road is being patrolled). The horde moves ever closer without having seen our terrified, hiding narrator yet. The closer they get, the stronger the stench of fish in the air.
“And yet I saw them in a limitless stream – flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating – surging inhumanely through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant, saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal….and some were strangely robed….and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.”
“But for all their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be – for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design – living and horrible – and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them – and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting: the first I had ever had.”
Our narrator awakens in the marshes the next day. The bizarre, almost riotous, mob never found him. He stumbles to a nearby village and ultimately makes it to Arkham where he speaks with government officials, leading to the raids that are mentioned at the beginning of the story. With the creepy village and the macabre chase behind us, the story shifts to Lovecraft’s invented city of Arkham where the narrator obtains some rather cryptic genealogical information pertaining to his great-grandparents.
There is no record of his great-grandmother’s ancestry. The question of her lineage consumes him to the point where “I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry.” His quest ultimately leads him to finding some old jewelry his great-grandmother had “of very grotesque and almost repulsive design.” He discovers that his ancestor was a Marsh, the same last name as that of the captain who long ago sailed to the South Pacific in crazy Zodak’s tale.
This shakes the narrator to his core and remains on his mind. In 1931 he begins to have dreams of “great watery spaces” where “labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions.” These become dreams of being underwater with his grandmother and, in turn, with her grandmother, the former Marsh of mysterious lineage. These dreams affect the narrator in the worst possible way. He realizes that he himself is related to the depraved fishing community of Innsmouth. The boundary between the horror of the village and his own being vanishes.
Lovecraft enters into full mythos mode, the horror made more potent by its intimate connection with the narrator and, even more so, by his abrupt familiarity with the disturbing truth about his grandmother's grandmother. “For eighty thousand years Pht’thya-l’yi had lived in Y’ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y’ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea." (Recall that torpedoes were fired into the depths beyond Devil Reef.) "It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved.”
As mentioned earlier, the people of Innsmouth have a strange appearance. In the end, the narrative transitions from the past to the present. The overlying metaphysical threat of the Deep Ones is now mixed with the intimate experience of the narrator. He notices changes in the mirror. He is taking on “the Innsmouth look.” He briefly contemplates suicide. But the story ends with the narrator suddenly, maddeningly, joyous. “Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon, Ia-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia! Ia!” This cry is similar to the one old Zadok had screamed before running away. Our narrator will not shoot himself. Instead, he will swim into the depths where the lair of the “Deep Ones” is and “dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”
Of course, there is a metaphysical horror to all this. The Deep Ones are a global menace. They are as much at home in the depths off Devil Reef near Innsmouth as near those islands in the South Pacific. These creatures have something grand in mind. What are the Deep One’s going to do “when they git ready”? Lovecraft wisely does not reveal this but let’s the question sit unanswered in the reader’s mind.
But the most shocking aspect of this story is not the powerful cryptic ancient mystical threat. Rather, it is the fact that our narrator, innocent of knowing anything about Innsmouth, is nevertheless genetically ensconced in the horror of the old fishing village without initially realizing it. The shadow is not just over Innsmouth, it is part of our narrator’s existence in the end making the peril of the Deep Ones an intimacy in addition to being (perhaps) the ultimate fate of humankind.
Lovecraft mixed intimate and ultimate terrors in several of his stories. The theme of a terrible mystery being revealed with worldwide implications for the human race is not new here nor is it even unique to Lovecraft. But the way he affects the reader in The Shadow Over Innsmouth is unsurpassed. The story’s weird, grotesque, quasi-science fiction entailment of the one person the reader knows makes for an apprehensive literary experience. In this case, it is mixed with exciting action passages as the narrator flees for his life – only to later discover that the terror is not a place but a transmorphic way of life which he accepts with a macabre sense of joy.
Actually, this unsettling existential fantasy is different in kind but not different in degree to what I felt as I read Thoreau earlier. You know something’s not right with the world…and it could be you. What revelation could be more horrifying than that?
Coming in at about 60 pages, Innsmouth is about 15-20 pages longer than his more famous story The Dunwich Horror. The overall concept of the narrative and many of its paragraphs makes for a top-notch disquieting read. Ancient myths, mysterious cults or persons, grotesque circumstances, and sinister implications for humanity are all traits of his best writing but rarely does the weird fiction author put all of these elements into play as in this story. This one even adds the nice touch of making the horror more intimately related to the narrator than we would at first suspect.
To begin with, Lovecraft supplies us with a plethora of “facts” about raids and “a prodigious number of arrests” made in the winter of 1927-28. No one ever came to trial. Instead there were rumors of “disease and concentration camps.” The military got involved and a “deep-diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss of Devil Reef.” “Liberal organizations” objected to such heavy-handed treatment but were quieted when “representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons.”
Such information gives a ring of reality and solidity upon which Lovecraft will build his fantastic tale. The story’s narrator reveals that all this was the result of frenzied information he provided to the government. “It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927…” He has remained silent about the matter until now. "...I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing." In this way, Lovecraft hooks you. What in the world happened to this guy to cause such a strong legal and military response?
Our nameless young adventurer (the author reveals his name only in his notebooks) has just “come of age” and he is enjoying a sightseeing tour of New England (funny how Thoreau and Lovecraft wrote about the same geographic section of America) with particular interest in “antiquarian” architecture and genealogy. Although he considers himself familiar with the region, he has never heard of Innsmouth and is curious to see it.
Innsmouth is an old Atlantic port and fishing town, now mostly dilapidated with only a few people living there. It is cut off from civilization by miles of marsh and swamp. A solitary road serviced by “motor-coach” is the only way into the village. Small as it may be, its population is strange. They have “queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut.” Their skin is “rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shriveled of creased up.” Our narrator decides to visit for the day and take the bus out that evening. There are several wonderful paragraphs of the changing landscape on the bus ride, similar to what is found in Lovecraft’s travelogues. This reinforces the feeling of authenticity about the story.
Three encounters initially drive the story, and serve to supply all the background for the bizarre events he witnesses. The first involves the train station ticket teller of perfectly ordinary Newburyport. He supplies our hero (and we readers) with the basic background on why Innsmouth became so strange over the course of a century or so. The last is a young grocery clerk who works day shifts in Innsmouth but doesn’t live there. He provides information about what Innsmouth is like and how peculiar its people are today. It is this lad who tells us about the aged town drunk, Zadok Allen.
In between, there is also a trip to the Newburyport Historical Society where the narrator is able to examine “strange jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth.” “A sort of tiara” particularly catches his eye and we are treated to a marvelously antiquated Lovecraftian paragraph over a close examination of its carvings. This ratchets up the foreboding sense of tension the story creates. Lovecraft’s archaic style plays into the sense of foreboding history he establishes.
“The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity – half achthyic and batrachians in suggestion – which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral.”
Informed by the grocery clerk as to where the old drunk can usually be found, the narrator nervously walks through decrepit Innsmouth and, indeed, happens upon Zadok who he promptly supplies with liquor. The drunker the old man gets, the wilder his telling of Innsmouth’s past becomes. In its more coherent beginning, Zadok speaks of Obed Marsh, who, after the War of 1812, sailed to the south Pacific. There he sort of “went native” as the British say and brought back to Innsmouth the cultish religion of one of the island tribes.
Innsmouth is home to several houses of worship which supposedly practice strange ceremonies. The Esoteric Order of Dagon is the chief temple. “Dagon” is the name of an earlier, well-done short-story and is used here as part of the fascinating mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. I have blogged on this aspect of the writer before. Just offshore, near Innsmouth, lies Devil Reef. Supposedly, some of the villagers swim out there on certain nights to perform various rites and incantations.
But you don’t need to understand any of the broader mythos to appreciate The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The fishing village had fallen on hard times with its primary industry imperiled by meager catches. Basically, Obed Marsh, due to his island travels, made a pact with god-like supernatural frog-fish - worship and human sacrifices in exchange for bountiful fishing and wealth. There is also the abominable detail that worshipers breed with the Deep Ones, which is why everyone in Innsmouth looks so strange. Their hybrid offspring look human when born, but as youth fades into old age these horrid progeny take on the appearance of the monstrous abyss dwellers and return to the depths of the sea to live forever, which is why Innsmouth is almost devoid of old people. Except for the town drunk, of course.
96-year-old Zadok works himself up into a frenzy about the strange religion and demonic fish-frogs. The reader is left to wonder how much of what is being said is due to the liquor and how much is due to the fear Zadok holds for incoming tide as the waves crash upon the shoreline. Zadok is terrified of the truth about the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Lovecraft gives the old drunk a thick provincial accent:
“Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it’s this – it ain’t what them fish devils hez done, but what they’re a-goin’ to do! They’re a-bringin’ things up aout o’ whar they come from into taown – ben doin’ it fer years, an’ slackenin’ up lately. Them houses north o’ the river betwixt Water an’ Main Streets is full of ‘em – them devils and what they brung - an’ when they git ready…I say, when they git ready….ever hear tell of a shoggoth?”
With that old Zadok screams incoherently and vanishes running through the streets leaving our narrator (and us) rather confused and unsettled. Come evening our protagonist discovers that the “motor-coach” is broken down and needs repairs (like the rest of the town). So, the narrator checks in to the only hotel for the night, the Gilman House. Get it? Gill-man. Little joke there. He doesn’t stay very long.
Lovecraft proceeds to offer us pages of steadily increasing tension as the narrator hears all sorts of creaks and footsteps in the old hotel. Suddenly, someone tries to break into his room. Despite his heightened fear, he manages to logically plan and execute an escape just as his door is being forced open. This is actually one of Lovecraft’s most suspenseful “action” sequences, ranking up there with some passages of At the Mountains of Madness. We are inside the narrator’s head, intimately aware of his struggle to escape and remain hidden from his unseen assailants. He ends up prowling the dark streets alone, attempting to avoid some sort of frenzied gathering that oozes into the town from the sea and from various dilapidated houses along the shore.
“Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind terror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.”
“It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne upon me – the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town, and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.”
Lovecraft’s incomparable talent for using suggestion and mere glimpse to fill the reader with existential dread and heighten our sense of alarm is fully on display in these paragraphs. Without actually seeing much of anything (what he does see is usually poorly lit or from a distance), the story builds an unceasingly vague but nevertheless unsettling undertone of tangibility. After more passing glances and unleashed ramblings of a frightened mind, the narrator finally makes it to the edge of the marshes where he hides as the wild horde keeps coming closer.
For several paragraphs, the narrator plays cat and mouse with the maddening crowd that is coming after him. He is careful to make his way toward the marshes (his only possible route of escape in the one-road town, he is sure the road is being patrolled). The horde moves ever closer without having seen our terrified, hiding narrator yet. The closer they get, the stronger the stench of fish in the air.
“And yet I saw them in a limitless stream – flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating – surging inhumanely through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant, saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal….and some were strangely robed….and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.”
“But for all their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be – for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design – living and horrible – and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them – and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting: the first I had ever had.”
Our narrator awakens in the marshes the next day. The bizarre, almost riotous, mob never found him. He stumbles to a nearby village and ultimately makes it to Arkham where he speaks with government officials, leading to the raids that are mentioned at the beginning of the story. With the creepy village and the macabre chase behind us, the story shifts to Lovecraft’s invented city of Arkham where the narrator obtains some rather cryptic genealogical information pertaining to his great-grandparents.
There is no record of his great-grandmother’s ancestry. The question of her lineage consumes him to the point where “I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry.” His quest ultimately leads him to finding some old jewelry his great-grandmother had “of very grotesque and almost repulsive design.” He discovers that his ancestor was a Marsh, the same last name as that of the captain who long ago sailed to the South Pacific in crazy Zodak’s tale.
This shakes the narrator to his core and remains on his mind. In 1931 he begins to have dreams of “great watery spaces” where “labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions.” These become dreams of being underwater with his grandmother and, in turn, with her grandmother, the former Marsh of mysterious lineage. These dreams affect the narrator in the worst possible way. He realizes that he himself is related to the depraved fishing community of Innsmouth. The boundary between the horror of the village and his own being vanishes.
Lovecraft enters into full mythos mode, the horror made more potent by its intimate connection with the narrator and, even more so, by his abrupt familiarity with the disturbing truth about his grandmother's grandmother. “For eighty thousand years Pht’thya-l’yi had lived in Y’ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y’ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea." (Recall that torpedoes were fired into the depths beyond Devil Reef.) "It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved.”
As mentioned earlier, the people of Innsmouth have a strange appearance. In the end, the narrative transitions from the past to the present. The overlying metaphysical threat of the Deep Ones is now mixed with the intimate experience of the narrator. He notices changes in the mirror. He is taking on “the Innsmouth look.” He briefly contemplates suicide. But the story ends with the narrator suddenly, maddeningly, joyous. “Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon, Ia-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia! Ia!” This cry is similar to the one old Zadok had screamed before running away. Our narrator will not shoot himself. Instead, he will swim into the depths where the lair of the “Deep Ones” is and “dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”
Of course, there is a metaphysical horror to all this. The Deep Ones are a global menace. They are as much at home in the depths off Devil Reef near Innsmouth as near those islands in the South Pacific. These creatures have something grand in mind. What are the Deep One’s going to do “when they git ready”? Lovecraft wisely does not reveal this but let’s the question sit unanswered in the reader’s mind.
But the most shocking aspect of this story is not the powerful cryptic ancient mystical threat. Rather, it is the fact that our narrator, innocent of knowing anything about Innsmouth, is nevertheless genetically ensconced in the horror of the old fishing village without initially realizing it. The shadow is not just over Innsmouth, it is part of our narrator’s existence in the end making the peril of the Deep Ones an intimacy in addition to being (perhaps) the ultimate fate of humankind.
Lovecraft mixed intimate and ultimate terrors in several of his stories. The theme of a terrible mystery being revealed with worldwide implications for the human race is not new here nor is it even unique to Lovecraft. But the way he affects the reader in The Shadow Over Innsmouth is unsurpassed. The story’s weird, grotesque, quasi-science fiction entailment of the one person the reader knows makes for an apprehensive literary experience. In this case, it is mixed with exciting action passages as the narrator flees for his life – only to later discover that the terror is not a place but a transmorphic way of life which he accepts with a macabre sense of joy.
Actually, this unsettling existential fantasy is different in kind but not different in degree to what I felt as I read Thoreau earlier. You know something’s not right with the world…and it could be you. What revelation could be more horrifying than that?
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