I recently read H.P. Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” a novella about a strange town that has become entangled with a race of fish-people who worship a dark god (this summary is probably gratuitous considering the fame of this story). Generally, I love Lovecraft’s fiction. Specifically, I love this novella.
Some general comments about Lovecraft before proceeding: I’m reluctant to write about him. Why? Because of all the weird writers I’m interested in, the “critical/scholarly/fan” community—I like term “shieldwall”—that comments on and critiques him is very large and intimidatingly well read. This is, of course, connected with, among other things, the establishment of Arkham House Publishing, a company founded to preserve Lovecraft’s legacy.
As I continue this blog, I aim to more fully delve into this work (side note: I will begin with the relatively new biography of Lovecraft written by Lovecraft afficionado S.T. Joshi titled *I Am Providence*). And so, please please consider this post as a tentative and “amateurish” step into a field that is quite large—a single toe into a pool of eldritch slime-horrors.
Now. Let us return to “Shadow Over Innsmouth.”
The pace and structure of the story is what truly endears me to it. It begins subtly. The protagonist wanders aimlessly through Innsmouth gathering this or that tidbit of information which begins to accumulate allowing him to piece together a vision of horror. To some extent it emulates the structure of a traditional detective novel like, say, *The Maltese Falcon.* After he has a talk with a drunken homeless person, all the pieces fall together and the novella actually becomes a psuedo-action thriller. I won’t spoil the ending, which is great.
Aside from “cheerleading” this story, what else can I offer? Well, here’s a little information. The story was written in November and December of 1931. It wasn’t published until 1936 and, according to August Derlath, it is the only fiction written by Lovecraft that was published independently and not in a periodical. I find this intriguing because the material circumstances of the periodical market determines, to a large extent, the narrative shape of the stories published within it.
How does the material circumstances of this story’s publication play out in terms of the story’s structure and style? Here’s some conjecture: the pace is unhurried and, though it still split up into sections, it reads as if it organically holds together the way that some other longer Lovecraft pieces (I am particularly thinking of “Herbert West-Reanimator”) feel stitched together from otherwise distinct episodes.
Some interpretation: this story is preoccupied with racial purity and a fear that informs it is the fear of the racial purist who is afraid that somewhere in their family tree are some “alien” elements. I don’t find this particularly scary. What I do find intriguing, however, is the idea of “inhuman” elements secretly infiltrating human society, of other worlds—older than our own—existing outside of what we consider the norm. The fear of genetic contamination that pervades a lot of Lovecraft’s fiction is difficult for me to understand and *may* be anachronistic here in 2011 (this is, of course, being optimistic).
Fear of the Other is more universal. For me the power of this story is that Lovecraft has created a village of Others who are strange not because of how *different* they are from us. It’s the other way around. They are anthroid fish people. Thus, they are creepy because of their *resemblance* to us. Therefore, the predominant aesthetic effect of the story is—(::sigh:: I hate using this word.) *uncanny.* In other words, the fish-people of Innsmouth are a distortion of ourselves, but the distortion is skillfully tempered. This is why I think the final scene in the story is so disturbing—the protagonist staring at himself in a mirror.
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