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I decided to skip ahead in my reading of Lovecraft’s work because I’ve been looking into a lot of media that base themselves on Lovecraftian horror, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth keeps coming up as a direct influence on them. While I did skip over the majority of his work to read this, I feel pretty confident in saying this is probably his best story and I understand why it’s so often used as an inspiration. It’s also where his abhorrent political and racial views are the most visible, which makes it so frustrating to talk about this story in a positive light.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a story of a man who hears about the relatively isolated town of Innsmouth on the New England coast while on an ancestral journey to Arkham. Curiosity gets the better of him and he decides to take a day trip, and ends up uncovering horrifying realizations about the residents, and even about himself in a bit of a departure from my previous experiences with his stories. All of the narrators in the stories I have read are typically just observers of strange phenomena or higher beings that may or may not even acknowledge humanity’s existence. Not so in Innsmouth. After a lengthy and somewhat hard to follow backstory of the town given by an old drunk, the narrator is besieged and hunted down by the resident monsters in an excellent chase sequence. And in a twist of events, the narrator discovers that his ancestry can be traced back to those very monsters as he slowly starts to look like one by the story’s end, making the ill-fated discovery of the town seem like a subliminal calling from the beginning. And that’s where the problematic views become too obvious to ignore.
H. P. Lovecraft was a notorious racist and especially despised race-mixing. The subplot in Innsmouth is all about a group of indigenous people in the pacific that bred with the fish people to create horrifying hybrid monsters, and it ties in to the history of the town itself, and the narrator’s lineage is a result of one of these relations. It is a blatant allegory to miscegenation, and how Lovecraft viewed it as a way of inferior traits to invade the white gene pool. And the isolated community that speaks in a throaty language, worships an old god, and has large dealings in a gold-like substance isn’t helping to dissuade any negative comparisons of the fish folk to Jewish people either.
It’s infuriating that these elements take such a spotlight in the story because this is the one where Lovecraft’s classic prose that is simultaneously vague and vivid works at its best. I almost forgot that I already knew the narrator was going to escape Innsmouth due to the past-tense nature of the story because I was so fixated on the moment. The horrors feel so much more real and threatening when they are taking an active interest instead of being a mere glimpse into the unknown. I guess I can take solace in the fact that Lovecraft is long dead, so I’m not really supporting him financially, and that his abhorrent beliefs are at least buried somewhat in allegory instead of being openly part of the story, so I can still recommend this as a classic influential work that can be enjoyed today without feeling the need to qualify that statement with as massive of an asterisk as I would with something like Gone With The Wind or Birth of a Nation.
I decided to skip ahead in my reading of Lovecraft’s work because I’ve been looking into a lot of media that base themselves on Lovecraftian horror, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth keeps coming up as a direct influence on them. While I did skip over the majority of his work to read this, I feel pretty confident in saying this is probably his best story and I understand why it’s so often used as an inspiration. It’s also where his abhorrent political and racial views are the most visible, which makes it so frustrating to talk about this story in a positive light.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a story of a man who hears about the relatively isolated town of Innsmouth on the New England coast while on an ancestral journey to Arkham. Curiosity gets the better of him and he decides to take a day trip, and ends up uncovering horrifying realizations about the residents, and even about himself in a bit of a departure from my previous experiences with his stories. All of the narrators in the stories I have read are typically just observers of strange phenomena or higher beings that may or may not even acknowledge humanity’s existence. Not so in Innsmouth. After a lengthy and somewhat hard to follow backstory of the town given by an old drunk, the narrator is besieged and hunted down by the resident monsters in an excellent chase sequence. And in a twist of events, the narrator discovers that his ancestry can be traced back to those very monsters as he slowly starts to look like one by the story’s end, making the ill-fated discovery of the town seem like a subliminal calling from the beginning. And that’s where the problematic views become too obvious to ignore.
H. P. Lovecraft was a notorious racist and especially despised race-mixing. The subplot in Innsmouth is all about a group of indigenous people in the pacific that bred with the fish people to create horrifying hybrid monsters, and it ties in to the history of the town itself, and the narrator’s lineage is a result of one of these relations. It is a blatant allegory to miscegenation, and how Lovecraft viewed it as a way of inferior traits to invade the white gene pool. And the isolated community that speaks in a throaty language, worships an old god, and has large dealings in a gold-like substance isn’t helping to dissuade any negative comparisons of the fish folk to Jewish people either.
It’s infuriating that these elements take such a spotlight in the story because this is the one where Lovecraft’s classic prose that is simultaneously vague and vivid works at its best. I almost forgot that I already knew the narrator was going to escape Innsmouth due to the past-tense nature of the story because I was so fixated on the moment. The horrors feel so much more real and threatening when they are taking an active interest instead of being a mere glimpse into the unknown. I guess I can take solace in the fact that Lovecraft is long dead, so I’m not really supporting him financially, and that his abhorrent beliefs are at least buried somewhat in allegory instead of being openly part of the story, so I can still recommend this as a classic influential work that can be enjoyed today without feeling the need to qualify that statement with as massive of an asterisk as I would with something like Gone With The Wind or Birth of a Nation.