The Shadow Over Innsmouth And Other Stories Of Horror

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H.P. Lovecraft is a writer whose works have had a substantial impact on popular culture. His name itself has been turned into an adjective - “Lovecraftian” - meaning, basically, a kind of horror involving vast and undefeatable evil powers. Even people who have never read Lovecraft have a dim sense of Cthulhu and they are exposed to Lovecraftian elements in movies and television.

I'm one of those people. I didn't attempt to read Lovecraft until this summer - August 2020. One of the first stories I started with was one I had heard constantly referenced by other books and stories, namely “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

The story involves a narrator making it a trip through the New England region. He decides to divert his tour through the town of Innsmouth because he had a distant ancestor who came from Innsmouth. Innsmouth had a poor reputation for backwardness and poverty. He goes to Innsmouth and finds it to be squalid and hostile. Many of the natives have an “Innsmouth look” which involves wideset eyes and a receding chin. As he wanders, the hostility against him increases. He comes to find that there is a conspiracy afoot and that his way out of town is barred by the natives.

Think about how many stories in television and movies involve an outsider stumbling into a community with a dark secret. I don't know if Lovecraft originated this trope but he did write this story in the late 1920s.

I liked this story. It is not particularly fast-moving. Lovecraft spends a lot of time on descriptions and information dumps. This story is probably unusual in the Lovecraft canon for the amount of dialogue involved and how Lovecraft advances the story through dialogue instead of a narration. I was surprised at how much Lovecraft put me in mind of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

I found the story to be intriguing and enjoyable. It definitely had a “creep” factor that has stuck with me. It's definitely a classic and I would recommend it on that basis. On the other thand, if you don't have the willingness to cut your way through what is fairly archaic, dense prose, then this may not be your cup of tea.