Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories. Today we’re looking at “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” written in November-December 1931 and first published as a bound booklet by Visionary Publishing in April 1936. You can read the story here. Spoilers ahead.
Summary: During the winter of 1927-1928, the government raided Innsmouth, MA. Afterwards there were no trials, only rumors of concentration camps. Innsmouth’s neighbors didn’t complain: they’d never liked the place. It’s our narrator whose reports led to the crackdown. Now he wants to tell his story, as he makes up his mind about a terrible step that lies ahead of him.
During an on-the-cheap coming-of-age tour of New England, he finds the train from Newburyport to his ancestral Arkham too pricy. The ticket agent suggests the Innsmouth-run equivalent of the Chinatown bus.
The agent gossips about the obscure town: Innsmouth’s half-deserted, and gets by on its unusually abundant fishing grounds. The last remnant of industry is Old Man Marsh’s gold refinery. A mysterious epidemic killed half the town in 1846. “Bad blood” gives them a strange look: narrow heads, scabby skin, bulging eyes that never seem to shut. No one sees them old, and there are rumors of degenerative disease. They’ve replaced ordinary churches with the “Esoteric Order of Dagon,” and view outsiders with suspicion.
Innsmouth also produces occasional pieces of exotic gold jewelry. The local historic society’s specimen disturbs the narrator: its extraordinary workmanship, its otherworldly style.
The bus driver has the features the agent described, and smells overwhelmingly of fish. The narrator feels instant revulsion.
In Innsmouth he finds a chain grocery. There an affable young Arkham man, transferred by his employers, eagerly shares his dislike for the town’s people. He says they won’t talk, but Zadok Allen will—when he’s drunk. The clerk draws a map and warns of areas where strangers have disappeared.
The narrator resolves to spend the time before the bus looking at architecture, and speaking only with out-of-towners. Eventually he finds Zadok. Reasoning that even mad stories may reveal a core of historical truth, he buys bootleg whiskey and leads the old drunkard to where they can talk unobserved.
Those were hard times, during Zadok’s childhood, but Obed Marsh still traded in the South Seas, including on an island where the natives wore strangely carved gold jewelry. Marsh learned that they’d made deals with amphibious frog-fish monsters: human sacrifice in return for fish and gold. The natives and monsters interbred, producing children who changed and became immortal. All living things come from the water, and it only takes a little push for them to go back.
Neighboring tribes wiped out the islanders. Without the gold trade, Innsmouth’s economy faltered. Under Obed’s leadership some townspeople found gods living deep under nearby Devil Reef who would answer their prayers. Young people disappeared. Innsmouth started to prosper again.
Then a party followed Obed’s people out to the reef and jailed them. Two weeks later, hordes of monsters emerged from the water. They left no one alive but those who’d go along with Obed or keep quiet.
Obed made everyone take the Oath of Dagon, and “mix” whether they liked it or not. He promised rewards, but also threatened: the Deep Ones don’t want to start wiping out humanity, but if they have to…
Obed was forced to take a second, unseen wife. They had three children—including one normal-looking girl who was secretly married to an Arkham man.
It gets worse: the Deep Ones have been bringing things up through hidden tunnels, hiding them in town. “Ever hear tell of a Shoggoth?”
But here Zadok breaks off, looks at the ocean in terror, and runs. The narrator sees nothing. When he gets back inland, the man has disappeared.
The bus for Arkham arrives. After a whispered conversation the driver reports engine trouble. Dazed, the narrator rents a hotel room for the night. There’s no bolt on the door, apparently a recent removal. The narrator uses his multitool to transfer a bolt from the clothes press.
In the dark, he hears someone try his lock, then go into the next room and try the connecting door. The bolts hold, but vague fear becomes specific threat. The power cuts off. From below come inhuman barks and croaks.
Neighboring roofs—too far to reach from the narrator’s room—offer a way out. Someone knocks on his outer door, loudly and repeatedly. He forces the connecting door, hears people trying to enter all the rooms, escapes using curtains as a ladder.
He flees through town, hiding in doorways and mimicking the locals’ shambling gait. Every group of pursuers looks less human. Signal lights flash in the hotel and out on the reef, and he sees inhuman figures swimming toward town.
At last he escapes over the railroad bridge. Hiding in a railroad cut, he finally sees his pursuers clearly: flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating figures with grayish green skin, fish-like heads, and long webbed claws.
The next day he speaks with government officials in Arkham, then Boston. The aftermath of those conversations is well-known, and he wishes that was all he had to tell.
He cuts short his planned travel, but continues his genealogical research. He learns to his horror that his great-grandmother was a Marsh—and probably not of New Hampshire as she claimed. His family tree is marred by asylum and suicide, and some of his relatives’ strange features now look all too familiar. An uncle shows him a safety deposit box full of his great-grandmother’s jewelry—likewise familiar.
Then the dreams begin. Dreams of cyclopean underwater cities, with denizens that horrify him when he wakes, but don’t horrify him in the dreams—for in the dreams he’s one of them.
His health and appearance worsen. Sometimes, he’s unable to shut his eyes. He dreams that his grandmother hasn’t died, and that she shows him the underwater city of Y’ha-nthlei—his eventual and inevitable home.
So far he hasn’t shot himself. The dreams have deterred him, and now he wakes in exaltation as much as horror. No, he cannot be made to shoot himself. He’ll break his cousin out of the sanitarium, and take him down to the ocean. And in the lair of the Deep Ones they’ll dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.
What’s Cyclopean: The narrator dreams of “weedy cyclopean walls” in “cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei.” Lovecraft’s stock architecture descriptions are contrasted here: decrepit Innsmouth with its gambreled roofs versus sunken, cyclopean Y’ha-nthlei.
The Degenerate Dutch: Where to start? With the specific epithets, like Zadok Allen calling Obed Marsh’s South Seas informer a “yeller devil?” With the ticket agent who speaks, disgusted, of sailors breeding with Chinese and Fiji women? With the repetitive horror that Innsmouth’s residents don’t speak English—and the comparison of their language to animal noises (a comparison racists often make about real languages). Or with the overriding concern with “alienage,” with inhuman foreigners forcing or tricking people into interbreeding, with having the other turn out to be part of you?
Mythos Making: The Deep Ones are held off by the signs of the Old Ones, pay tribute to Cthulhu, and are doing… something… with a Shoggoth. While the Esoteric Order of Dagon talks about Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, it does in fact appear to be thinly-veiled Cthulhu-worship.
Libronomicon: Does a very detailed map of Innsmouth count?
Madness Takes Its Toll: The narrator’s cousin ends up in an asylum when he starts to turn into a Deep One. And the narrator—like many Lovecraft narrators—wonders whether what he saw was hallucination. (Rule 1: It’s never a hallucination.) On a meta level, the whole story may be Lovecraft coming to terms, in his own inimitable way, with the mental illness in his own family tree.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I was amazed, reading reviews of Litany, how many people congratulated me (or accused me of politics) for my cleverness in having the government put the Deep Ones in concentration camps. That had very different connotations in 1936, as did the swastika left by those who wiped out the South Sea islanders. But it still struck me with enough force, on first read, that I read on with a jaundiced eye. And there’s a lot to be jaundiced about.
What jumped out at me then, and still does, is how much of this story is second-hand rumor—facilitated by the fact that the narrator refuses conversation with anyone from Innsmouth. We get a bit from two outsiders who despise the townsfolk—and a great deal from a 96-year-old drunk guy whose manner of speaking suggests delusion. The only thing the narrator sees for himself is that the town is half-abandoned, and townsfolk aren’t fully human. Which… isn’t actually an atrocity. They try to get into his room and to stop him from leaving town—given that he’s one of their lost children and has just heard all manner of horror from Zadok, that’s actually kind of understandable.
Thing is—these are all things that disliked minorities have been accused of historically. Human sacrifice? Demonic deals? Plague and murder? Check, check, check. Can’t you be more original with your blood libel? And it’s preserved by a combination that Lovecraft portrays perfectly: fantastic, sordid rumor encourages people to avoid direct contact, and shards of ambiguous experience are used to shore up rumor.
So I’m a Deep One apologist, which you already knew. And I’m well aware that many readers take Zadok as a reliable narrator—as he was clearly intended to be. What do I get if I look at the faces instead of the vase? Mene, mene, tekel uparsin is from the Book of Daniel, foretelling the fall of empires. And Zadok’s the name of the first priest in Solomon’s temple. Innsmouth’s got itself a prophet—though whether he’s warning against the fall of the town, or of humanity, is left wide open.
While Lovecraft probably intended the narrator’s physical and mental transformation to be a horror, it doesn’t entirely come across that way. His movement from fear to ecstasy is too seductive. The language used to portray the change is clever, even subtle. Innsmouth’s described as “fear-shadowed” throughout, “marvel-shadowed” at the end. And while I used it throughout the summary for convenience, the name “Deep Ones” doesn’t actually appear until the dreams start. When the narrator acknowledges his kinship, they get a name; until then they’re “fish-frog monsters” and similar.
Even then, though, nothing in the story ever takes Zadok, or the grocery clerk or ticket agent, at anything less than face value—ultimately, until the narrator becomes an insider, the outsider views are only the only ones that can be heard, and must absolutely be believed. The former changes with the narrator’s transformation; the latter doesn’t.
In closing, I’ll note while the narrator’s a Marsh on one side of his family, he’s an Orne on the other. Anne, our characters are related! [Anne: That’s right! I’d forgotten about Eliza Orne, the narrator’s grandmother. I was originally thinking of Lovecraft’s wizard, Simon Orne, who appears in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Small cosmos.]
Anne’s Commentary
Lovecraft and happy endings? No common association, but I can think of a few cheerful-ish closes. There’s the Finally-Realized-The-Place-Of-Heart’s-Desire ending, as in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. There’s the Catastrophe-Averted ending, as in “The Dunwich Horror.” And then there’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” which ends in a manic, even ecstatic, surrender to the weird.
I love this one. Written in 1931, “Innsmouth” shows Lovecraft at the height of his Mythos-making powers. The town is the most fully described of his invented cities, a masterly mash-up of the regionally authentic and fantastic. Having grown up in a northeast town where the glory days of manufacturing were long past, I recognize the fading splendor of Innsmouth’s mansions and the seedy grime of its slums. I’ve played in the abandoned houses and explored the overgrown railroads and eaten in diners where canned soup was indeed the best bet. There’s a glamour in such things for the young. The adults around me, on the other hand, must have felt some of the desperation that drove Innsmouth into a new religion. I’m not saying that my neighbors would have dropped Deep One lures into the Hudson. Still, despair’s a dangerous force both on the individual and the social level, as are greed and power and the lure of immortality.
“Innsmouth” also boasts a structure better balanced among world building, action and denouement than, say, “The Mound.” The unnamed narrator is at the center of events and a precipitator of consequences. I sense poignant similarities between him and Lovecraft: the antiquarian and genealogical bents, the tight budget, the shadow of family illness. Lovecraft’s parents both died at Providence’s Butler Hospital, an early pioneer in the humane treatment of the mentally ill. The narrator’s strange maternal grandmother disappears, his uncle commits suicide, his cousin is confined to a sanitarium. It’s interesting, and arguably clunky, that we don’t know about them until late in the story. If his uncle killed himself after a trip to New England, wouldn’t the narrator recall this while he was on an increasingly traumatic visit? Wouldn’t he associate his grandmother’s unsettling stare with the Innsmouth look sooner? A valid quibble, though less so with a retrospective account than with a real-time narrative. We do get early hints in the familiarity of the Newburyport tiara and in Zadok Allen’s assertion that the narrator has Obed Marsh’s “sharp-reading” eyes.
During this Lovecraft re-read, for example in “Shadow Out of Time,” I’ve noticed frequent use of the words “normal” and “abnormal.” “ Innsmouth” gives us this thematic pair as well as the related “wholesome” and “unwholesome.” Other stressed words are “repulsion,” “degeneration,” “plague,” “contagion/contagious,” “taint.” The narrator comes to see Innsmouth as an example not of alienage but of insidious disease, possibly hereditary. In fact, the whole city seems diseased and rotting from within! Ironically, though, alienage is the right answer, after a fashion. The Innsmouth folk aren’t sick; they’re just not totally human anymore.
Phew. I was worried there.
Because a disease that leaves you looking like Joe Sargent? Nasty. A process that would render you amphibious, immortal and heir to deep-sea cyclopean wonders? Wow. As with Yith brain transfer, sign me up! Or have the Yith convince my father or mother to sign up, so I get the genetic benefits. No wonder, once the narrator gets over his initial fainting spells, he can’t wait to visit his Y’ha-nthlei relatives.
Except, what about that interspecies sex thing? Lovecraft’s not going there apart from hints about “mingling” and wives never seen in public. A definite squick factor, even for the most liberal and adventurous? (Interesting aside: The narrator notes that “liberal organizations” protested the confinement of Innsmouthers. That was, until they saw the detainees. Blatant speciesism, but with the real-life confinements and exterminations soon to follow, so utterly believable a response.)
But their desire to fraternize with humans isn’t the worst thing about the Deep Ones. I had forgotten two things before my recent re-read. One, the Deep Ones are supposed to have a tropey pagan liking for human sacrifice. Two, they’re planning to expand their land operations. In fact, they may be plotting WORLD DOMINATION VIA SHOGGOTH! If that’s not teh ebil, what is?
It is only derelict Zadok Allen who brings up human sacrifice. I think his reminiscences are reliable with regard to what he himself has seen (which doesn’t include actual sacrifices), even as whiskey plunges him into escalating feats of dialect. The government takes the Deep One threat seriously enough to destroy the waterfront where they’re supposedly collecting weapons of mass destruction We know the US government is never wrong about weapons of mass destruction, right? And in the narrator’s dreams, his relatives admit to the world domination plan.
Inebriated narrative mixed with hearsay. Government. Dreams. With these providing the chief testimony against Deep Ones, my jury remains out; in the meantime, they’re cool by me.
Join us next week for a not-so-pleasant evening “In the Vault.”
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land.” Her work has also appeared at Strange Horizons and Analog. She can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal. Her alma mater’s water comes from the Quabbin Reservoir, and she now needs a new excuse for being so weird.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “Geldman’s Pharmacy” received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” is published on Tor.com, and her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen. She currently lives in a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island.
This is, I think, one of only a few Lovecraft stories in which the government plays an effective role. There’s a lone police detective in “Call of Cthulhu” but in the best Mythos traditions, he’s ignored. But in this one, the US government itself believes the story and acts on it with unrestrained force, later covering up its actions.
In that regard, it’s a stepping stone to all those modern Mythos stories like the Laundry series, the X-Files, the Delta Green supplement and so forth…
One of Lovecraft’s strongest, I think, even though much of the time our protagonist is standing around listening to the tales of other people. I’ve always enjoyed the note of euphoria the story ends on and, of course, shadowed Innsmouth itself, a place where even the street map holds weird menace.
This story first appeared as a standalone chapbook and it was six years before it saw pulpy print in Weird Tales, January 1942, though (if I remember correctly) it only made the cover of the Canadian edtion. Also of potential interest here are “The Ghost of Lancelot Biggs”, part of a series by the now-obscure but then well-regarded SF author Nelson S. Bond and “The Phantom Slayer” by Fritz Leiber.
I was kind of amused when I found out, during my college years, that Innsmouth was inspired not wholly by a generalized sense of racism, but Lovecraft’s discovery that his great-great-grandmother was (gasp!) Welsh! The horror! Lovecraft’s racism always stood out as sort of absurd and laughable in its total, stick-up-the-ass insecurity about his own lineage.
This was also one of his best stories, I think. I always found the part where the Deep Ones break into his hotel and he’s running across the rooftops to escape was absolutely terrifying, probably the tensest chase sequence I’ve ever read.
What’s also distinctive about this story is it’s one of the few times Lovecraft writes a really effective “action” sequence: The narrator’s narrowly escaping from his hotel room, frantically dodging around town looking for a way out, and stumbling along the abandoned railway track are truly vivid and gripping. I really feel his panic, desperation and exhaustion.
One more “biblical” reference in this story: The last line, when the narrator talks of going under the sea to live “in wonder and glory forever” is practically a paraphrase of the last line of the 23rd Psalm.
It’s time for an updated “Shadow over Innsmouth”, because that town has to be full of yuppies today. The fish people sold their houses and retired to the South Seas.
(relatives in Newburyport here :-) )
“The Shadow Over Insmouth” has effective decadent atmosphere, but it’s
hard to like a story whose governing theme is nothing more profound than
Lovecraft’s excessive revulsion for miscegenation. (I surmise that he would
be on the negative side of today’s genetic-engineering controversy.)
It seems paradoxical that the same man who wrote “Innsmouth,” the worse
“Arthur Jermyn,” and the supremely ridiculous “Medusa’s Coil” (whose
climactic, shocking final revelation is “…in deceitfully slight proportion,
Marceline was a negress”) also wrote “The Colour Out of Space,” At the
Mountains of Madness, and “The Shadow Out of Time.” The cosmic attitude
cultivated by Lovecraft at his best is philosophically the polar opposite to
his racism. From a cosmic viewpoint, what could possibly be more
insignificant–more utterly beneath notice–than the trivial distinctions
between races of human beings? I’ve never understood how HPL could entertain
both perspectives. It wasn’t entirely a matter of “immature racist early,
mature cosmic late”–there is considerable overlap in time between the writing
of his racist and his cosmic stories (e.g., “The Call of Cthulhu” (cosmic,
1926); “The Dunwich Horror” (cosmic, 1928); “The Whisperer in Darkness”
(cosmic, 1930); “Medusa’s Coil” (racist, 1930); At the Mountains of Madness
(cosmic, early 1931); “The Shadow Over Insmouth” (racist, late 1931). (Of
course, I’ve oversimplified these judgments; many stories have mixed
perspectives.)
This is the story (with an assist from “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”) that put 10 or 11 year old me off of Lovecraft for several years. Scared the crap out of me so badly that I didn’t even want to touch the book. Every time I had to reshelve things to keep my authors in order, I hated when I had to move that book. Of course, it didn’t help at all that it had this cover:
That’s a damn creepy dude.
Still, it probably is one of his best stories. From his description of the decaying, half-abandoned town to the steadily building tension to the chase, everything falls into place.
The equation of a dubious racial background with having insanity in the family says a lot about both attitudes in the early 20th century and the special attitudes that HPL was raised with. A taint in the blood and all that. But I do think that this is really about the mental illness of both his parents, and I’d be willing to bet the aunts browbeat him with that, especially his father’s (not good enough for our sister, blah blah blah), repeatedly.
My main problem with this story is believing a guy with a history of insanity in the family could show up saying he’d been chased by frog monsters and get an entire town wiped out on his say so. Granted, there’s a missing drunk he says can back him up if anyone can find him (that would be the drunk last seen alive when the narrator was luring him off to an isolated location. Nothing suspicious or serial-killery in that at all, is there?)
@6:
I was going to write up a longer version of this when we got to Mountains, but how in the name of Azathoth’s piping idiots do you come to the idea that At The Mountains of Madness is the polar opposite of Lovecraft’s racism?
Picture if you will, a high and noble race with a slave underclass. Picture this slave underclass crudely mimicking the noble race until finally killing them and continuing on in a crude approximation of the noble race’s culture. Note that Lovecraft paints the shoggoths as horrific and note that of the Elders he proclaims, “THESE were men!”
I think there are clear parallels to be drawn here. Mountains is, at its heart, still an extension of the Fear of the Other / xenophobia that leaves no Mythos story untouched.
It’s especially striking that At the Mountains of Madness is often brought up as evidence that Lovecraft outgrew his racism towards the end of his career: “Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn – whatever they had been, they were men!” Yet it was written before this one.
jmeltzer @@@@@ 5 Heh. In my take, the yuppies and hip academics live in Arkham, in repurposed factories and warehouses along the Miskatonic. In Innsmouth, the yuppies doing the urban renewal only look like yuppies….
And, hey, just sail down the sound between Plum Island and Newburyport, and you can have brunch in Innsmouth!
And I’m just working on paving over the dynamited waterfront ruins for the post-war housing boom. The surviving Deep Ones may not be entirely pleased by all the new suburban construction…
HPL wrote somewhere that Innsmouth is a “twisted Newburyport”, and there are parts of Gloucester in it too. Both were rather run down in his day – but no longer.
I do wonder how he would have reacted to yuppies, and to the Esoteric Order of Dagon hall becoming a Starbucks …
The Starbucks is just a front. Deep under its Bohemian wanna-be trappings, unhallowed rituals still take place, fueled to greater fervor by the caffeine.
The Deep Ones lost my fear when I realized that Abe Sapien (from Hellboy) is one. I have to assume that at least some of those interspecies matings were voluntary.
Also, I hope future readings will cover “Ibid” (Lovecraft writing deliberate comedy!), “The Last Test” (a female viewpoint character), and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (a questor encounters a vast and unfathomable cosmic entity. . . and makes friends).
#1 Good call about the laundry series, that makes sense in the fictional universe.
I recently finished the lovecraft’s monsters anthology and there’s a great little short in there from one brian hodge (the same deep waters as you) as a follow-up to what happened to the captured innsmouth lot. You do feel sympathetic towards them as you do here, as it seems the writer did.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to see “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as a parable of miscegenation.
The inhabitants are echt-Yankees, after all.
The real anxiety of the narrator is about ‘degeneration’ in -his own- bloodline; about inbreeding, decay, hereditary madness, all of which are things that preoccupied Lovecraft.
That, if anything, is the appropriate parable for the Deep Ones.
What Lovecraft probably had in mind as the model for the government action in sweeping up the inhabitants of Innsmouth was the “Red” raids in 1919-20, when various politically disfavored types were rounded up, interned and then shiped to Europe.
There was a game that came out in 2005 called
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
and it was a first person action game that follows this story pretty accurately. If anyone here is into gaming even a little bit you should track this game down!
Neil Gaiman’s story “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” is set in the “original” Innsmouth, a decaying seaside town in Britain (whose existence is of course denied by all outsiders) inhabited by some fairly personable acolytes of Cthulhu, though it’s been a bit of a slow season for them.
One thing I forgot to mention which jumped out at me for the first time. HPL worked a puckish little joke into this thing that most people seem to gloss over. One of the four leading families and the name of the hotel in which the protagonist is forced to stay is Gilman. Gill-man? Seriously Howard? Based on the sorts of jokes he put into his letters and the way he worked his various friends into stories, I’d be willing to bet he knew exactly what he was doing here.
I wonder, with the end of this story being as it is, could it be argued that this is HPL sorta kinda overcoming his own fears/prejudices/racism? Maybe? Accidentally? Temporarily?
After all, where his protagonist is all “The horror! The horror!” at first, he does a complete “Fish-God cult? Iz not so bad akshully! Iz akshully kinda naiz!”-180 at the end. Reconcilliation with family history, reunion with not- actually- insane cousin, prospective reunion with not-actually-dead grandmother, awesome new crib in fancy neighborhood…what’s not to like?
(Un-)Intentional Aesop?
Another week, another look at some more of Charlie Stross’s inspirations for the Laundry Files. We’ve got mentions of Dunwich, the Old Ones, the Deep Ones, the ‘Innsmouth look’, and most pertinently, a government coverup.
It would be interesting to see a re-read of the Laundry Files, given that every time I read them I pick up more inspirations, allusions and in-jokes.
(It took me several years to pick up on the joke about Bob Howard’s middle names being Oliver Francis…)
*edit, and it’s taken me until just now to realise that ‘Howard’ may well be a reference to old HP himself.
I like this story very much. It’s my favorite HPL story.
There was a movie, made in Spain, but mostly with actors that spoke English, that follows the story of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The movie is called Dagon, for who knows what reason. And the city’s name was changed from Innsmouth to Inboca, with the city location also being changed from eastern USA to the Galician coast in Spain.
Ryamano @@@@@ 24 I imagine the Deep Ones have cities all over the world. One day a Discovery Channel crew shooting the next Shark Week show on Megalodon’s survival will drop a camera into their midst. Then we’ll have Shoggoth Week instead.
A consummation devoutly to be wished?
@@@@@ 17
The “sallow skin” and wide eyes kind of make me think that the Deep Ones are exaggerated Pacific Islanders. And, given The Horror At Red Hook, I find the idea that Innsmouth ISN’T about the horrors of mixing cultures a little naive.
@@@@@ 23
Mightn’t Bob Howard be a reference to Robert Howard, the Texan who wrote the Conan stories, as well as some excellent weird fiction and weird westerns?
Shoggoth Week. Very cool.
I enjoy the details of the town and general descriptiveness of the story. The Deep Ones are intriguing and the general idea of subteranean civilizations is always fun (for certain degrees of fun).
The “degenerate Dutchman” parts could be done without.
Somebody upthread mentioned the improbability that our protagonist could go staggering into the FBI offices babbling about fish-frog monsters and get a full armed invasion of the town. Perhaps he realized that and came up with something about “Communists! Bootleggers! Communist bootleggers!” Then when the Feds got there, they saw what was really going on and wound up torpedoing Devil’s Reef.
Also, this is very obviously the first X file. Not whatever it was they came up with back in the 50s with Mulder’s mentor. Chris Carter really dropped the ball on that one.
This is the trailer for the movie I mentioned
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yAnVNy27co
Lovecrafty scenes don’t start until the 0:40 mark. It’s nice to see some scenes recreated on film. Also, looking at the trailer, I noticed these guys also made the movie Re-animator. What happened with people trying to make H P Lovecraft movies? Why did it stop? Besides these ones, I remember only the Call of Cthulhu silent movie (which is awesome) and rumors regarding someone in Hollywood trying to make At The Mountains of Madness.
@9: Yes, the Old Ones/shoggoth relationship does have parallels to racism, but
“speciesism” is a closer parallel. The shoggoths are not an oppressed branch
of the Old Ones’ own species, but were created by the Old Ones as a sort of
organic robots specifically intended to do heavy work. The Old Ones’
bioengineering seems to have been poorly implemented; the shoggoths developed
“accidental intelligence” and “stubborn volition,” rebelled, and were forcibly
repressed. The Old Ones also domesticated Mesozoic reptiles that had
originally evolved from their protoplasmic experiments, in which respect the
Old Ones are no more oppressive than humans, none of whose cultures have
hesitated to domesticate other species that they found useful.
@17: “Innsmouth” involves first miscegenation (the story refers many times to
mixing of “bloods”); then degeneration, the degenerates being offspring of the
interbred unions: “Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods
there’d be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more’n more like
the things, till finally they’d take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’
things daown thar.”
there’s a great little short in there from one brian hodge (the same
deep waters as you) as a follow-up to what happened to the captured
innsmouth lot.
Well, less than 20 years later the US government would be becoming very interested indeed in amphibious warfare (in the South Seas, even!) and what better to fight an amphibious war than amphibious soldiers? Clearly the Innsmouth Nisei would all have been drafted into the USMC.
“23 Jan. Battalion still in rest camp, Solomon Islands. The battalion lost our code talker today, a Navajo PFC called Frank Samson, a good kid, who was posted away from us to the 45th. We expected to get another Navajo or maybe a Choctaw as replacement but instead the Navy has sent us a bug-eyed young fellow called Homer Marsh. I do not know what language he is speaking on the radio but it sounds like no Indian tongue I have ever heard…”
@29: I hope that these two lists of Lovecraftian films may prove interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_based_on_works_by_H._P._Lovecraft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cthulhu_Mythos_films
Lovecraft as a whole is very hard to film: his stories include indescribable things, long periods where the main character listens to a story told by someone else, little in the way of conventional plot, action, relationships etc, overt racism, implicit racism, nihilism, narrators of questionable sanity and many other things that cause studio executives to flee. Typically, you get a broadly faithful, small scale, independent film, like The Call of Cthulhu, or a film which uses Lovecraftian material in a different type of story, like Cast a Deadly Spell.
Guillermo Del Toro has, as you mentioned, tried with At the Mountains of Madness but found the studios unreceptive, not least because the studio wanted a PG-13 film where Del Toro wanted an R rating. There’s also the danger that people will consider it derivative of the works it inspired, as was the case with John Carter: I don’t think my sanity could remain intact if I heard filmgoers complaining that At the Mountains of Madness was inferior to Alien vs. Predator…
@29: OK, I’m pretty sure my previous post on the matter got eaten, because it contained two links to the Wikipedia categories “Films based on works by H. P. Lovecraft” and “Cthulhu Mythos films”. These contain a decent selection of the cinematic outings of Cthulhu and friends.
The problem with adapting Lovecraft is that, aside from the racism etc, he isn’t really a very visual writer. Things are half-seen, or undescribable, or the narrator is of questionable sanity: generally, Lovecraft’s stories don’t fit the blockbuster formula. Guillermo Del Toro did indeed try to make At the Mountains of Madness but there were too many difficulties: not least since Del Toro thought an R-rating would be appropriate but the studios didn’t want to go above PG-13. What you tend to get are small-scale independent adaptations, like the aforementioned The Call of Cthulhu or films with mythos elements that tell a different kind of story, such as the tongue-in-cheek Lovecraftian noir Cast a Deadly Spell.
@32,33 – Your first comment was indeed intercepted by our very enthusiastic spam filter. I’ve just published it. Thanks for the heads-up.
@21: Possible pun aside, “Gilman” is a real family name that’s all over that part of New England. I have ancestors named that.
(Hmm. Maybe that’s why I’m getting that fishy feeling every morning.)
@35
Well, obviously it’s a real name, but there are plenty of other names of long-standing across the New England seaboard that he could have used. I remain convinced that it was a deliberate choice and that he did it with a smirk.
ETA: I also think that Zadok’s heavy accent was a lot more intrusive than Ammi’s last week. It’s much more difficult reading and interferes with the story in ways which Ammi’s did not.
Lovecraft’s stories are also hard to market because they have zero romance, which is of course a necessary element in every movie and television show. Gordon adds them in but isn’t too ostentatious about it, while del Toro flat-out refuses (he’s a pretty outspoken opponent of the token romance, and as I hear it, this was also part of why studios initially refused to back his Mountains of Madness adaptation).
I thought Dagon was a pretty decent adaptation of Shadow over Innsmouth.
maxfieldgardner @@@@@ 37 Romance in Lovecraft! Well, what little there is is ill-fated. We’ve already seen what happened to Edward Derby when he fell for Asenath Waite, what happened to T’la-Yub when she lost it over Zamacona. There’s a neat little “love” triangle in Charles Dexter Ward, resulting in a determined stalker of a rejected suitor and a woman who comes out pretty well, considering she’s in a Lovecraft story.
It would be cool if either “Mountain’s” geologist Dyer or grad student Danforth was played by a woman, no romance resulting. I remember the first time I saw “The Andromeda Strain” and saw they’d cast one of the book’s male scientists as a woman. I was so terrified that romance would ensue, but nope, it didn’t.
Maybe they thought that using a heavyset actress would make us realize that any romance was impossible, urgh. Also, natch, it’s the female scientist who has epilepsy but doesn’t tell anyone until too late. Two more bones I might have to pick with the movie, but at least there wasn’t any tacked-on love story.
@38: Has anyone tried adding a token shoggoth to “Sweet Ermengarde”?
It would be cool if either “Mountain’s” geologist Dyer or grad student Danforth was played by a woman, no romance resulting.
If anyone would go for that, it would be del Toro. I was happy with the relationship between Mako and Raleigh in Pacific Rim ending without any romance, just a super close friendship forged in battle and mutual respect. And I was even happier that del Toro specifically said in later interviews that he wanted to show that a male and female lead could be in the same story and have a relationship without it being romantic in nature.
DemetriosX @@@@@ 21: Don’t forget about the Marshes, also a marine-tinged name.
DGDavis @@@@@ 30: I fear that “no more oppressive than humans” is a pretty low bar.
I don’t know that fear of other races, fear of mental illness’s taint, and fear of hypothetical other species were all that separate in HP’s mind. Nor need the question of which can be inferred here be “pick one” in any case, no more than–to take a more positive example–the X-Men represent only racial minorities or only QUILTBAG people or only the general alienation of being a young geek.
a1ay @@@@@ 31: I would read the hell out of that story.
I would also watch the hell out of a del Toro adaptation of “Mountains.”
Del Toro update: there’s a chance that “At the Mountains of Madness” might be going ahead with Legendary instead of Universal but he thinks he can make it at the high end of PG-13 without losing all that much (apparently, the autopsy was the main problem). Until then, enjoy some pictures taken from an eldritch book of forbidden lore:
http://imgur.com/a/xyWcV#ikxJpOt
a1ay @@@@@ 31: I would read the hell out of that story.
Good to know. It’s in the queue right behind the “Greenmantle”/”Terminator” crossover…
SchuylerH @@@@@ 42 The autopsy of an Elder Thing? Really? When accessible to all TV documentaries/medical reality shows routinely show surgery on living ACTUAL humans?
I figured the ratings people had read the Necronomicon and realized that any representation of a shoggoth would cause mass hysteria and drive humanity back to the peace and safety of a new dark age.
@44: Well, Del Toro seems to be referring to the experimental dissection of the man and the dog carried out by the Elder Things but the point stands. Rather ludicrous, methinks.
Very new to Lovecraft – like this reread new – so I was not familiar with this story.
About a year ago, I read a short story that was a modern take on this one. Thanks for the education!
Summary: Two guys from out-of-town bought a B&B to run in Innsmouth, or some town by the sea. It took a local normal looking girls to fill them in on “Yes, the people F**ked Fish people gods!” Oh the horror of it!
But since normal people wouldn’t come to the B&B, they started catering to the Fish Gods that wanted a quite vacation. Where paid in gold and treasures, did not have to sleep with any of the fish people and all ended well.
Except the fish blood had become thin in the modern towns people. So they looked closer to human, still not normal attractive, and were not desisted to become immortal. So maybe this earlier generation got the better end of the bargain?
Regarding being a Deep One apologist, this idea of the US suppressing the Deep Ones for their religion has actually been explored in various stories and sequels throughout the years. The problem with your approach I have is the same that I have with Brian Worra making the Tcho Tcho basically just a subgroup within the Hmong. It basically takes away the horror that these things are really monsters. With the mystery gone the level of interest drops considerably. After all who is really sorry that the Aztecs no longer practice human sacrifice? The very best story along these lines for me is by Brian McNaughton, “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth,” found in multiple anthologies. It describes how one of the victims of the diaspora comes back to an institution in Innsmouth with the complaint that his family had not been allowed free practice of their religion…Mr. McNaughton then turns this very American sympathy against the reader.
MTCarpenter @@@@@ 47 I haven’t read “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” so correct me if I’m wrong to assume that part of the practice of the Deep One religion, per this story as per the original, is human sacrifice.
Myself, I have problems with any cosmic monsters being much interested in human sacrifice, or interbreeding with humans for that matter. The Deep Ones are less “cosmic” than some of Lovecraft’s creations. I don’t recall that canon gives them an extraterrestrial origin, even. As for Cthulhu, well. Doesn’t he have something more amazingly outre to think about while lying around R’lyeh?
But I’ll save my main ramblings on this theological matter for “The Call of Cthulhu,” coming soon!
@48: What you’re thinking of is pleasant compared to the “baptism” from “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth”:
“To baptise your soul we have to separate it from your body. Take heart from the fact that your suffering won’t be wasted. Even now your pain and shame are floating out like incense to feed those whose glory you can’t even begin to comprehend.”
I don’t necessarily mind nice(ish) Deep Ones and horrifying Deep Ones but there is, to me, a contradiction there. It’s like elves: Tolkien gives us the wise and powerful Galadriel and Elrond, Pratchett tells of the (spits, touches iron) Lords and Ladies. I can enjoy them both in different ways, though I broadly lean towards one of these interpretations and do not believe that they can exist in the same fictional universe.
Slightly off-topic: Thought folks here might get a kick out of the Underwhelming Lovecraft tumblr…
As one of HPL’s most famous stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth has been freely explored in story, film, stage and art ever since its publication. Sequels, prequels and re-imaginings abound. This is a big part of the Lovecraftian shared universe that has attracted so many artists of so many disciplines over the years. One reason that there are not as many comic book adaptations as you would expect is that for years August Derleth and his estate claimed copyright ownership for the story. Whether this is true, it is now firmly in the public domain. The best comic book adaptation for me, in terms of art, is from Selfmadehero’s Lovecraft Anthology #1 by Leah Moore, John Reppion, and Leigh Gallagher. For you maniacs out there I can direct you to a Japanese language manga adaptation. The movie Dagon from 2001, directed by Stuart Gordon, scripted by Dennis Paoli and starring Ezra Godden as Paul Marsh, is actually an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It’s not great but not bad, with a pretty good depiction of the protagonist’s panicky flight in the decrepit streets. In January 2014 the Wildclaw Theatre group in Chicago presented a stage adaptation at the Atheneum Theatre. I was fortunate enough to see it. Scott Barsotti made Olmstead into a woman (for various reasons: a thumb in the eye of woman fearing HPL, just for the heck of it and also because he had more actresses than actors to work with). It did not change to impact of the story at all; as Ken Hite likes to say, the most heroic thing Olmstead does is scream and pass out by the railroad tracks. Direction by Shade Murray and the set by John Ross Wilson were first rate, with a nicely scary shoggoth. As for sequels and legacy stories, they are innumerable. A few favorites are “A Study in Emerald” by Neil Gaiman, “Fair Exchange” by Michael Smith, “Objects from the Gilman-Waite Collection” by Ann K. Schwader, “Cabinet 34, Drawer 6” by Caitlin Kiernan, “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” by Brian McNaughton , “The Same Deep Waters as You” by Brian Hodge and the novel The Jennifer Morgue by Charlie Stross. Some authors have recreated the events of the federal raid on Innsmouth. I like “Once More from the Top” by A. Scott Glancy. If you can imagine it, it can happen. The estimable Kenneth Hite has written a picture book mash up of Lovecraft and Maurice Sendak to give us Where the Deep Ones Are. Andy Hopp’s art is first rate. We can argue about whether it’s actually a children’s book. In fact, you should check out his entire mini-mythos series. Do you want a board game? Try Innsmouth Escape from Twilight Creations. Do you want a computer game? Explore the adventure A Shadow Over Hackdirt in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. A google image search for Deep One or Innsmouth leaves you inundated by many creations, often superb. This is the barest smattering of what’s out there.At least for now, Innsmouth as a source of inspiration seems inexhaustible.
@9: That’s what I thought when I read <i>At the Mountains of Madness</i>, the first Lovecraft story I’d read. Definitely pro-Shoggoth over here.
@31, I think there might be a problem with desertion…
MTcarpenter @@@@@ 47, SchuylerH @@@@@ 49: YMMV, obviously. For me, it turns the horror around and puts it on the other side: the way that a few nasty whispers can sometimes be as deadly and destructive as any ancient abomination.
On the other hand, damn that passage from “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” sends shivers down my spine. The good kind; I think I’ll have to seek it out.
I like the comparison with different versions of elves. I have an Elf Scale that goes from 1 – comprehensible, benevolent, and twee – to 10 – alien and deeply dangerous through casual malevolence, indifference, or the really scary sort of benevolence. Other beings can go on the same scale: New Age guardian angels are at 1, for example, while biblical angels are somewhere close to 9.
I’d put humans in the 5-7 range, depending on my level of cynicism on a given day. Lovecraft and I agree that the most terrifying thing is discovering an inextricable connection between yourself and the terror that you wish you could see as alien. We just have very different terrors.
@51: That’s not the only instance of Kiernan masterfully picking up on Lovecraft’s ideas. I’d suggest looking up (if you’ve not already) “Houses Under the Sea,” “Tears Seven Times Salt,” “The Red Tree,” and, of course, “The Drowning Girl.” I ADORE Kiernan and I think she is the best heir to Lovecraft’s legacy that we currently have.
I liked “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” especially the “Other as self” twist. Yet I didn’t feel it had the vicseral power of “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” or “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” (For that last one, it helps if you read it for the first time while you are attending college in Boston and you’re kind of in love with the first city in which you’ve ever lived!) ;)
Best,
Jaime
:)
Usually, when in it comes to sexual themes in a story like this, it would be firm ground for Freudian discussions of mixed repulsion and attraction. This story also has some some obvious connections to STDs in Lovecraft’s family. And, yet, the theme I come away with, under all the cyclopean whatnot, is “Girls are icky! You don’t know where they’ve been! They have girl-germs! And COOTIES!!!!”
There’s none of that repressed attraction stuff in Lovecraft’s writing. It’s all GROSS and ICKY (only with more syllables). Even your perfectly respectable grandmother may be hiding BAD STUFF in the family tree. Maybe she’s NOT from New Hampshire, like she always said, maybe she’s from MASSACHUSETTS (who knows what Lovecraft would have done if a character was from New Jersey, probably sunk into a swoon and never gotten up).
Overall, this is a freaky story, even if you don’t go into the ethnic cleansing issues. Taken on Lovecraft’s own terms, it’s a story about a perfectly respectable New England town that is quietly committing human sacrifices and that summons up demons from the deep to wipe out a large chunk of the populace when they try to stop it. The survivors either tow the line or get killed. Their descendents become immortal monsters.
But, when I think of Lovecraft’s fears of miscegenation, instead of thinking about the racial and eugenics theories that were big at the time and some of their awful applications, I keep seeing Lovecraft as a freaked out seven-year old who has just been told where babies come from and is totally grossed out by it.
Because, besides being a totally ICKY way to come into this world (involving TOUCHING girls and maybe even having to TALK to them), it’s a double edged sword. Inbreeding creates monsters and outbreeding lets things that are already monsters into your family tree–you don’t know where those girls who say they’re from New Hampshire really come from or what kind of germs they’re carrying. Even if you never get girl-germs yourself, it’s too late. You were already created by this icky, girl-germ process. You can’t wash it off. It’s INSIDE YOU!!! COOTIES!!!!! You’re DOOMED!!!!!!!
@56 Ellynne
“who knows what Lovecraft would have done if a character was from New Jersey, probably sunk into a swoon and never gotten up”
A perfectly healthy reaction…
I was just working on the “Call of Cthulhu” write-up last night, and can confirm that terrible hints of eldritch horror are found in New Jersey.
@@@@@ 57 & 58 I have it on good authority that the entire cast of Jersey Shore are Deep Ones, but they’ve been disowned by the Innsmouth/Y’ha-nthlei branch of the species for blatant human behavior.
@59: I was holding off on saying this but: Real Housewives of Miskatonic County: great “reality” television concept or the greatest “reality” television concept?
SchuylerH @@@@@ 60 I’ve already sent a proposal for Real Housewives of Arkham to Lifetime TV — maybe we could join forces and really rock the reality world!
My HGTV show, Rehabbing Dunwich, vanished without a trace, or at least the advance camera crew did. However, the Food Network is going ahead on Seafood Dynasty, starring the whole Marsh clan!
Exciting times.
@60 SchuylerH
I for one would devour any kind of Lovecraftian reality TV show.
Judge Judy dealing with the fallout of the Herbert West incident, Intervention trying to save Eldritch Horror Cultists, Dunwich Teen Mom, Hell’s Kitchen teaching us how to cook humans, Storage Wars finding the one locker with forgotten eldritch tomes from Miskatonic University, America’s Most Loathsome Cosmic Horrors, I’m a Sleeping Deity…Get Me Out of Here!, Pawn Stars buying Deep Ones jewellery (hilarity ensues), and Mythbusters’ ‘What does it take to kill a Shoggoth?’ (“When in doubt, C4.”).
I want them all!
I comment at the “Red Hook” entry on an unintellionally funny bit that is the main thing I remember about that story. Here, I want to record the only passage in a Lovecraft story that has ever had me to the point of weeping from laughter. …Lovecraft obviously lavished much care on this one. He really wanted to show what he could do and what the weird story could be, don’t you think? BUT… the pulpster within would not be denied! And so Lovecraft not once, but twice, SOUNDS OUT the old coot’s screams! (1)
EH—AHHHH—AH! E’YAAHHHH. . .
(2) E—YAAHHHH! . . . YHAAAAAAA
…..I tell you, I’m literally chuckling as I type this. …I can’t help fantasizing about Lovecraft being in an upstairs bedroom writing the story, and actually sounding-out the combinations of letters that he wants to use to catch the oldster’s shrieks, and the aunts are downstairs, and one looks at the other, and the one responds, “Oh, that’s just Howard writing one of his stories again!”
I genuinely can’t tell whether you like the story or not.
sabalos @@@@@ 64: And. The word you’re looking for is “and”.
Academics always talk about art “starting a conversation” (at least on PBS), but it probably takes a whole lot of square pegs and round holes such as this story to actually get people talking. Does any of our cultural narrative obsessions really fit this odd tale, or are we projecting onto it current talking points? Which perspective from within the narrative should prevail? The protagonist? Zedok Allen? The unsympathetic neighboring towns? Who was the stand-in for HPL here? Are we supposed to feel horrible about Olmstead’s mania at the end, or sympathetic? Wouldn’t the friendly locals have perhaps acted in a more friendly manner if they were actually friendly? Etc.
Jon@@@@@ #66 Hell no John!!These themes of racism and xenophobia come from the letters of Lovecraft himself. His letters and other writings show he was preoccupied by fears of immigrants, racial mixing, and other themes that are being talked about here. We’re not starting a conversation, you walked in late and missed the conversation entirely. He also mentions in the stories themselves a disgust with sailors who interbred with Chinese and Fijian women, and I think mentions of half-breeds. To miss all of this back story is unforgivable in my opinion. There was another wag on this thread who claimed it was all about Lovecraft’s own family tree and his insecurities about madness. Read his freakin’ letters!!!! There was quite a bit of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe into his Connecticut going on at the time as well. The fact that he writes about aquatic half-breed people with a strange religion taking over is not a coincidence. Open your eyes for crissakes!
@22
I highly doubt this. I think Lovecraft’s deliberate intention of the true horror of the ending is that, God forbid, one could not only succumb to the effects of one’s “polluted” blood, but actually like it, instead of doing the only sensible thing: shooting oneself, as the protagonist is tempted to do, or better yet, doing what Sir Arthur Jermyn did in ‘Facts Concerning…’.
I realize that I am arriving years late to this particular party (and I hesitated for a long time before writing this post), but I just wanted to add a comment regarding the end of the story. While the narrator does indeed seem to be eagerly embracing his inhuman heritage, I’m not so sure about the welcome that he will receive: ever since I first read “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (lo, these many years ago), I have assumed that when the narrator meets his transformed grandmother in his dream and she “greets [him] with a warmth that may have been sardonic” (quoting from memory here), that her warmth is indeed sardonic, and that when she tells him that for bringing on death from the land-people, he “will have to do a penance, but it would not be heavy,” if he does in fact reach Y’ha-nlthei, his penance will likely be heavy indeed (and quite possibly slow and excruciating).
In short, while I fully support Deep-One apologism, including efforts to flesh them out (scale them out?) more fully, and find sympathy with them (I consider Ruthanna’s Winter Tide to be, quite literally, one of the best novels that I have read in years), I suspect that Lovecraft himself would feel differently. Which is part of the point, I suppose.
No worries, people get to party whenever they show up! (Ain’t no party like a Lovecraft Reread party, ’cause a Lovecraft Reread party involves lots of thoughtful, respectful comments…)
I honestly think it would be pretty inhuman of the Deep Ones to be so easily forgiving of the narrator–which may be part of Lovecraft’s in-story point, that they didn’t really put any value on the lives of their “partners.” As an apologist, I tend toward the idea that “Your penance will not be heavy” translates as “You can certainly make up for it before the seas boil, and possibly even before the final extinction of humanity on land.” And that Grandma knows full well that a kid raised among mortal men has a different perspective on time.
Thank you! There are other fora where posting after so long would likely get no response at all, or else grumblings over resurrecting a dead discussion (then again, with a Lovecraft Reread, thread necromancy would fit right in…).
Like you, I prefer thoughtful, respectful commentary, and I’m glad that I find it here. I arrived at the Lovecraft Reread (and to the Tor.com community in general) by way of Winter Tide (and to Winter Tide by way of NPR’s reviews of both it and Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe) and I am glad I did so; while I have read nearly all of Lovecraft’s original corpus and some of his contemporaries, until recently I had barely scratched the surface of contemporary Lovecraftiana, let alone plumbed its dark, unfathomable depths, and this blog has been a good introduction to that world as well. Thanks again!
Have there ever been any race-oriented treatments of the deep ones that make them the metaphorical white people in the equation? The essence of Zadok’s narrative is backed up by their own promises to Olmstead at the end – and based on that essence, deep ones show up with promises of resources the local land dwellers don’t have, but this trade quickly turns into invasion, colonisation, and the imposition of religion, culture, and mores – even the interbreeding fits.
So I can’t help picturing people in the South Seas, or elsewhere, seeing ships full of white people show up from distant oceans with questionable intent, and alien taint and monsters in their wake.
“They try to get into his room and to stop him from leaving town—given that he’s one of their lost children and has just heard all manner of horror from Zadok, that’s actually kind of understandable.”
Meh. That’s actually kind of creepy. And almost guaranteed to confirm his Zadok inspired fears, rather than relieve them.
Multiply light colored black chicks that I’ve talked to say they get shit for being oreos, whether they do anything white or not. Maybe, being steeped in a ¿specist? ¿racist? environment for so long, the new england deep ones had come to think in those terms as well, and saw unnamed narrator as an unreliable Other, incapable of understanding as the rest of new england because his eyes just weren’t far enough apart.
And we don’t really know how racist/specist the deep ones were to begin with.
I mean. Other than that they were apparently willing to engage in human traffic and purchase human women for sexual purposes from the south sea islanders. And that the ‘fraternizing’ didn’t really start until later, ie when there were deep ones of mixed blood who might have thought fondly of their south sea mothers.
It’s tempting, when one has been slandered so long, to say that one has no bad traits, to counter your enemies’ claims that one has all bad traits. But aren’t both claims equally dehumanizing and ultimately painful to live with?
For instance, I know how loyal Aphra is to Grandfather. But does he really just slap her around because of the Holocaust?
Or is he a also a misogynist?
It seems likely to me that Aphra has a great capacity for love. That could motivate her to apologize to her friends for a person who abuses her.
@@@@@ 72 yeah, I think I just read one. A Human Stain, by Kelly Robson. They have sea serpents as the final life stage rather than deep ones, but it’s the same metamorphic life cycle. The unfortunate narrator is a lesbian englishwoman who gets duped by her gay german friend into caring for his long lost straight brother’s human formed child.
It… ah… doesn’t turn out well for her.
The incessant disturbing trait of the tainted is their whiteness, the whiteness of the child, the whiteness of the non human formed larva.
Oh my gosh. The story make such a creepy use of meat smells. I was reading it while my couch surfing hosts were cooking their Thanksgiving foods and ended hiding in the back room all day trying not to puke.
Full disclosure!
Oh f@ing cr#de.
I went back and reread everything again. Apparently my brain was filling in what the deep ones were doing with the South sea islanders they bought from parts of Leviticus and Exodus. That was not in the text!
Many apologies. This is why you shouldn’t give eight year olds bibles as their only source of entertainment! They might never recover!
Tegan. Tegan were you confusing Deep Ones and angels again. Though if you think about the actual biblical descriptions of angels, “and they found the daughters of men fair” actually reasonably counts as the first miscegenation-obsessed cosmic horror on record.
New headcanon: Song of Solomon is a serious attempt by a four-headed, thousand-eyed unnameable monster to describe their human girlfriend. Or… possibly vice versa.
Two stories which inspired Lovecraft:
There’s some more information on the link between The Harbor Master and Innsmouth, as well as the story itself, over here: https://www.oldstyletales.com/single-post/2020/09/01/the-harbor-master-by-robert-w-chambers-a-rare-and-forgotten-story-transcription