The Shadow Over Innsmouth
by H. P. Lovecraft
  

Visionary Publishing Company,
Everett, Pennsylvania; 1936
158 pages

collected in —
The Outsider and Others

The Dunwich Horror and Others

  
What a topical story this is, seventy-five years after it was written! Recently rereading H. P. Lovecraft's fantasy novella "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", I was struck by what an ideal nightmare it concocts from such current worries as: immigration; racial mixing, even racial degeneration — or evolutionary ascent!; and American ports' vulnerability and security.

Now Lovecraft is not talking ethnic balance and ward politics here, let alone international trade and folk-wandering and realpolitik. Nor is it a horror story in the sense of rats in the walls or corpses in the basement. I certainly would not claim that "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" shares anything reasonable about current public controversies.

But HPL does know the deeps where many of our ingredients of nightmare grow unnaturally, and he brings them forth and pins them precisely to the landscape:

That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shewn on common maps or listed in recent guide-books would have interested me, and the agent's odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in its neighbours, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist's attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there —

Yes, Innsmouth is loathed and detested, but a sparsely-traveled bus does pass through the town. If you must go that way, go in daytime.

© 2006 Robert Wilfred Franson