The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Shadow over Innsmouth is a horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in November–December 1931. It forms part of the Cthulhu Mythos, using its motif of a malign undersea civilization, and references several shared elements of the Mythos, including place-names, mythical creatures, and invocations. The Shadow over Innsmouth is the only Lovecraft story that was published in book form during his lifetime.
The story follows the narrator, a student conducting an antiquarian tour of New England, as he travels through the nearby decrepit seaport of Innsmouth. Here he interacts with strange people, witnesses disturbing events, and uncovers a conspiracy that leads to horrifying and personal revelations that challenge his own sanity.
Plot
The narrator explains how he instigated a secret investigation of the decrepit town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, a former seaport isolated from other nearby towns by vast salt marshes by the U.S. government after fleeing it on July 16, 1927. The investigation ultimately concluded with the arrest and detention of many of the town's residents in concentration camps as well as a submarine torpedoing nearby Devil Reef, which the press falsely reported as Prohibition liquor raids. The narrator proceeds to describe in detail the events surrounding his initial interest in the town, which lies along the route of his tour from Ohio across New England, taken when he was a 21-year-old student at Oberlin College.While waiting for the bus that will take him to Innsmouth, the narrator busies himself in neighboring Newburyport by gathering information on the town's history from the locals; all of it having superstitious overtones. He learns that Innsmouth was once a profitable port and shipbuilding center during the colonial and post-revolutionary periods, but began to decline after the War of 1812 interrupted shipping. A local merchant named Obed Marsh built a profitable gold refinery, but the town only deteriorated further after riots and after a mysterious epidemic eliminated half of its residents in 1845. Marsh also founded a pagan cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon, which became the town's primary religion. Outsiders and government officials, including Census Bureau agents and school inspectors, are treated with hostility by the townsfolk.
The narrator tells the surprised bus driver that he wishes to stop at Innsmouth, and they proceed in the rickety bus to the town. He finds Innsmouth to be a mostly deserted fishing town full of dilapidated buildings and people who walk with a distinctive shambling gait and who have "queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes." Both the town and its residents are saturated with the odor of dead fish and the narrator constantly feels a certain Lovecraftian unnameable uneasiness at various junctures of his exploration. The only resident who appears normal is a grocery store clerk from neighboring Arkham, who was transferred there by the chain. The narrator gathers much information from the clerk, including a map of the town and the name of Zadok Allen, a very elderly local drunkard who might give him information when plied with alcohol.
After exploring the town to find unusual architecture and an area of fisherman who exhibit advanced symptoms of the odd Innsmouth degradation, the narrator happens upon the fully human Zadok. He lures Zadok to a private area with a bottle of whiskey and only after some time gets Zadok to open up. Eventually after the bottle has been drained Zadok explains what he knows of the town's history. While trading in the Caroline Islands Obed Marsh discovered a Kanak tribe in Pohnpei who offered human sacrifices to a race of immortal fish-like humanoids known as the Deep Ones. The Kanak also bred with Deep Ones, producing hybrid offspring which have the appearance of normal humans in childhood and early adulthood but eventually slowly transform into Deep Ones themselves and leave the surface to live in ancient undersea cities for eternity. When hard times fell on Innsmouth, Marsh's cult performed similar sacrifices to the Deep Ones in exchange for wealth in the form of large fish hauls and unique jewelry. When Marsh and his followers were eventually arrested, the Deep Ones retaliated by attacking the town and killing more than half of its population.
The survivors were left with no other choice than to join the cult and continue Marsh's practices. Male and female inhabitants were forced to breed with the Deep Ones, producing hybrids who upon maturing permanently migrate underwater to live in the city of Y'ha-nthlei, located underneath Devil Reef. The town is now dominated by Marsh's grandson Barnabas, who is almost fully transformed into a Deep One. Zadok explains that these ocean-dwellers have designs on the surface world and have been planning the use of "shoggoths", semi-intelligent protoplasmic entities, to conquer or transform it. As their discussion reaches its conclusion, Zadok sees strange waves approaching the dock and tells the narrator that they have been seen, urging him to leave town immediately. The narrator is unnerved, but ultimately dismisses the story. Once he leaves, Zadok disappears and is never seen again.
After being told that the bus is experiencing engine trouble, the narrator has no choice but to spend the night in a musty hotel. While attempting to sleep, he hears noises at his door as if someone is trying to enter. Wasting no time and with no means of self-defense, he escapes out a window and through the streets while a town-wide hunt for him occurs, forcing him at times to imitate the peculiar walk of the Innsmouth locals as he walks past search parties in the darkness. Eventually, the narrator makes his way towards railroad tracks and hears a procession of Deep Ones passing in the road before him. Against his judgment, he opens his eyes to see the creatures. He finds that they have grey-green skin, fish-like heads with unblinking eyes, gills on their necks and webbed hands, and communicate in unintelligible croak-like voices. Horrified, the narrator faints but wakes up at noon the next day alone and unharmed.
After reaching Arkham and alerting government authorities about Innsmouth, the narrator discovers that his grandmother was related to Obed Marsh's family, although the origins of her mother were unclear. The narrator's uncle had previously visited Arkham to research his ancestry before killing himself by gunshot. After returning home to Toledo, Ohio, the narrator begins researching his family tree and discovers that he is a descendant of Marsh through his second wife Pth'thya-l'yi. By 1930 he begins gradually transforming into a Deep One. His story starts to use odd words and phrases with seemingly no awareness of doing so, his previous convictions lessen, and he begins having dreams of his grandmother and Pth'thya-l'yi in Y'ha-nthlei, which was damaged but not destroyed by the submarine attack. They explain that the Deep Ones will remain underwater for the time being but will eventually return to invade the surface world "for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved."
After briefly glimpsing a shoggoth in one of his dreams, the narrator awakens to find that he has fully acquired the "Innsmouth look." He wants to kill himself and purchases an "automatic" but cannot go through with it. As the narrator concludes his story, he suffers a mental breakdown and embraces his fate. He decides to break out his cousin, Lawrence, who is even further transformed than he, from a sanatorium in Canton and take him to live in Y'ha-nthlei.
Characters
;Robert Olmstead;Obed Marsh
;Barnabas Marsh
;Zadok Allen
;Grocery store clerk
Robert Olmstead's family tree
This is a family tree of the story's protagonist and narrator, Robert Olmstead, as described in The Shadow over Innsmouth and in Lovecraft's notes.Inspiration
Both of Lovecraft's parents died in a mental hospital, and some critics believe that a concern with having inherited a propensity for physical and mental degeneration is reflected in the plot of The Shadow over Innsmouth. It also shares some themes with his earlier story, "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family". Cthulhu, an entity from previous Lovecraft stories, is the overlord of the sea creatures. The mind of the narrator deteriorates when he is afforded a glimpse of what exists outside his perceived reality. This is a central tenet of Cosmicism, which Lovecraft emphasizes in the opening sentence of "The Call of Cthulhu": "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."Lovecraft based the town of Innsmouth on his impressions of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which he had visited in 1923 and fall 1931. The real Newburyport features as a neighboring town in the narrative. A likely influence on the plot is Lovecraft's horror of miscegenation, which is documented by Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague de Camp and others.
Robert M. Price cites two works as literary sources for The Shadow over Innsmouth: Robert W. Chambers' "The Harbor-Master" and Irvin S. Cobb's "Fishhead". Chambers' story concerns the discovery of "the remnants of the last race of amphibious human beings", living in a five-mile deep chasm just off the Atlantic coast. The creature of the title is described as "a man with round, fixed, fishy eyes, and soft, slaty skin. But the horror of the thing were the two gills that swelled and relaxed spasmodically." Lovecraft was evidently impressed by this tale, writing in a letter to Frank Belknap Long: "God! The Harbour-Master!!!" "Fishhead" is the story of a "human monstrosity" with an uncanny resemblance to a fish: his skull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have a forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes were small and round with shallow, glazed, pink-yellow pupils, and they were set wide apart on his head, and they were unwinking and staring, like a fish's eyes. Lovecraft, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature", called Cobb's story "banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake". Price notes that Fishhead, as the "son of a Negro father and a half-breed Indian mother", "embodies unambiguously the basic premise of The Shadow over Innsmouth.... This, of course, is really what Lovecraft found revolting in the idea of interracial marriage...the subtextual hook of different ethnic races mating and 'polluting' the gene pool." Price points out the resemblance in names between the Deep One city of Y'ha-nthlei and Yoharneth-Lahai, a fictional deity in Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana, who "sendeth little dreams out of Pegana to please the people of Earth"—a precursor to Lovecraft's fictional deity Cthulhu, who sends less pleasant dreams from R'lyeh.
The description of the Deep Ones has similarities to the sea creature described in H. G. Wells' short story "In the Abyss" :