"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936)

This long story by H.P. Lovecraft has a lot of his usual gaffes as well as strengths. It's a pretty decent rave-up overall that way but, curiously, he seems to miss the most interesting point of his own story. I'm tempted to put that squarely on his ongoing xenophobic panic, not to remind everyone about it but because I think this time it hurt a story even more than usual. But not to worry. As part of the "Cthulhu Mythos," these Deep Ones and/or Old Ones have likely seen treatment by someone who doesn't miss the point (I wouldn't know because I haven't read much beyond Lovecraft in this particular universe, or even all of Lovecraft). "Innsmouth" pairs a shabby and mysterious New England seaside town with a teeming underwater civilization just over the harbor reef. The sea creatures can interbreed with humans and begin life on land. As they age they return to the waters, where they live forever (which reminded me of the robot kid in A.I.). In return for being allowed to live among the townspeople in Innsmouth, the amphibians use magical mystical powers to draw fish to the harbor, creating an exclusive market for the community. The crusty New England fishermen have all the work they can stand. The amphibians also appear to have some process for extracting gold from the ocean, or perhaps mining it somewhere. They keep a refinery going in the town, which supports everything.

It's beautiful, really, but no, H.P. has to make it a nightmare of foreign alien invasion, shading everything in that direction. The whole place smells "fishy"—an observation that only comes up 16 or 17 times. The strange and creepy "Innsmouth look" features eyes that never blink, narrow heads, scaly necks. The only clonking detail he might have missed is that they keep goldfish food sitting around in snack bowls. They are meant to frighten us, but first they are comical and then they just start to look like a lost opportunity to tell an interesting story about evolution. But, right, they frighten the clutched-up narrator, who desperately tries to figure out whether they are "Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid." The amphibians have a history of being horrible so, like aliens from outer space with their anal probes, they have to be taken as horrible to a certain degree on the story's terms. So horrible they are. They and their rubbery pursed lips have put the clampdown on Innsmouth, chasing away all the Christian churches (or even better, adapting them) and also starting their own, the Esoteric Order of Dagon. They don't like strangers in town, especially when the stranger talks to (and can understand the ludicrous dialect of) a 96-year-old alcoholic we see pound the best part of a quart of liquor (yeah, right). And they really don't like it when the stranger stays overnight, which our narrator never intended to do but, well, things happen.

And so to the night of terror, when the narrator's bus out that evening breaks down and he has to stay in the town hotel and battle fishy smells. It's not a bad action / adventure type of tale at this point, though I admit sometimes I got confused about the street names and directions and landmarks as the action went down. (The narrator gets all his information about the town from a grocery store clerk in the town First National, who helpfully draws him up a complicated map and tells him all the parts of town to avoid.) The point is, at the barest level, there are malevolent monster things after the narrator and he must get away in a not-so-merry chase, but all's well that ends well and he finds a way to beat it out of town unharmed. Well, there's still one more horrible revelation when the narrator begins to notice, years later, that he is less and less interested in blinking, but I'll leave you to find it for yourself. Again, turning this into a nightmare when it could be something so much more encompassing and immersive, squishy bio/body horror, and issues about species development, consciousness development, intelligence, adaptation. I mean, all that is here—there has to be fan fiction that takes it in its obvious LGBTQ+ implications to all kinds of much better and more interesting places. Lovecraft dreamed it up. But it's almost like he didn't really notice. I mean, they're interbreeding with us. They like us on some level. Maybe we should try liking them too. If I weren't so hinky about world-building fiction as a general thing, I might be tempted to look into it further. I might anyway.

H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America)
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