The Shadow over 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' Part V: Beyond the Gates of the Threshold... The Library and Historical Society (Dun-Dun-Dun)

Part of the charming weirdness of Lovecraft is his insistence on odd exposition. Often, weird details creates the meat of his weird tales; in The Shadow (twitch) Out of Time, for example, the main character's body isn't merely taken over by some creature from beyond reason, but, in fact, we get to learn all sorts of things, like the details about said creature's race's system of cataloging books. Because, in Lovecraft, the monsters that will take you over your life quite naturally often have intricate library systems.

It's this fixation on obscure details that makes him more weird than simple horror. Say what you want about a creature more horrible than imagination as a literary device, but when they are a spider or a clown, there is a certain creepiness. In Lovecraft, again and again, you aren't supposed to be creeped out by the monsters, but find them simply alien. Creatures beyond the limits of imagination in the shape of a common phobia is different thing than throwing some incongruous images together, like 'wing' and 'barrel,' 'dragon' and 'octopus,' 'sentient' and 'rainbow,' 'ichorous pyramid' and... well, just about anything, really.

Often they are ill-described because their physical forms are the least interesting part of the story. I get the sense that often didn't really care about what they looked like; they were, rather bluntly, beyond the limits of his imagination. That's not an insult. His imagination, likewise, wrote stories that are beyond the limits of a more typical monster story. They are just operating in two places beyond each others' horizons. His creatures are often nonsensical, but word salad is a pretty good way to evoke things beyond our senses.

Probably his most straightforward monster tale, The Color Out of Space, has zero rampages through town, but does have an exciting scene of a Borax bead test. There are no secret cults, no whispers of books with forgotten history, no tangible monsters. The creature of the story is Lovecraft at his most alien. In a lot of ways, I think the common coinage of Cthulhu for all of Lovecraft is in precisely how much easier it is to visualize something like Godzilla with tentacles for a mouth than a floating smear of carcinogenic rainbow.

Mostly, though, what his creatures are up to are understandable. His winged barrels and ichorous pyramids are scientists of a sort, after all. He sums up the Elder Things with

After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being.

I think it is more than a little useful to keep in mind he wrote that less than a year before he wrote Innsmouth. So it isn't as simple as Lovecraft abandoned or demythologized his tales in a world of magic and cults, but of a sufficiently advanced science misunderstood and never looked back. At the Mountains of Madness and Innsmouth were written back to back, in that order. There are connections between the works, too, such as the theme of degeneration of a culture, the big bad in both being shoggoths, etc.

I think this helps explain the strange tension between the horror we are supposed to feel at the miscegenation and odd undercurrents of sympathy and identifiability with these horrible creatures. Men of another order of being, even if a degenerate one, are men none the less. The Deep Ones, after all, are perfectly understandable creatures, able to engage in trade, have races to the reef, and even breed with us. They even have a nuclear family, though, you know, with Dagon for a dad and Hydra for a mom. Every family is different. I mean, sure, they eat people, but I know plenty of folks with odd diets and dietary restrictions. Over the natural history of man, I sure we can rest assured that to dine on your kind is much more normal and natural a cuisine than a gluten-free vegan ice cream cone. There is nothing to suggest their home in Y'ha-nthlei is a broken home, so they must be doing something right.

It is the precisely the constant reminders of the similarities to humans in the Deep Ones as well as the not quite humanness of the hybrids that make for the uncanny here. I'm not suggesting that Lovecraft started to see more similarities between races, even if it troubled him, nor am I going to make a reductionist read of the Deep Ones as stand in for The Other across the uncanny valley of degeneracy. Again, I will say a more complicated, and not necessarily more enlightened, of a view of race is going on here than in Red Hook, as the Deep Ones don't merely reflect us, or are somehow our shadow, but in a deeper sense, are part of ourselves. Again, after all, the narrator is a Deep One, and I don't think that is supposed to merely be the same sort of twist as The Outsider, as the underlying sympathies with the monsters are throughout, and not merely because the unnamed tomato is in the mirror.

I still prefer the reading counter to HPL's intent, of a people trying to help a prodigal son come home. Whoever he is and whatever he does doesn't matter because one day the Deep One racial memory switches on, and he just leaves, middle of a economics lecture like, just gone. He constructs this delusion of being on vacation, making it to Newburyport were the bus is coming to pick him up, which would simultaneously explain why there's only four passengers on the bus, why the bus drive stares at him when he pays him for the trip, and why the ticket agent never sells him a ticket. Not because he is the most unprofessional ticket agent ever, with zero percent perfection on ticket sales, but a whole lotta racist commentary, but because he's not there. The narrator is standing in the empty bus stop awakening to what will happen next, unable to cope with it, and overcompensates by rejecting everyone with mixed blood as degenerate, sorta. You know, it's a prejudice which makes you think silly things like they actually worship Ol' Scratch. That's not true, it's not devil worship, Father Dagon is a loving fa can't handle, can't handle, devil worship, the mixed blood ruined the perfect world, and all the sympathies against the coping mechanisms of theories of racial purity work.

Like The Outsider, it's not until the end do we get why all these details don't quite add up, and it isn't mere sloppy writing to have a ticket agent who doesn't sell tickets, why people treat him like his an obviously crazy person, etc. But we don't get that. We get something more... mixed.

So what happens next is he finally gets on the bus for Innsmouth, the actual setting of the story. Oh, wait, no, that's not true. That doesn't happen even in this chapter. What happens next is another drip and drop exposition. This being Lovecraft, instead of getting to the action, we get “...And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking up data...” Yes, yes, of course you do. 'Cos that's how Lovecraft rolls.

I'm not bagging on what follows. I do think HPL ground the world of Innsmouth in the sheer ordinariness:

...The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except that the town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of great marine prosperity in the early 19th century, and later a minor factory center using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to the county.

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.

Again, note the banality of the creepiness. It reads mostly like mostly like an encyclopedia entry, nothing exciting here, some industrial ups and down, implications of ethnic cleansing, good fishing, and continuing gold sales. I am really a fan of the continual subtlety of a lot of Innsmouth, especially since a lot of it works on telling you the same story again and again with a little more details, like mentioning the riots, and at the same time giving you bizarre maybe-red herrings, maybe-sloppy details like the “discreetly veiled evidence” of large scale racially driven murders. I'm not sure, exactly how you drop subtle hints about that, really. 'For the next three days, the Manuxet mysterious turned red, and the lack of available drinking water explains why all the Poles and Portuguese decided to go live elsewhere suddenly.'

After the ker-pow historical research action scene, he's off... to the Historical Society. Really. Because a library isn't big enough of a place for this exposition dump. Except that's not what happens. What happens next is exactly the kind of charming fixation on obscure details that I like in HPL:

.. Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth...The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample - said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara - if it could possibly be arranged.

The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me into the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously late. The collection was a notable one indeed, but in my present mood I had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a corner cupboard under the electric lights.

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs - some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine - chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At first I decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic defiances of every recognized stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from any - Eastern or Western, ancient or modern - which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity - half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

Two rather obvious things:

First, note that finally there is some action, as little as there is-- the narrator become fixated on the fish-frog tiara by its mere description, and actually does something... well, he resolves to do something, which at this point is gaining ground. Ah, finally, the plot is afoot! Until this point, he has done nothing in this narrative time line but demure at the high fare, ask a question, and look up data. Okay, when you biggest action verb is 'demure' and you're nearly at the end of the first chapter, well, be grateful something happens to you, even if it is turn into a fish. Look how he turns away from being such a passive character at this point, going to far as to drag an elderly woman out of her home and get her to give him an after hours visit to the Historical Society. All he's done is read about it, and this guy was all rather meh about the implication of mass murder. It's a pay off to the slow start that almost works, if, you know, you didn't have two other false starts.

Imagine, instead this alternate Innsmouth, where the nameless narrator starts enigmatically only on vacation, arriving in town, trying to get the cheapest way possible to... more vague stuff. Oh, that'd be Innsmouth, but you don't want a ticket to go there. Really, why? Crazy racist diatribe, which includes the info at the library. At the mention of the tiara, One ticket to Innsmouth, please. Son, I just told you, you don't need a ticket, just pay the bus driver, with all the implied never happened crazy. Next thing you know, he's harassing an old woman out of bed to see the tiara.

Second, look at the amount of detail thrown at the tiara. Yes, it needs to be memorable for the endgame payoff of his families history, but, sheesh, this thing sings. The slavish detail is appropriate, I suppose, and buttress well the developing racial memory, but the description is beyond the sufficiently advanced science of 'Mountains' winking “It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.” It's not merely a vivid description of the tiara, it's organic beauty, it's alien metallurgy, but it's somehow a description that brings up race. It is precisely that it isn't racially or historically identifiable that makes it so otherworldly to the narrator.

Again with the racial weirdness. It's not that it is described in racial terms, its that it cannot be described in racial terms that is uncanny and causes uneasiness, and, yet, when he becomes conscious of the nature of the tiara as being beyond narratives of race, beyond the history of the world he lives in, he falls into the 'pseudomemory,' and first notices it is, in fact, covered with evil fishmen. Which, you know, should be something you'd notice first thing, I'd think, unless, you know, being covered in evil fishmen is something people often miss, I suppose, which would explain why he missed it-- it being coverd in evil fishmen and all.

It is these kinds of things that keep having me come back to the idea of a completely unreliable narrator. It's shiny, it'd pretty, it's beyond time and space and racial theories... some sort of memory stirs and now it's evil. But it's so ill-fleshed out, part of me thinks it is just an unreliable writer. In the end there isn't really a payoff for it. They are, as best can be told, evil, and he isn't merely unable to accept the truth of not being racially pure, and that isn't causing his identity to crumble.

Again, I enjoy this sidelong creepiness, of the man who sold it just happens to be soon after murdered, etc. It's good, and it's there, it just doesn't go anywhere. Look at how the devil-worshiping pirate thing works a little later:

... It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon", and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.

I don't know what to say about this weirdness. It's natural to start worshiping pagan gods when fish show up. Okay, maybe. I mean, it's pretty clear Christianity is in Innsmouth, and surely there must be someway to tie an abundance of fish in with some sort of power of Christ, maybe? I mean, this is the kind of weird sloppiness that distracts from the intentionally weird. I mean, what can be said about paganism “soon came to be the greatest influence in the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether,” since the story later makes it clear the end of the Christian community and the end of the Freemasons in Innsmouth happens at the same time, if not one and the same. Really, once you replace one religion with another, you don't usually let the temples rot and take over the Masonic Hall. These are the kind of things that make me thing something hidden is going on here, and not mere just the sloppy writing. Still, I don't ever think there is a bottom. I mean, other than Freemasons control the world, obviously.

Clark Ashton Smith and The Other Gods

A decent enough sketch on the themes and bio of Clark Ashton Smith, another early 20th C. weird tale writer, but I think what is more interesting is the implied stuff lurking in the background, from the approaching cliché of the idea that fantasy/sci-fi is declining because its idioms and tropes dominate mainstream culture’s ten poles and blockbusters as well as advertising and crass consumables (Threepio Crunch Cereal, etc.) to the more focused idea that, even though magazines were losing their mass media appeal, the pulp fiction/genre magazines flourished because the mass media of movies and radio didn’t cater to those audiences, establishing the weird tale as perhaps the iconic case of the long tentacle and 1000 True Fans, etc. Whether these things turn out to be true, etc., I think these are become part of the background understanding now, which, to me, is a little more interesting when moving forward than, say, CAS’ mother pouring hot water on her leg.

Personally, I am not as much a fan of CAS as I am of HPL or REH, and, to be honest, I only mostly know his Zothique and his Hyperborea "cycles," though I will admit to A Vintage from Atlantis being one of the stories that really stuck with me. His style, I'll admit, greatly grates me, and seems like every worst affectation of HPL taken to the next level. Still, I will also freely admit chagrin over him being too weird for my tastes. However, he wrote an oft-quoted piece that I admire the sentiments, if not the sounds:

The nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or unfound, is upon me at times. Often I long for the gleam of yellow suns upon terraces of translucent azure marble, mocking the windless waters of lakes unfathomably calm; for lost, legendary palaces of serpentine, silver and ebony, whose columns are green stalactites; for the pillars of fallen temples, standing in the vast purpureal sunset of a land of lost and marvellous romance. I sigh for the dark-green depths of cedar forests, through whose fantastically woven boughs, one sees at intervals an unknown tropic ocean, like gleams of blue diamond; for isles of palm and coral, that fret an amber morning, somewhere beyond Cathay or Taprobane; for the strange and hidden cities of the desert, with burning brazen domes and slender pinnacles of gold and copper, that pierce a heaven of heated lazuli.

"The nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or unfound" is wonderful, and rolls around the tongue like, well, a great Atlantian wine, I suppose. Now maybe it is unfair to compare to Melville's, er, ofter-quoted

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

But in someways I see the weird tales responding to a similar call. I certainly don't want to suggest I can see the faces of these gods from some mountain top, but I think its an interesting comparison of Ishmael's call of the sea to the unnamed narrator of Innsmouth and the two very different kinds of growing madness in them, especially when we get over our genetic fallacies nebbishness.

There is more than a sly, dark humor in common "it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off" next to "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing," never mind all the damp, drizzly Novembers.

I'm not suggesting anything like a mash up of Obed Marsh commanding the Pequod... sorry, thinking about it though... but I do think nostalgia of things unknown is related to those Novembers in the soul, whether Queequeg or Yog-Sothoth, ultimately, is the key and guardian of the gate. Ultimately, I think part of the attraction I have for the weird tale is I no matter how I account, I can't get to lost, legendary palaces of serpentine, silver and ebony as soon as I can.

Which is just a loopy way to say I don't have much to say about CAS. Still, there's the whole Deep Ones versus the White Whale thing. It's no "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains," but really, what is?

The Shadow over 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' Part IV: The Ticket Agent, Threshold Guardian

So, finally we are moving into the meat of Innsmouth, which means, well, first, I'm going to stop harping on that damn submarine attack, and second, we are finally moving somewhere, although it turns out that movement is into lots and lots of exposition. I'm going to quote a lot a length, because I want to show how these expositions work as complete vignette or flash stories in their own right. Which is part of why section after section of exposition works in Innsmouth. It is a tricky thing, but one I think HPL pulls off, even though I think he is giving into his worst instinct and getting a good result.

I also want to call attention to how well HPL writes capturing dialect, and how when he stops relying on his overly effected style, he becomes a lot more effective. I really think these parts are some of his best writing. I can't help but feel compelled on by this.

"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812 - but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now - B. and M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.

"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.

"That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and old man Marsh, who owns it, must be richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. He's supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother seems to've been some kind of foreigner - they say a South Sea islander - so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in 'em. But Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like anyone else far's I can see. I've had 'em pointed out to me here - though, come to think of it, the elder children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.

"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn't take too much stock in what people here say. They're hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. They've been telling things about Innsmouth - whispering 'em, mostly - for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they're more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh - about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts - but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don't go down with me.

"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the coast - Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that there's a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef - sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It's a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.

"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and it's just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef.

"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough - there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don't believe ever got outside of town - and it left the place in awful shape. Never came back - there can't be more'n 300 or 400 people living there now.

"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I don't say I'm blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn't care to go to their town. I s'pose you know - though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk - that a lot of our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.

"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks and we can't be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl. You'll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst - fact is, I don't believe I've ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em - they used to have lots of horse trouble before the autos came in.

"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with 'em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyone tries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when there ain't any anywhere else around - but just try to fish there yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used to come here on the railroad - walking and taking the train at Rowley after the branch was dropped - but now they use that bus.

"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth - called the Gilman House - but I don't believe it can amount to much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten o'clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus there for Arkham at eight o'clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of years ago and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms - though most of 'em was empty - that gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was the kind of voice that sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural - slopping like, he said - that he didn't dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the morning. The talk went on most all night.

"This fellow - Casey, his name was - had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folk watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer place - it's in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what I'd heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any kind of dealings. You know it's always been a kind of mystery where the Marshes get the gold they refine. They've never seemed to do much buying in that line, but years ago they shipped out an enormous lot of ingots.

"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the Marsh women-folks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen port, especially since he always ordered stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for native trade. Others thought and still think he'd found an old pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old Captain's been dead these sixty years, and there's ain't been a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things - mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to look at themselves - Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.

"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they're a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you, there probably ain't more'n 400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess they're what they call 'white trash' down South - lawless and sly, and full of secret things. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.

"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain't welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard personally of more'n one business or government man that's disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.

"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there and have no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you - even though the people hereabouts will advise you not to make it. If you're just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you."

A lot of this isn't so much foreshadowing or clues as in a normal mystery, but a bare skeleton of truth that later exposition fills in more details. Of course, here it makes sense that the speaker doesn't quiet believe what he has been told, so the constant '...but I don't believe it' works this time.

Look at

...old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts...

I mean, that's pretty much a rough synopsis of what old Zadok Allen will later say. So again we have this loopy structure of telling you what will happen later on, but here this builds tension instead of deflating it-- at this point, the idea of summoning of devils is treated as beyond the pale, while it turns out to be far weirder, if anything else, than that. And, again, I love how he captures the regionalism of New England-- 'but I don't believe it' takes the form of “but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don't go down with me.” I mean, obviously, when you come from Panton, you're too sensible to believe this stuff (as a side note, if you look up Panton, you'll see the one citation for the town is that, even though unnamed and unimportant, this minor character is from there, unintentionally capturing so much about the town so well, perhaps?).

“[T]here's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now” could've been used to set up for poor little cousin Lawrence. The fact that this could've been done but just plain damn wasn't just serves to highlight how crap that part is.

Then we come to the part that is hardest to articulate my feeling about:

"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I don't say I'm blaming those that hold it... I s'pose you know... that a lot of our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.... That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place... I guess they're what they call 'white trash' down South - lawless and sly, and full of secret things. "

I'm certainly not interested in defending the racial views of HPL, nor do I care about how it supposedly softened to mere vehement racism over time. And I certainly don't want to pretend we can gloss over or separate this sort of stuff from the other themes neatly or historicize it away into 'it was a different time.'

It seems to me two things are important to say about Innsmouth though: First, Innsmouth's horror is primarily one of racial degeneracy, and for all the feints of fishmen, poor hygiene, and home repair, it is no accident that first things first, the people of Innsmouth are said to be rather racial progressive about the whole 'miscegenation' thing, not only in terms of (ominous music plays, while whispering the next word) admixture, but outright marriage, especially for 'it was a different time.' That needs to be accepted, because, frankly it's going to get a lot creepier than not blaming people for feeling racial prejudice.

Second, this isn't The Horror at Red Hook. Both sides of the the racial story need to be accepted. I'm not defending Innsmouth as being a more mature, enlightened view of race, just a more complicated one-- and, frankly, I feel that this still works as a horror story, where Red Hook is really just a horrifying, angry howl. And part of why I feel it works is the casualness of the racism, and yet the constant reminder of even in the world of Innsmouth there is this tension if not resistance to it-- the Chinese wife has nothing to do with the breeding programs of Obed Marsh, and it is freely admitted that such spooooky miscegenation is not unheard of, producing no named ill-effects. The racial issues at work here are complicated, since it is race that is the red herring, and racial prejudice which hide the real truth. Part of me wants to read this as super-duper racism, but I don't think it's stable ground. The ambiguity of race and racism in the story, if nothing else, helps evoke the creepy wrongness of Lovecraft Country, and you are never really sure where you stand.

The story freely admits that the racial prejudice is a blinding prejudice, and this is not the same as the sense in Red Hook of having merely the warranted amount of xenophobia of the evil foreigners. It calls attention to the fact that racial prejudice produces inane ideas like another person's religion is must be devil worship, which is a noticeable change from not only the devil worship by foreigners in Red Hook but also the voodoo meeting (je-eez! really?) of the "very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type" in The Call of Cthulhu. Sure, they are still into devil worship, more or less, in Innsmouth, but this is laughable on its face, not an obvious truth about those who've mingled with the "queer kinds of people."

Again, I'm not interested in even getting into HPL's changing views on race. I mean, gee, I guess there won't be a whites-only maw when Cthulhu eats us and all, but that's not really even close to sitting together at the table of brotherhood. However, in Innsmouth being of 'mixed blood' doesn't always make you a devil worshiper. The racial background of the main devil worshipers here seem to be white and, more or less, doing it for practical reasons, not some sort of racial degeneracy. So all his old tropes are mixed up here.

And it is this, I think, that makes it still work as a creepy setting-- the racism isn't the only presented point of view, and mostly works against the grain. I will admit my deliberate counter-reading of of Chapter IV as trying to bring a family member home doesn't make the town of Innsmouth itself a racial utopia, but I will say the ticket agent himself seems to be conflicted about racial prejudice; while he calls the prejudice out as a prejudice, I have no other read than “[t]hat plague of '46 must have taken off the best [that is, 'pure,' nee 'white'] blood in the place,” and yet he still sees Innsmouth residents as white people, even if they are white trash.

So I'm not sure exactly how to take this, other than a whole lotta creepy folk incidentally not caught up in white supremacy... as sailors often were. There is this counter-critique like this running through out Innsmouth. The 'racial degeneracy' problem is supposedly symptomatic of a deeper one (wink!), but I'm failing to see the specifics of what is going wrong here. Certainly I can see HPL expecting the mere mixing as the horror, but it's like he puts the best foot forward, which is an odd way to go about having an irrational fear. We'll get into more specifics when we get to Zadok Allen, but I'm really not sure what the Deep Ones are up to that is so inhuman.

Later, however, we will find out that the narrator himself is a product of miscegenation, which complicates things tremendously-- the entire story revolves around empathizing with the plight of this mixed blooded protagonist. And while I concede that the longing he has for his own kind is certainly meant ironically, I still find HPL makes a pretty good case for the Deep One's side-- among other things, the hybrids never die, never grow out, hang out with all their relatives, and have a pretty leisurely life. If this was in the clouds instead of underwater, it would clearly be a sort of heavenly existences. In the end, not being 'pure' isn't much a problem for the narrator, even when that impurity is, you know, freaking fleshing eating fishmen. Now that's racially progressive. Ironies and implied contrasts aside, HPL seems to have a problem not gilding the lilies for miscegenation.

The Shadow over 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' Part III: Third Times The Charming Seaside Town of Fishmen

I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and - so far - last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England - sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical - and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother's family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth.

Okay, this would have been a perfectly fine beginning without all the nonsense, false starts, and the unnecessary "sound the depths!" and "run silent, run deep," Hellcats of the Navy fury. The title is called The Shadow Over Innsmouth, an ominous enough title, without being all that specific, and the first line here starts answering questions raised by the title, call-response style. Even if the reader has no idea of New England naming conventions of towns, pronounces it 'ply-mouth' instead 'plim-ith,' etc., you'd still get something along the lines of 'hm, The Shadow Over Innsmouth... what's an Innsmouth?' "I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and - so far - last time."

See how that flows smoother as a slow seduction into creepiness than having a military attack on a geographical feature? It lets you the narrator is knew nothing about Innsmouth once, too, but learned. See, you've already got someone you can identify with, and a promise of guidance in some nice expositions and foreshadowings (man, I even hate that word now, too) of something off in "and - so far - last."

I also think how quickly the story moves past the reasons for going to Innsmouth is rather deft. A paragraph from now, and we're already going to Innsmouth, premise met. The mundanity of what the narrator is up to helps glide past any questions of what the character supposedly was up to that led to the opening. It isn't a cliche, like a flat tire forcing him to stop, etc., to distract us, but it isn't so interesting it distracts us either. It is a tricky thing, since a lot of the good solutions became cliche for this reason, and for such an old and well-known story, I'm surprised this premise isn't pinched more often.

Oh, not in the specifics... a fractured bildungsroman of a "sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical" leasurely trip on the cheap through rural New England screams the certain odd fixations of one Mr. Howard Phillips Lovecraft. While this tale is missing the more easily parodible last sentence pointlessly in italics, things unhelpfully (un)described as at all the wrong angles, and overly Freudian tentacles and ichorous maws, I think one of the things that really works here is the mundane creepiness to Lovecraft Country, and whatever the narrator is up to here is both boring and weird.

But the idea of a story starting in media res the main character's vacation solves a lot of the logistical problems of establishing the character's background and normal routines. This guy doesn't mention his job, his friends, his relationships, not even his freaking name. This guy is on vacation. I mean, his background is he has some ancestors and he doesn't really do anything. What he's doing is bumming around. He accidentally goes to Innsmouth. There is a certain minimalist elegance in that. It isn't until Chapter V, after explicitly mentioning that he decides to quit this trip, that he develops any sort of biography.

So this is the begining of the story proper, and look how tight it is compared to what's come before. The story doesn't get into motion until he stops with the whole "I never heard of Innsmouth" bit. Instead of wasting time coming up with motivations, personality and reasons for him to end up in Innsmouth, to explain how he goes from the ordinary world to smack-dab in the middle of a creepy story, he just gets on a damn bus. The fact that his cousin is in a madhouse or whatever won't matter once he gets to Innsmouth, so why bother wasting time on it?

See, that's a begining. It introduces the character and situation, not tells you a shaggy dog story or hint the rest of the story might be unreliable.

With gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth.

"...Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing..."

January 22 is Robert E. Howard's birthday. I'll save my thoughts about him and his works for now, and just point to this, one of my favorite weird tales. Hopefully, one I will be coming back to in detail later.

The Shadow over 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' Part II: Hints Of A False Start

...but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

Picking up roughly where we left off, note the previous section is roughly being dropped. The story's beginning is even explicitly in the text being dismissed as irrelevant, and the narrative shifts to the present tense now. I don't want to remake the same points as before, but merely if something can so off-handedly be dismissed, maybe pare it down. But don't call attention to how it's totally not relevant. It's an easy point to belabor, because it is so frustrating.

This part, though, adds up to a whole lotta nothin', too, since it is mostly a framing device to transition into the beginning of the main flashback in the story. Too much can't be revealed without ruining even more of the story, so it ends up merely spinning wheels for all of a paragraph before dropping backing into the past, though a seperate one than before.

In some ways, the structure of the first three chapters is like this, roughly jumping from one set of flashbacks to another, and flashbacks within flashbacks, all so Fishizen Kane, though without the pteradactyls. It is tricky to pull off, but HPL does an admirable job by not having the narration itself jump around in time after these first two false starts, and using dialects to keep the story-with-a-story clear. This creates some other problems later on, but we'll get that old man drunk when we come to him.

I do, however, like how there is the elements here that hint of some of what is coming in Chapter V, however, these still, I think, would be better elsewhere. Personally, I find a particularly lovely turn phrase in "odd cravings to whisper" which evokes more than vague talk of an ominous growing plan, and self-doubts of sanity. A terrible way to start a story not about an unreliable narrator is to make him look like one and then just drop that.

Two other quibbles:

Why, after having gone through this, would our unnamed narrator worry he was the first to go mad? Sometimes the sloppy writing points at a more interesting tale; the total lack of follow up is what makes it sloppy. The only way for him to be first is if none of the events in Innsmouth happened as the narrator believes, which explains the nonsensical nature of the second hand tales of submarines attacking reefs and such. Yet this isn't The Yellow Wallpaper of Innsmouth; although HPL sets all the pieces up on the board for the 'succumbing to a contagious nightmare hallucination' interpretation, it is my sense that you are to take it all in the end as more or less a just-so story, and things happen as they seem.

Yet there is the lingering lines that point to a more ambitious story somewhere beyond the simple just-so or 'it was all a crazy dream,' one where the narrator is slowly growing more alien, not mad, as the call of sea is growing, growing, and, in Chapter IV, the Deep Ones are merely trying to lead a lost brother home to Y'ha-nthlei, instead of doing whatever they're up to... It is these hints that draw me in Innsmouth, and, ultimately, why I am so frustrated with it.

Finally, there is "evilly-shadowed seaport of death;" a perfectly hackneyed, silly phrase, but, oh, dear God, when Innsmouth is over, I am so sick of the word 'shadow.' The name of these series of posts is my attempt to cope with the constant variants of 'shadow' all over and over and over again in Innsmouth. I used to think maybe it was a failed attempt at something, some sort of repetition like crashing waves. Now, I suspect HPL was merely sloppy, yet they still crash on me like waves. I have these nightmares that I will do a count of the number of times that damned word is used in the story, but there are, after all, things a man is not meant to know. Yet Mother Hydra calls those odd cravings in whispers to another part of me...

The Shadow over 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' Part I: Pointless Beginings

So one of the reason I am starting a blog is to do things like tackle my issues with H.P. Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, both in the sense of pure commentary and to do something with that commentary. I don't know if at this point there is anything more to this than a record of my thoughts as if a simple reader's journal, but, well, cart, meet horse.

Hopefully, these will be a series of posts that work their way through the text, pausing to comment, condemn, and congratulate specific sections. I'm not going to post the entire text here, even cut up amongst the commentary, nor am I going in giving a broad overview of the story, my views of the story, the mythos in general, or, well, frankly anything other than a running commentary on specific bits which may provide the above anyhow.

I get that is a highly alienating stance to take, especially for someone who has never read the story. On the other hand, I work on the assumption that whoever has read this far has also read the story, not because of any greatness on HPL's part that will be spoiled, or some sense of propriety of or to some sort of weird canon, or even as to have any clue what the hell I'm going on about, but because it's too weird, and not in the "weird tales" sense, to write with such an open audience in mind.

I also know this will be an odd way even for someone who has read the text to revisit it... Since there are no line numbers or even pages I'll cite, the text will be hard to place in context, even, I'm sure, for me, after a while. Still, you know, this isn't really for future me, either. At this point, I have no expectation of any sort of audience in mind. Frankly, I am just going to do my thing. I'll provide more or less random commentary after more or less random quotations, something like the format of:

During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.

Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the government in the end. Only one paper - a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy - mentioned the deep diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reef lay a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.

Okay, that's a pretty damn good cold opening.

I love the images this conjures: light snow falling on a small army of prohibition G-men crossing the frozen Manuxet, firing service pistols into the dark, burning and pillaging the village, even going so far as to be haphazardly flinging dynamite around, like some mad Untouchables RTS, the contrast in the night of fire off snow. Yeah, yeah, I know, none of this is actually there in the text; "under suitable precautions" hardly implies G-men-cum-Vikings sacking, and he spends more time explaining the deterioration of the building than the action, but, then again, as it is, it seems to imply some sort of frog marching of the Deep Ones, which seems to me a lot more silly an idea than an action scene with any action.

Then we slip into some sort of government conspiracy, secret detentions, with staccato-talking newspaper men getting some chin music from goons with badges... And then, holy Michael Bay, a submarine attack on a reef, of all things, not even on the town, and the ding-a-linging of brass bells, klaxon blaring, sonars pinging, a-woo-gahs, periscopes up!, metal tubes echoing "The Captain has the Con!"...

Except none this happens. It could have, but since none of this matters, HPL runs though it as quick as possible, making it even more pointless. While this might been a 'kick-ass' action ending, it's actually complete irrelevant for the rest of the story as he wrote it. Well, almost. He does reference it one more time in Chapter IV,

...The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth...

and nothing more. While HPL certainly isn't an action-packed writer like, say, R.E. Howard, it is one thing to have 'indescribable' be the hangnail of your descriptions, and quite another to hint at a climax with dynamite explosions, burning a town down, a sub attack, and the government faking a outbreak epidemic and setting up secret concentration camps and the pay off all of "[t]he later action."

This overstated sense of mystery to all of this here is a problem throughout Innsmouth, though the problem is clarity, not ambiguity. There is very little grounding to all the monologuing flashbacks in the story to the events in the story and everything here but the mere fact of the raid itself is deliberately set out as an uncertainty in the story. The raid is said to “tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth,” even though this confirmation is hearsay, and the raid is done on the basis of what the narrator tells the government anyhow.

So this is all head-scratchingly circular, neither showing nor telling us anything to which we can really latch on to make sense. The main tale to explain what is going on in Innsmouth is interrupted before we can find out what is really going on. While there is something attractive to a narrator who is unreliable retelling encounters with other unreliable narrators, unfortunately at a certain point in Innsmouth all the masks supposedly come off.

While there are some red herrings for reading it as the ramblings of a young man gradually becoming more and more delusional, that clearly isn't the intent here. What we are presented with is what is, more or less, what is going on, though things never really come into real focus.

While this holding back of what is really going on is quiet successful in, say, The Call of Cthulhu, that's not the issue here, since it is rather clear what is going on, other than why the narrator sometimes pointlessly complicates the narration with obviously false doubts. This is one of the largest problems in HPL's writing in general, his penchant for simultaneously telling, not showing, yet refusal to definitely tell you anything even when it's already obvious anyway. If we are to connect the dots, then at least show us the damn dots. The story is just muddled in its exposition, going so far as to fail to tell us the narrator's name.

Structurally, though, note that now there is two climaxes to this story; chronologically, there is this one in the beginning and the one in near the end itself. One ends with a 1920s government conspiracies and an over the top submarine attack, the other with a guy fainting in some bushes. Guess which one the story goes with? Oh, wait, did I already ruin the ending for you? See what a bad technique that is?

What boggles me is he had the broad strokes for a good action scene, this two-fisted comeuppance that seems to stop the Deep Ones in Innsmouth from doing their dark, super-secret plan, that would have stood in a bitter contrast to the last chapter denouement, then fritted it away for... what exactly? You still keep the hint of deus ex machina, only now put right in the beginning, foreshadowing and enticing with an ending that never comes.

While it's pretty conventional to have the narrative of a mystery told as a flashback of flashbacks within flashbacks-- that is, the story is told only after all the actual piecing together of something that happened already before that -- the nameless narrator is no detective. For now, however, note that the plot works fine without this additional layer of flashback, and I think Innsmouth suffers more for having this.

I can't see any reason why he scuttled all the action in this action scene and make the story promise something it never delivers, other than to hook the reader in to get to the 'good parts.' If it isn't the good part, why have it? If the narrator has no part in your climax, you shouldn't have that be the climax, sure, but don't lower Zeus in first to fix everything, flashback to how the whole mess came about in the first place, then flashforward to show how Ye Gods accomplished Ye Bupkis. That's just a waste of Ye Time. Instead, you know, maybe you should rework the climax.

Besides, I think the story could have stood better on it's own starting off as a travelogue that goes horribly, horribly wrong; the title already holds some sort of dreadful promise to take the reader at least until reaching the town itself, in all of Chapter II. The best I have is he was worried that the slow, building creepiness wouldn't draw you in, even though that's a pretty standard convention for what amounts to a 'haunted house' story, dwelling on the spooky architecture and strange residents of the town, etc., as all the while the monsters scurry-- well, hop-- at the periphery.

I do, however, think Innsmouth as is still works as an effectively creepy story, although often in spite of what we are apparently supposed to find creepy and in especially the sorts of things we are not. For all its faults, I think this has some of his best writing, which we will look at later, although to be perfectly honest, it's when he really, really steps away from his own voice that he starts writing really, really well.

So, uh, that's the first of the problems I'm oh-so cleverly saying casts a shadow over Innsmouth. And my first post. And... exeunt.