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.