Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; The Shadow Over Innsmouth pt.1

This series is a blind read of H.P. Lovecraft’s works.  The idea is that I will read through the entirety of his published works and probably move onto a few successors (which will absolutely include August Derleth).  That being said, I have only rudimentary knowledge of the Gothic and cosmic world of Lovecraft.  Because of this There will be some pretty crazy theories coming through this blog, but it’s something I love to do, so if you have a better theory, or a clashing theory, please respond!

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is cut into 5 parts, so I’m going to dedicate a blog post for each section.  The first is merely the set up; our narrator is planning a trip in New England and wants to find cheaper transportation so a ticket agent tells him that he can take a bus through Innsmouth, a port town that is nearly deserted.  This first portion is basically about our narrator getting information about this strange little shady town, but he comes across a few interesting nuggets.  The first comes from the ticket agent.  Though he is an unreliable source, he tells the narrator that the people of Innsmouth are strange.  That they come from a lineage of a sea Captain, Obed Marsh.  Apparently Obed’s son married a strange girl, “a South Sea Islander” of strange physiognomy.  Then the son of these two is Old Man Marsh, who married a girl from nearby Ipswitch.

The people of Innsmouth have an oddly fish-like appearance.  they seem to be mostly bald with narrow heads, flat noses and bulgy eyes that never seem to shut, their necks are shriveled and creased up (gills), and their skin has a rough, or scabby look and feel to them.  This is probably stemming from the “South Sea Islander” mother of Old Man Marsh.

What is strange about this is an intermarriage theme, which is held over from “Arthur Jermyn”, though in this story is seems to be fish related (we’ll get to that later), rather than ape related.  I am still unsure of where the ape beasts come from, (I.E. what god they are related to), but it is apparent that the fish theme comes from Dagon.

So The Old Captain goes out to an island, just off the mainland, where no one else has seemed to go, but there are rumors that he has made contracts with devils out on that small island.  If we go back to the short story “Dagon”, we will remember a seaman who crashed on an island with a strange monolith, and on that monolith were drawings of fish-men worshiping some sort of creature under the sea.  He makes contact with them an nearly goes insane.  Could it be that this is a similar island, that worshipers of Dagon have formed?  Are these the devils that Obed Marsh has been communicating with?

It seems so.  As the story progresses, we find that a person from Innsmouth made thier way to state street and pawned a tiara, then he died shortly thereafter (intentionally?  Or by curse?).  Our Narrator was shown this tiara by a curator who had it under a case.  There are strange reliefs on the tiara, similar to the images we saw on the monolith in the story “Dagon”.

I’m particularly interested in the lineage of these peoples.  Are they gradually being changed?  It is said that the town only has about 400 people now (at the time of the telling of the story) and that it was far bigger before that.  It doesn’t seem possible that the entire town was populated by the inter-species breeding of the Marshes.  Could their dealings with Dagon be transforming the townsfolk?  Or have other piscatorial denizens come to the town through Marsh’s worshiping and interbred with other townsfolk?  We might find more clues in part 2…

What do you think?

Join me tomorrow for “The Shadow over Innsmouth” part 2!