Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; The Shadow over Innsmouth pt. 4

We have now reached the denouement.  The background of the story has lead our narrator to try and flee that horrible mind-bending mess that is Innsmouth.

When the chapter opens our narrator has decided to get out of dodge, and goes to get to the bus, only to be told by the odd bus driver, that despite travelling to Innsmouth without issue, there is suddenly a engine problem and the narrator will have to wait the night.  Joe Sargent (the bus driver) tells our narrator to go to the Gilman to wait the night.  He even tells our narrator that he will get a great room rate.  They only charged him a dollar.

He waits the night away in his room and makes sure to lock and barricade the door.  He even looks for an escape route, just because he is scared.  Then late in the night there is a shuffling at the door, and someone knocks with increasing frequency when he doesn’t answer.

Our narrator gets scared and tries to flee through the hotel.  There is a fairly large chase sequence which is a little jumbled (Lovecraft is a master of tone and atmosphere, not action), but the narrator flees out the window and through the streets to get out of Innsmouth.

He faints when he sees a large contingent of fish creatures gather in town, creatures nearly too abhorrent to describe.

There are a few interesting visuals in this portion of the book.  The first is after he flees the Gilman, he tries to stay to the shadows, but he has to cross a street that has direct view of the waters, and he sees two different things of note.  The first is a strange light, emanating from out over the sea of a color he cant quite pinpoint.  And there is a churning of creatures coming to Innsmouth from the craggy rock that old Captain Obed frequented.  This image of the churning waters with “bobbing heads and flailing arms” that “were alien and aberrant” in a way he could not conceive.  This immediately brings about images of Cthulhu and the multi-tentacled beard.  Though these are smaller creatures, and probably more related to Dagon.

The unholy light however, of a hue unknown.  The moon is full and bright throughout the story, could it be the moon’s call?  The moon has called creatures in previous stories, could this be the call, and answer that we have seen in previous stories?

Beyond that there is one more aspect of the story which is really provocative.  There seem to be three different creatures in Innsmouth.  We have creatures that are simian based, which we have seen in many different stories , we have fish creatures which walk beside the simian creatures, and then we have something dog like, or what I like to establish as “beasts”.  The beasts are called from the moon in every other story, with the exception of “The Doom that Came to Sarnath” and there there are fish creatures which are called by the moon.

Are the beasts and the simian creatures (think “Arthur Jermyn” and “The Outsider”) the same thing?  Could Innsmouth be Sarnath in this age?

With the completion of chapter V of this story (which will probably be tomorrow) I have now read through two Del Rey Lovecraft books, and will get started into the third.  I would like to begin to get a timeline, or at least get to understanding the mythos and how they are connected on my own (and with the help of you all) without doing any research and see how my theories stack up.

What do you think?