Shadows Over Innsmouth

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HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT is probably the most important and influential author of modern supernatural fiction. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and was a life-long resident of Providence, Rhode Island, until his untimely death in 1937. Lovecraft’s poems, essays and infrequent fiction received popular acclaim in the amateur press and through such pulp magazines as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories.

Many of his tales are set in the cosmic vistas that exist beyond time and space or in the fear-haunted towns of an imaginary area of Massachusetts. ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ is indicative of the latter.

An integral part of several loosely connected stories that have since become identified as the “Cthulhu Mythos” (named after one of the gods of Lovecraft’s eldritch pantheon), ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ was written in 1931 and, at some 26,000 words, is one of the author’s longest works.

The story re-introduces the reader to the decaying coastal town of Innsmouth (first mentioned in Lovecraft’s early short tale ‘Celephais’), founded by merchant captain Obed Marsh who, in the 1840s, brought back a strange wife from the South Seas with a peculiarly fishy look. It is revealed that the Marshes intermarried with an ocean-dwelling race of humanoid beings called the Deep Ones, creating a species of batrachian hybrids, and the once-prosperous New England seaport has been gradually undermined by a decadent cult called The Esoteric Order of Dagon, committed to the service and ultimate resurrection of Great Cthulhu and other dark gods.

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