The Shadow over Innsmouth

The narrator explains how he instigated a secret investigation of the decrepit town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts—a former seaport isolated from other nearby towns by vast salt marshes—by the U.S. government after fleeing it on July 16, 1927. The investigation ultimately concluded with the arrest and detention of many of the town's residents in concentration camps as well as a submarine torpedoing nearby Devil Reef, which the press falsely reported as Prohibition liquor raids. The narrator proceeds to describe in detail the events surrounding his initial interest in the town, which lies along the route of his tour across New England, taken when he was a 21-year-old student at Oberlin College.

While waiting for the bus that will take him to Innsmouth, the narrator busies himself in neighboring Newburyport by gathering information on the town's history from the locals; all of it having superstitious overtones. The town was once a profitable port and shipbuilding center during the colonial and post-revolutionary periods, but began to decline after the War of 1812 interrupted shipping. A local merchant named Obed Marsh built a profitable gold refinery, but the town only deteriorated further after riots and a mysterious epidemic eliminated half of its residents in 1845. Marsh also founded a pagan cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon, which became the town's primary religion. Outsiders and government officials, including Census Bureau agents and school inspectors, are treated with hostility.

The narrator finds Innsmouth to be a mostly deserted fishing town, full of dilapidated buildings and people who walk with a distinctive shambling gait and have "queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes." Both the town and its residents are saturated with the odor of dead fish. The only resident who appears normal is a grocery store clerk from neighboring Arkham, who was transferred there by the chain. The narrator gathers much information from the clerk, including a map of the town and the name of Zadok Allen, a very elderly local drunkard who might give him information when plied with alcohol.

The narrator meets the fully human Zadok, who after the narrator gives him a bottle of whiskey explains that while trading in the Caroline Islands Marsh discovered a Kanak tribe in Pohnpei who offered human sacrifices to a race of immortal fish-like humanoids known as the Deep Ones. The Kanak also bred with Deep Ones, producing hybrid offspring which have the appearance of normal humans in childhood and early adulthood but eventually slowly transform into Deep Ones themselves and leave the surface to live in ancient undersea cities for eternity. When hard times fell on the town, Marsh's cult performed similar sacrifices to the Deep Ones in exchange for wealth in the form of large fish hauls and unique jewelry. When Marsh and his followers were arrested, the Deep Ones retaliated by attacking the town and killing more than half of its population.

The survivors were left with no other choice than to join the cult and continue Marsh's practices. Male and female inhabitants were forced to breed with the Deep Ones, producing hybrids who upon maturing permanently migrate underwater to live in the city of Y'ha-nthlei, located underneath Devil Reef. The town is now dominated by Marsh's grandson Barnabas, who is almost fully transformed into a Deep One. Zadok explains that these ocean-dwellers have designs on the surface world and have been planning the use of shoggoths to conquer or transform it. Zadok sees strange waves approaching the dock and tells the narrator that they have been seen, urging him to leave town immediately. The narrator is unnerved, but ultimately dismisses the story. Once he leaves, Zadok disappears and is never seen again.

After being told that the bus is experiencing engine trouble, the narrator has no choice but to spend the night in a musty hotel. While attempting to sleep, he hears noises at his door as if someone is trying to enter. Wasting no time, he escapes out a window and through the streets while a town-wide hunt for him occurs, forcing him at times to imitate the peculiar walk of the Innsmouth locals as he walks past search parties in the darkness. Eventually, the narrator makes his way towards railroad tracks and hears a procession of Deep Ones passing in the road before him. Against his judgment, he opens his eyes to see the creatures. He finds that they have grey-green skin, fish-like heads with unblinking eyes, gills on their necks and webbed hands, and communicate in unintelligible croak-like voices. Horrified, the narrator faints but wakes up at noon the next day alone and unharmed.

After reaching Arkham and alerting government authorities about Innsmouth, the narrator discovers that his grandmother was related to Obed Marsh's family, although the origins of her mother were unclear. The narrator's uncle had previously visited Arkham to research his ancestry before killing himself by gunshot. After returning home to Toledo, the narrator begins researching his family tree and discovers that he is a descendant of Marsh through his second wife Pth’thya-l’yi, and by 1930 begins to gradually transform into a Deep One. He begins having dreams of his grandmother and Pth'thya-l'yi in Y'ha-nthlei, which was damaged but not destroyed by the submarine attack. They explain that the Deep Ones will remain underwater for the time being but will eventually return to invade the surface world "for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved."

After briefly glimpsing a shoggoth in one of his dreams, the narrator awakens to find that he has fully acquired the "Innsmouth look." He wants to kill himself and purchases an "automatic" (an antiquated term for a semi-automatic pistol) but cannot go through with it. As the narrator concludes his story, he suffers a mental breakdown and embraces his fate. He decides to break out his cousin, who is even further transformed than he, from a sanatorium in Canton and take him to live in Y'ha-nthlei.

Robert Olmstead

Olmstead is the narrator and protagonist of the story. He discovers Innsmouth on a tour of New England while seeking genealogical information, and finds more than he bargained for.

The character, unnamed in The Shadow over Innsmouth, is called "Robert Olmstead" in Lovecraft's notes for the story, published in Arkham House's Something About Cats and Other Pieces (1949).[1] An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia points out that Olmstead's travel habits parallel Lovecraft's own—Lovecraft too would "seek the cheapest route", and Olmstead's dinner of "vegetable soup with crackers" is typical of Lovecraft's low-budget diet.[2]

Obed Marsh

Wealthy sea captain, patriarch of the elite Marsh family, and the founder of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. He was referred to by Zadok Allen as being the man who first summoned the Deep Ones to Innsmouth. In 1846, he was jailed after the towns bordering Innsmouth became suspicious of his crew. He died in 1878.

According to Lovecraft's story notes, Marsh's daughter, Alice, is Robert Olmstead's great-grandmother.[3]

Barnabas Marsh

Known as Old Man Marsh, he is the grandson of Obed Marsh and the owner of the Marsh refinery at the time of The Shadow over Innsmouth. Barnabas' father was Onesiphorus Marsh, Obed's son by his fully human wife; though Barnabas' mother, who was never seen in public, was apparently an actual Deep One. Zadok Allen says of him: "Right naow Barnabas is about changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon."

Zadok Allen

One of the few completely human residents of Innsmouth, and an alcoholic. His drunken ramblings allow Lovecraft to convey much of the town's secret backstory to the story's protagonist. Born in 1831, Allen disappears and dies in 1927, after being kidnapped and sacrificed by the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia notes that Allen resembles—and shares his years of birth and death with—Jonathan E. Hoag, an amateur poet of Lovecraft's acquaintance. A possible literary inspiration is the character of Dr. Humphrey Lathrop in Herbert Gorman's The Place Called Dagon (1927), who, like Allen, is a drinker who knows the secret history of his town.[4]

Grocery store clerk

An unnamed youth of about seventeen who is a native resident of Arkham, and therefore completely human. His superiors transferred him to Innsmouth, and both he and his family loathe the idea of him working there, but he cannot afford to quit his job. He is only too happy to encounter the narrator, and describes the sinister goings-on within Innsmouth, but the boy is unaware of what is really happening in the town. He tells the narrator of the bizarre deformities afflicting the native townspeople, and how the older generation are almost never seen outdoors due to their monstrous appearance. He also briefly informs the narrator of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and what he knows of the town's society, and directs him to the drunkard, Zadok Allen, for more information. Crucially, the clerk draws an extensive map of the town for Olmstead, which he uses later on as a means of escaping Innsmouth.

Hannes Bok's illustrations for the publication of the story in the January 1942 issue of Weird Tales

Both of Lovecraft's parents died in a mental hospital, and some critics believe that a concern with having inherited a propensity for physical and mental degeneration is reflected in the plot of The Shadow over Innsmouth. It also shares some themes with his earlier story, "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family".[5] Cthulhu, an entity from previous Lovecraft stories, is the overlord of the sea creatures. The mind of the narrator deteriorates when he is afforded a glimpse of what exists outside his perceived reality. This is a central tenet of Cosmicism, which Lovecraft emphasizes in the opening sentence of "The Call of Cthulhu": "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."[6]

Lovecraft based the town of Innsmouth on his impressions of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which he had visited in 1923 and fall 1931.[7] The real Newburyport features as a neighboring town in the narrative. A likely influence on the plot is Lovecraft's horror of miscegenation, which is documented by Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague de Camp[8] and others.

Robert M. Price cites two works as literary sources for The Shadow over Innsmouth: Robert W. Chambers' "The Harbor-Master" and Irvin S. Cobb's "Fishhead". Chambers' story concerns the discovery of "the remnants of the last race of amphibious human beings," living in a five-mile deep chasm just off the Atlantic coast. The creature of the title is described as "a man with round, fixed, fishy eyes, and soft, slaty skin. But the horror of the thing were the two gills that swelled and relaxed spasmodically."[9] Lovecraft was evidently impressed by this tale, writing in a letter to Frank Belknap Long: "God! The Harbour-Master!!!"[10] "Fishhead" is the story of a "human monstrosity" with an uncanny resemblance to a fish: his skull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have a forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes were small and round with shallow, glazed, pink-yellow pupils, and they were set wide apart on his head, and they were unwinking and staring, like a fish's eyes.[11] Lovecraft, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature," called Cobb's story "banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake".[12] Price notes that Fishhead, as the "son of a Negro father and a half-breed Indian mother," "embodies unambiguously the basic premise of The Shadow over Innsmouth.... This, of course, is really what Lovecraft found revolting in the idea of interracial marriage...the subtextual hook of different ethnic races mating and 'polluting' the gene pool."[13] Price points out the resemblance in names between the Deep One city of Y'ha-nthlei and Yoharneth-Lahai, a fictional deity in Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana, who "sendeth little dreams out of Pegana to please the people of Earth"—a precursor to Lovecraft's fictional deity Cthulhu, who sends less pleasant dreams from R'lyeh.[14]

The description of the Deep Ones has similarities to the sea creature described in H.G. Wells' short story "In the Abyss" (1896):[15]

Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils. In the position of the ears were two huge gill-covers, and out of these floated a branching tree of coralline filaments, almost like the tree-like gills that very young rays and sharks possess. But the humanity of the face was not the most extraordinary thing about the creature. It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a tripod of two frog-like legs and a long, thick tail, and its fore limbs, which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog’s do, carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper. The colour of the creature was variegated; its head, hands, and legs were purple; but its skin, which hung loosely upon it, even as clothes might do, was a phosphorescent grey.

• Cthulhu and R'lyeh are mentioned, the former in passing by Zadok Allen, and both toward the end of the narrative.
• The creature known as Dagon is first introduced in Lovecraft's 1917 tale of the same name.
• As related in "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937), Asenath Waite, the possessed victim of her father Ephraim Waite, is by implication one of the human/Deep One hybrids, and was a resident of Innsmouth before attending Miskatonic University. The servants she brings into her marriage to Edward Derby are likewise Innsmouth natives. This occurs after The Shadow over Innsmouth and Asenath's father and she escaped the government raid mentioned in the original story.
• The Waites, Gilmans, Eliots and Marshes are the "gently bred" families of Innsmouth. Despite his name, the protagonist of "The Dreams in the Witch House", Walter Gilman, is not established as having any links to Innsmouth or the Deep Ones.
• August Derleth also used the Deep Ones in the short story "Innsmouth Clay", which was inspired by an entry in Lovecraft's Commonplace Book. "The Shuttered Room" is another short story by Derleth, inspired by a note by Lovecraft, which also involves the Deep Ones. It mentions a connection between the Marsh family of Innsmouth and the Whateley family of Dunwich from "The Dunwich Horror".

Although rejected by the magazine during Lovecraft's lifetime, The Shadow over Innsmouth was reprinted in Weird Tales in 1942

Lovecraft was quite critical of The Shadow over Innsmouth, writing to August Derleth that the story "has all the defects I deplore—especially in point of style, where hackneyed phrases & rhythms have crept in despite all precautions.... No—I don't intend to offer 'The Shadow over Innsmouth' for publication, for it would stand no chance of acceptance."[16]

The story was rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright when Derleth surreptitiously submitted it for publication in 1933. "I have read Lovecraft's story...and must confess that it fascinates me," he wrote to Derleth. "But I don't know just what I can do with it. It is hard to break a story of this kind into two parts, and it is too long to run complete in one part."[17]

In late 1935, William L. Crawford's Visionary Publishing Company began the process of issuing The Shadow over Innsmouth as a book. The project came to fruition in November 1936 (although the copyright page declares the date of publication as April 1936), but the book had so many typographical errors that Lovecraft insisted on an errata sheet (which was also faulty). Lovecraft was displeased with the production; writing to his correspondent Lee McBride White on Nov 30, 1936, he wrote: "My Shadow over Innsmouth is now out - but as a first cloth-bound book it doesn't awake any enthusiasm in me. Indeed, it is one of the lousiest jobs I've ever seen - 30 misprints, slovenly format, & loose, slipshod binding. The solitary redeeming feature is the set of Utpatel illustrations - one of which, on the dust wrapper, saves the appearance of the thing..."[18]

It had a bound run of 200 copies — the only book of Lovecraft's fiction distributed during his lifetime.[19][20] Crawford had printed 400 copies but bound only 200; the others were destroyed later. Of this edition Robert Weinberg has written: "Only a few hundred copies of the book were printed, and even less than that were sold, even though it was available at the bargain price of $1 per copy. It featured good paper, black linen binding and four illustrations by Frank Utpatel. The book was the only bound hardcover to appear during Lovecraft's lifetime and became one of the true rarities in the collecting field. Its failure, and the poor sales of third non-fantasy book convinced William Crawford of the futility of his efforts."[21]

After Lovecraft's death (and Wright's), the story appeared in an unauthorized abridged version in the January 1942 issue of Weird Tales.[22]

As L Sprague de Camp noted, the action sections of Innsmouth are a departure for Lovecraft; the story's tense and memorable siege scene within the titular town's hotel reveals a flair in execution on a par with some of the most compelling chapters of R L Stevenson's Kidnapped. August Derleth called The Shadow over Innsmouth "a dark, brooding story, typical of Lovecraft at his best."[23] Robert Weinberg praised it as "a well-written story".[24] According to de Camp, Lovecraft distrusted his ability to narrate action, and the story is unusual in that Lovecraft includes sustained and effective[8] action writing during the culmination of the events in Innsmouth.

The Shadow over Innsmouth was republished in a 1994 anthology entitled Shadows over Innsmouth, containing stories by other authors based on Innsmouth and the Old Ones. The collection was edited by Stephen Jones, and included contributions by Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, David Sutton, Kim Newman (both as himself and Jack Yeovil), and other authors. There are also two follow-up volumes, also edited by Jones.

• Chalker, Jack L.; Mark Owings (1998). The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Bibliographic History, 1923-1998. Westminster, MD and Baltimore: Mirage Press, Ltd. p. 705.
• Derleth, August (1996) [1937]. "H. P. Lovecraft—Outsider". Crypt of Cthulhu. 15 (3). Robert M. Price (ed.), West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press. Original publication: "H. P. Lovecraft—Outsider". River. 1 (3). June 1937.
• Lovecraft, Howard P. [1936] (1984). "The Shadow over Innsmouth". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

• The Shadow over Innsmouth title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Shadow over Innsmouth, H. P. Lovecraft's original novella about Innsmouth
• "Map of Innsmouth and Environs" and a "Tourist's Guide to Innsmouth", from The Cthulhu Mythos: A Guide
• "The Harbor-Master" in In Search of the Unknown, Robert Chambers; complete text from manybooks.net
• "Fishhead", by Irwin S. Cobb; complete text from Gaslight
• "Of Yoharneth-Lahai" from The Gods of Pegana, Lord Dunsany
• The Shadow over Innsmouth 1994 hardcover edition (cover below)
• "Fishmen", a Musical version on YouTube