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    The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Fantasy and Horror Classics): With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss
    The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Fantasy and Horror Classics): With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss
    The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Fantasy and Horror Classics): With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Fantasy and Horror Classics): With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss

    By H. P. Lovecraft and George Henry Weiss

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    About this ebook

    While on an antiquarian tour of New England, young historian Robert Olmstead happens upon the run-down seaside town of Innsmouth where strangers are entirely unwelcome. The town is inhabited by queer people who seem to adhere to a religious cult and who, Olmstead's investigation threatens to uncover, seem to be hiding a terrible secret from the deep. First published in 1936, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is a horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft and part of the famous Cthulhu Mythos. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American writer of supernatural horror fiction. Though his works remained largely unknown and did not furnish him with a decent living, Lovecraft is today considered to be among the most significant writers of supernatural horror fiction of the twentieth century. Other notable works by this author include: “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Rats in the Walls”. A fantastic example of horror fiction by master of the genre not to be missed by those who have read and enjoyed other works in the Cthulhu Mythos cycle. Read & Co. is publishing this classic novella now as part of our “Fantasy and Horror Classics” imprint in a new edition with a dedication by George Henry Weiss.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateMar 31, 2016
    ISBN9781473369214
    The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Fantasy and Horror Classics): With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss
    Author

    H. P. Lovecraft

    Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

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    Reviews for The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a short novel about a weird hybrid race of humans and creatures resembling a cross between a fish and a frog, which lives in the seaside village of Innsmouth, so says the synopsis. In reality, it reads like a journal or a travelogue, and honestly, the writing style kept me with it as much as anything, as it was very matter-of-fact about what the writer went through. I’ve had this on my to-read list for a very long time, having been a goth teenager with a penchant for reading excessive amounts of books, and the books I skipped over in my goth-dom would probably have gotten me kicked out for cardinal sins - I never got around to Lovecraft or Gaiman’s Sandman comics, for instance -- so I’m glad I’ve finally gotten to both this year. I think I missed the comics train, unfortunately, but this was very readable and very creepy.
    • 5/5
      Shut my mouth, or my eyes if I can. This story is the basis of the Video Game The Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
    • 3/5
      Another creepy entry in the Lovecraft series. This one seemed a bit of a departure for H.P., in that it had a pretty solid action sequence, and actually showed people speaking.

      One of my biggest complaints with Lovecraft is the dearth of dialogue in any of his stories. In this one, he raises the bar by having two actual characters speak. I don't mean he just tells us what they say, he actually has them speak.

      Don't get me wrong, none of it is dialogue...both characters speak in information-dump monologues, and the second of the two's speech is so filled with patois that it's actually at times a quite difficult read. It took me two occurrences of the word "jine" to clue in he was saying "join".

      For all that, with the exception of the somewhat unbelievable change-in-mindset ending, this was one of the better ones, for me. But yeah, two stars off for the stupid ending, and the info-dump monologues.

      Gotta say, though, the blatant racism of the two included stories, Harbor-Master by Robert W. Chambers (of The King In Yellow fame) where the monster is briefly considered a "darkie", and Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb, that peppers the entire story with some brutal racial stereotypes and a heapin' helpin' of "nigger" took me by surprise.

      I can see how both stories appealed to Lovecraft, both from the man-fish angle, and from the slagging of a non-white race, but man...could have happily gone my entire life without reading either story.

    Book preview

    The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Fantasy and Horror Classics) - H. P. Lovecraft

    1.png

    THE SHADOW

    OVER INNSMOUTH

    Fantasy & Horror Classics

    By

    H. P. LOVECRAFT

    WITH A

    DEDICATION BY

    GEORGE HENRY WEISS

    First published in 1936

    Copyright © 2020 Fantasy and Horror Classics

    This edition is published by Fantasy and Horror Classics,

    an imprint of Read & Co.

    This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

    way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available

    from the British Library.

    Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

    For more information visit

    www.readandcobooks.co.uk

    To

    Howard Phillips Lovecraft

    Essayist, Poet &

    Master-writer of the Weird

    1890-1937

    He lived—and now is dead beyond all knowing

    Of life and death: the vast and formless scheme

    Behind the face of nature ever showing

    Has swallowed up the dreamer and the dream.

    But brief the hour he had upon the stream

    Of timeless time from past to future flowing

    To lift his sail and catch the luminous gleam

    Of stars that marked his coming and his going

    Before he vanished: yet the brilliant wake

    His passing left is vivid on the tide

    And for the countless centuries will abide:

    The genius that no death can ever take

    Crowns him immortal, though a man has died.

    Francis Flagg

    (George Henry Weiss)

    Contents

    H. P. Lovecraft

    I

    II

    III

    IV

    V

    H. P. Lovecraft

    Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Rhode Island, USA. Although a sickly boy, Lovecraft began writing at a very young age, quickly developing a deep and abiding interest in science. At just sixteen he was writing a monthly astronomy column for his local newspaper. However, in 1908, Lovecraft suffered a nervous breakdown and failed to get into university, sparking a period of five years in which he all but vanished.

    In 1913, Lovecraft was invited to join the UAPA (United Amateur Press Association)—a development which re-invigorated his writing. In 1917, he began to focus on fiction, producing such well-known early stories as Dagon and A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson. In 1924, Lovecraft married and moved to New York, but he disliked life there intensely, and struggled to find work. A few years later, penniless and now divorced, he returned to Rhode Island. It was here, during the last decade of his life, that Lovecraft produced the vast majority of his best-known fiction, including The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Thing on the Doorstep and arguably his most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu. Having suffered from cancer of the small intestine for more than a year, Lovecraft died in March of 1937.

    THE SHADOW

    OVER INNSMOUTH

    I

    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 is even now only beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence.

    Complaints from many liberal organisations 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 coöperate 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 lies a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.

    People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was now no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew very little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.

    But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

    It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; 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-rumoured 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 simply 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.

    I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and—so far—last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England—sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical—and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother’s family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley, and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants had offered.

    You could take that old bus, I suppose, he said with a certain hesitation, but it ain’t thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth—you may have heard about that—and so the people don’t like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow—Joe Sargent—but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s’pose it’s cheap enough, but I never see more’n two or three people in it—nobody but those Innsmouth folks. Leaves the Square—front of Hammond’s Drug Store—at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they’ve changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap—I’ve never ben on it.

    That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shewn

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