Shadows over Innsmouth

In 1931 the American author H.P. Lovecraft published what may be his best-known work, and certainly one of the most typical of his style of dark paranoid fantasy: "The Shadow over Innsmouth". This story takes us to a decaying New England seaport where since the 19th century the inhabitants have been enacting unholy rites brought back from the South Seas by Captain Obed Marsh. As a result they have developed a hideous form of bodily transformation in which they become less than human, and more adapted to an aquatic life in the deeps of forbidden Yha-Nthlei...

This seminal and nightmarish vision has influenced such as Stephen King (in "Jerusalem's Lot") and Bob Leman (in "Feesters in the Lake"). Neither of those stories is to be found here, in this volume which starts with Lovecraft's original story and follows the fate of others who have become embroiled with the story of cursed Innsmouth. What is here, as well as a handful of chilling illustrations, is a collection of stories by British authors such as Neil Gaiman, D.F. Lewis, Ramsey Campbell, and Kim Newman. Some, like Basil Copper's "Beyond the Reef" largely continue the story where Lovecraft's ends; others, like Michael Marshall Smith's "To See the Sea" reasonably assume that other parts of the world, e.g. the coasts of England, could equally have been affected by the Innsmouth heritage. 'Jack Yeovil''s "The Big Fish" reprises its author's fascination with the world of the movies and puts a 1940s private eye up against something worse than the Japs. Nick Royle's "The Homecoming" abandons Marsh and his cult entirely and treats the Deep Ones as a symbol of the 'Invisible Hand' and the paranoia it engenders. (Given the year of the original novella's appearance, it may itself have been a metaphor for fascism and its growing appeal to the middle classes of Europe).

Very often the Innsmouth legacy is all too attractive to the seeker: although at first repelled, the protagonist is then drawn in to the web of the Deep Ones and wants nothing more than to be one with watery Yha-Nthlei and to evolve beyond rough humanity. It is this, the sense that it is not a purely external threat but one that comes from within, and invites humankind's collusion, that gives Lovecraft's paranoid mythos its power, and that of the stories that follow it in this volume.