The Shadow Over Innsmouth

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a story from 1931 involving a trip that goes awry, we could say. We have a character who is traveling through New England, who boards a bus and ends up in the town of Innsmouth. It’s a quintessential Lovecraft setting: an old, decaying seaport town with inscrutable characters. A dark history begins to emerge, and the revelation is that there are creatures under the sea called the deep ones, that have interbred with the human beings that lived in Innsmouth. At a certain age, people who grow up in Innsmouth then go into the water, and they go down into the deep to join the deep ones who dwell below the waves. Then there’s a twist at the end… This one is exemplary of the atmosphere that Lovecraft seeks to develop throughout his fiction, notably these decaying New England seaports in which everything seems ominous and inscrutable. Yes. Lovecraft harkened back to the idea of being the 18th-century gentleman. Although racism was obviously common in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, Lovecraft was racist even by the standards of the time period. What seems to repulse him most in his fiction is the idea of hybrid entities or miscegenated creatures, and that’s the source of much of the horror in his fiction – the idea that humans have interbred with either species from other planets or with animals. So you get creatures that are hybrids. China Miéville, who is an author of weird fiction in his own right, says that this racism is not ‘epiphenomenal’ in Lovecraft, it’s not something on the surface that can simply be sort of ignored. It’s actually what moves his fiction along. The source of the horror in Lovecraft comes from his racism and his anxieties about the ‘encroachments’ of people of colour. He has a story called The Horror at Red Hook , which is not on my list, but reflects a period of time when he lived in a section of Brooklyn in New York called Red Hook – and the story is just all about how the ethnically diverse population is, to him, so frightening and ominous. He speaks about people of colour, of various ethnicities, as though they are subhuman. The interesting thing about The Horror at Red Hook is that it was somewhat recently rewritten by a contemporary author of horror fiction named Victor LaValle, who has published it as The Ballad of Black Tom . It’s a retelling of The Horror at Red Hook that shifts the location of horror away from the ethnically diverse population of Red Hook and instead focuses on racism itself, as being what truly is the horror at the heart of the story. Yes. What I think is most interesting about the way that Lovecraft is being utilized today is the attempts to honour his legacy and his contributions to the genre, while at the same time operating in a mode of critique, highlighting the fact that there are these objectionable aspects to his fiction. Victor LaValle’s re-scripting of The Horror of Red Hook is a good example of that. Or the HBO series, Lovecraft Country, does something very similar. It takes a book of the same name by Matt Ruff, and in the HBO series version, you have Lovecraftian monstrosities – shoggoths and other kinds of monsters – but the focus is on a black family in 1950s America who are encountering racism as part of their day to day experience, which is as scary as (if not scarier than) the Lovecraftian monsters. So it’s the revisions of him that are very fascinating. You can have an homage or acknowledge his significance, but at the same time – rather than cancelling him and just not mentioning him – rewriting him in ways that take that racism that was central to his fiction, and highlight that as being what the true horror actually is."