The Shadow Over Innsmouth - King of Madness
It’s March Madness week here at Horror bound and I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the madness than with the King of Madness, HP Lovecraft himself. I knew I wanted to focus on Lovecraft but wasn’t sure if I should focus on all of his works, just a few of his works, or one in particular. After rereading a few of my favorites after a long time of not reading any Lovecraft at all, I noticed that I was seeing his stuff from a whole new perspective. I read The Colour Out of Space, The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. While I was able to look at each story with a different perspective, the one that changed the most for me from my original feelings on the story and the one I want to focus on today is The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
It’s a fairly short read so I actually read it and then immediately started it over and read it again when I finished. I remember liking the story the first time I read it years ago, but not nearly as much as I did this time around. This time around as a much more seasoned reader there were things I picked up on that I either totally missed or didn’t realize the first time around.
First let’s give a quick run through of the plot so that we’re all on the same page.
The story centers around our unnamed narrator who is doing a bit of traveling in the north shore region of Massachusetts. He finds himself in Newburyport and learns about the neighboring town of Innsmouth. In spite of hearing from one of the locals in Newburyport that Innsmouth is a horrible place filled with horrible people who don’t like outsiders, the narrator decides to take the bus to Innsmouth, spend the day there seeing the town and learning what he can about it before taking the bus out of Innsmouth on his way to Arkham.
As he takes the bus into town he notices a strong fish-like small and immediately realizes why people don’t like going there and why people in the neighboring towns dislike even the idea of Innsmouth. Once in town, the narrator comes across a few natives of Innsmouth and finds them to all have “narrow heads”, “flat noses” and “starry eyes,” the looks leaves him intrigued and he wants to find out as much as he can about this strange town before he leaves on the bus later that afternoon. While in a grocery store, he meets a young clerk who is not from Innsmouth who gives the narrator some more background on the town including a rough map of the streets and giving him the name of an elderly local drunk named Zadok Allen who loves to talk to outsiders about the history of the strange town. Still curious, the narrator does his best to meet up with Zadok and learn even more about Innsmouth. Using a bottle of booze as bait, he lures Zadok to a remote area of downtown And proceeds to give him the drink and listen to his tale.
Zadok tells the story of Obed Marsh who discovered a race of people known as the Deep Ones. Obed also created a cult-like religion known as the Esoteric Order of Dagon which offered human sacrifices to the Deep Ones. Later, Zadok says, the Deep Ones attacked the town and forced the remaining inhabitants to breed with the Deep Ones creating a hybrid race that starts off looking human but slowly turns into Deep Ones as they grow older. The narrator is shocked by the story but passes it off as just the story of an elderly drunk man and moves on with his day.
The narrator spends the rest of the day looking around the town until the bus arrives. When he goes to get on the bus he is informed that it’s broken down and he won’t be able to take the bus out of town until the following morning. With no other choice available to him, the narrator stays at the Gilman House which is the only hotel available to him. It is old, musty, and run down but the narrator takes a room anyway. He is unnerved by the stories he’d heard before arriving in town and the stories from the grocer and Zadok Allen. This combined with the old hotel makes his stay seem endless. When he gets to his room he bolts the door and hopes sleep comes soon. He is then tormented by footsteps and noises outside his room. Numerous unseen people we assume are natives of Innsmouth try to break into his room and he is forced to flee to other rooms via the adjoining doors. This is the most tense part of the story and well worth a read. From there the narrator flees the hotel through the streets and is chased by the people of Innsmouth and, we assume, the Deep Ones. Eventually he hides from them and is shocked at the monstrosities he’s sees moving past him from his hidden location.
The next day he leaves Innsmouth and eventually returns home. As the years pass, the narrator discovers that he is actually related to Obed Marsh and he slowly begins to change until he starts to look like one of the members of Innsmouth and he plans to return to join the other Deep Ones. This is the point of the story I want to focus on because I think it sets up an interesting dynamic that I didn’t pick up on when I read this at a younger age.
Looking back at the story, everything the narrator knows about the town of Innsmouth and the people that live there he hears from someone who does not live in the town and admittedly does not like the people who live there. in Newburyport he talks to someone who introduces him to the town, telling him that no one goes there and no one likes the people there. The grocer says his family didn’t want him to work there but that he needed the money so kept the job when he was transferred to Innsmouth but that he doesn’t like it there and Badok Allen is about as unreliable as they come.
The point being, all of these characters in the story have preconceived notions of the town and citizens of Innsmouth. This is where the concept of madness comes into play. Nothing has happened to our narrator since he stepped foot in the town of Innsmouth when he checks into the Gilman House, but the stories he’s heard, true or not, have led him to believe that the town and its people are evil and not to be trusted. Those stories from several different sources built up a madness inside him, made him paranoid to the point of being scared just at the thought of staying in the Gilman House. Were there actually people trying to get into his room? Probably. But was he more predisposed to thinking the worst of the people of Innsmouth by the time we get to that point in the story? Absolutely. Let’s come back to that point though in a moment.
Following the chase through the street, the narrator hides and is able to see the Deep Ones as they pass by his hiding spot. Again, we assume this is true and not just a hallucination brought on by his lack of sleep and terror about the town of Innsmouth itself. Knowing what we know about the narrator, that he was actually one of the Deep Ones, a long lost relative, it is more likely that the Deep Ones were not after him to do harm to him or hurt him in any way because he was an outsider.
It is more likely that they were looking for him because they realized something he didn’t, that he was one of them and that he belonged there with them. Perhaps they could sense something in him and knew that he was one of them and were just going to talk to him and convince him of the fact that he was a descendant of the Deep Ones. The point being, we don’t know the motivations of the Deep Ones and we actually know next to nothing about them. Everything we know is second or third hand stories of them and if people are that suspicious of Innsmouth how can we, as readers, take them seriously? This feeling of unease that the narrator has is one instance of madness within this story.
The second instance of madness has to do with Lovecraft’s ability to change the way we think of the Deep Ones in the story. In a way, he puts this madness on us the readers. Because we see the story only from the eyes of the narrator, we also known very little about the Deep Ones. But we are so eager to believe just as the narrator does, we want the Deep Ones to be evil monsters from the beginning and Lovecraft is able to make us believe that with relative ease.
In the end, The Shadow Over Innsmouth is an amazing story with the ability to be read and interpreted in multiple ways depending on the perspective of the reader. Are the Deep Ones as evil as the narrator is led to believe? Or are they a more benevolent group who were just looking to re-connect with a long lost family member who had returned home? If you haven’t read it before, give this classic horror story a read and let me know what you think. If you’ve read it and want to discuss, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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