![]() 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. 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". 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. But the horror of the thing were the two gills that swelled and relaxed spasmodically." Lovecraft was evidently impressed by this tale, writing in a letter to Frank Belknap Long: "God! The Harbour-Master!!!" (HPL: Selected Letters 3.430) "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. The creature of the title is described as "a man with round, fixed, fishy eyes, and soft, slaty skin. 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. Chambers' "The Harbor-Master" and Irvin S. Price cites two works as literary sources for The Shadow over Innsmouth: Robert W. The real Newburyport features as a neighbouring town in the narrative.Ī likely influence on the plot is Lovecraft's horror of miscegenation, which is documented by de Camp and others. Lovecraft based the town of Innsmouth on his impressions of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which he had visited in 1923 and fall 1931. 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." ![]() The mind of the narrator deteriorates when he is afforded a glimpse of what exists outside his perceived reality. Cthulhu, an entity from previous Lovecraft stories, is the overlord of the sea creatures. It also shares some themes with his earlier story, " Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family". Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft distrusted his ability to narrate action, and the story is unusual in that Lovecraft includes in chapter IV a sustained and effective piece of action writing.īoth 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, a common preoccupation among eugenicists of the time, which, along with paranoiac fears of miscegenation, is reflected in the plot of The Shadow over Innsmouth. It is the only Lovecraft story which was published in book form during his lifetime.Īccording to L. He then discovers that he has alien ancestors and must eventually return to the sea. He alerts the authorities, who take drastic action. He flees, but finds that his pursuers are the hybrid monsters of his informant’s story. The student is tricked into staying overnight in the town, and he is attacked in his hotel. A local resident tells him a horrifying story of aquatic monsters who can interbreed with humans to produce amphibian hybrids. He travels to Innsmouth and observes disturbing events and people. He sees a piece of exotic jewelry in a museum, and learns that its source is the nearby decrepit seaport of Innsmouth. The narrator is a student on an antiquarian tour of New England. It references several shared elements of the Mythos, including place-names, mythical creatures and invocations. It forms part of the Cthulhu Mythos, using its motif of a malign undersea civilization. ![]() Lovecraft, written in November–December 1931. ![]() The Shadow over Innsmouth is a horror novella by H. ![]()
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