by Neil Gaiman
Afterword
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
INTRODUCTION
SPAWN OF THE DEEP ONES
HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT is probably the most important and influential author of modern supernatural fiction. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and was a life-long resident of Providence, Rhode Island, until his untimely death in 1937. Lovecraft’s poems, essays and infrequent fiction received popular acclaim in the amateur press and through such pulp magazines as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories.
Many of his tales are set in the cosmic vistas that exist beyond time and space or in the fear-haunted towns of an imaginary area of Massachusetts. ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ is indicative of the latter.
An integral part of several loosely connected stories that have since become identified as the “Cthulhu Mythos” (named after one of the gods of Lovecraft’s eldritch pantheon), ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ was written in 1931 and, at some 26,000 words, is one of the author’s longest works.
The story re-introduces the reader to the decaying coastal town of Innsmouth (first mentioned in Lovecraft’s early short tale ‘Celephais’), founded by merchant captain Obed Marsh who, in the 1840s, brought back a strange wife from the South Seas with a peculiarly fishy look. It is revealed that the Marshes intermarried with an ocean-dwelling race of humanoid beings called the Deep Ones, creating a species of batrachian hybrids, and the once-prosperous New England seaport has been gradually undermined by a decadent cult called The Esoteric Order of Dagon, committed to the service and ultimate resurrection of Great Cthulhu and other dark gods.
Lovecraft wasn’t particularly pleased with the finished story, and in his usual self-deprecatory manner described it as “my own verbose and doubtful swan-song... as a sort of grand finale to my present prose period.”
Despite the enthusiasm of his literary prodigy, August Derleth, who considered the tale “a dark, brooding story, typical of Lovecraft at his best,” other correspondents were more critical, and the despondent author put the manuscript away and turned to other projects.
The typescript remained unpublished until 1936, when Lovecraft gave it to William L. Crawford, a friend of his from the United Amateur Press, who was starting his own imprint, the Visionary Publishing Company of Everett, Pennsylvania.
“Crawford has at last issued my ‘Innsmouth’ as a lousily misprinted and sloppily bound book,” the author complained in a letter. “The printed errata slip doesn’t cover half the mistakes.”
Crawford produced 400 copies of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and had half of these bound as a slim book containing four illustrations by Frank A. Utpatel. Initially this volume was sold for $1.00 apiece, but Crawford managed to distribute only about 150 copies before he ran out of money and had to end his short publishing career. The unbound sheets were subsequently destroyed.
“It did not bring Lovecraft the recognition I hoped it would bring him,” the publisher later admitted.
Nowadays it’s not surprising that this book is a great rarity amongst collectors of Lovecraftania and commands high prices whenever a copy is occasionally offered for sale.
The story eventually reached a wider readership in Weird Tales for January 1942. Since then it has been published extensively and is today justly regarded as one of Lovecraft’s finest tales of the macabre.
During his lifetime, Lovecraft strenuously encouraged other writers to develop themes from the Cthulhu Mythos in their own work, and over the years such authors as Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Stephen King, Frank Belknap Long, Brian Lumley, Clark Ashton Smith and Colin Wilson, to name only a few, have explored and enhanced his original concepts.
Many diverse hands have individualised ideas to be found in Lovecraft’s fiction, and although a number of these stories have used the Deep Ones and their marvel-shadowed dwelling place, there has never before been an attempt to relate a fictional history of Innsmouth and its ichthyoid denizens.
Using H.P. Lovecraft’s original novella as inspiration, the all-British contributors to this volume—including established masters of the genre and newer names at the time—depict the dreadful decline of the Massachusetts seaport since the late 1920s: through the war years, the rock ’n’ roll era, and the late 20th century political upheavals in Eastern Europe, into the modern scientific age and beyond.
In these stories, as the decades pass, Dagon’s spawn spreads out from the American East Coast to cast its shadow over the British Isles and European mainland, while Innsmouth itself undergoes a metamorphosis both startling and unexpected.
And as strange as these tales may be, trust me when I say that there are more Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth to come...
Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!
Stephen Jones,
London, England
THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH
by H.P. LOVECRAFT
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. Unenquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major dashes 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 show 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 co-operate 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 county 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.