While I’m mostly reading Butter right now, I did have a long drive this weekend, and I was able to listen to the audio version of The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft. I’m hesitant to even say anything about the novella because there is so much out there about Lovecraft, and I feel like I don’t have enough context to add in-depth opinions. For a cosmic horror writer, my experience of Lovecraft is lacking — I’ve read a few of his stories, but I’ve never done a deep dive, and all I know about his life comes from a few hastily-read forwards.
There’s no denying Lovecraft held harmful views regarding race, mental health, and gender — and that knowledge colors any reading of his work. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a hotly debated story in itself, in that many people say it’s clearly an allegory against race-mixing while others claim the story itself refutes that in the meta-acknowledgement of the racism held by the towns around Innsmouth. I’m of the opinion: if your defense against being called racist is that “the creatures are clearly defined as worse than [insert non-white race here], because they aren’t even human!” then, it’s not much of a defense. There’s the feeling of “it would be bad enough for Marsh to have brought back a foreign bride, but he went a step further and brought back a colony of fish people to breed with”. So, yeah, pretty freaking racist even if the fish-people are not a direct stand-in for a race of people.
But despite the problematic nature of Lovecraft and his writing, his influence on cosmic horror is undeniable. As a cosmic horror writer, I find it important for me to explore the roots of the genre. Especially because a lot of those roots are “the fear of the other”, which is also a foundation of racism, and it is interesting to see how the genre keeps the cosmic while moving away from these roots.
The Cult: Real and Unknowable
Eventually, books about cults will shift from the occult to high control groups. There will be more focus on survivors, rescuing people from cults, and how control is maintained. Brainwashing will become a main fear of Americans, and cults will become one way to explore the way our beliefs and sense of self, built by the community around us, can change. Shifting in the 1960s forward, books will no longer show the horror of the occult being real, but will lean into the horror of a person who is able to pervert your beliefs to fulfill their own desires.
But pre-WWII, most cult stories focused on the occult as real. The main fears they drew on were the fear of the other and the fear of the unknown. While the other is often equated with race, the driving fear seemed to be “the other” in regards to religion. The antagonists were anyone not practicing Christianity, and threatening the order of “good Christian people.” Am I insane to say Lovecraft, an atheist, was pitting Christianity against the occult? Not really… since Lovecraft’s heroes are usually academics that exist above and outside the battle of religion. In Innsmouth, the “normal people” in the surrounding towns are Christian. The Innsmouth people are cultists. This allows the creeping dread setup of: those people aren’t like others. But the hero himself is willing to go to the town out of academic curiosity — something that overpowers Christian sensibilities to stay away. Lovecraft’s stories offer the fear: what if there is no benevolent God, only cosmic creatures who are imaginably powerful and, at best, ambivalent towards humans? To get at this fear, the cult has to be real. It has to release real creatures and disprove or challenge the known society — that of white, western Christianity.
I’m absolutely fascinated by the shift in cult literature between the fear of a very real anti-religion and the fear of someone tricking you into believing something that isn’t real. Taking into consideration The Faceless Thing We Adore, which is also cosmic horror that offers up a cult who manages to release a “real” being the difference in where the fear sits is drastic. There are several chapters in TFTWA where the god may not be real, and that induces more panic and dread than the chapters where the god is butterflying the world. In our current world, to act in the name of something that is false or wrong is somehow worse than bringing about mass destruction. Or perhaps it is just more personal. Which feels funny to say, considering Innsmouth also felt like the very personal story of a man afraid of inevitable mental health issues.
Giving Into Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth can be broken into four parts:
- The dread of the other/unknown: this is the setup where all the townspeople are saying to not go to Innsmouth and the “normal” people in Innsmouth are warning the narrator to stay away from the town. Something evil and weird is going on. Ohhhh, spooky.
- The confirmation of the occult: the glimpses of the priest, Zadok Allen’s story, the glimpses of shadows in the sea begin to confirm that more is going on than just cultural othering. While the final confirmation comes when the narrator actually sees the column of fish people, if you’ve read any other Lovecraft, the “confirmation” comes when we hear the name of Dagon and listen to Zadok’s tales. The narrator may not fully believe, but the reader has confirmation that the town is dealing in darkness and can potentially unearth an old god on the world.
- The chase scene: this is a rare one for Lovecraft because, from my readings, his horror is in the revelation of the cosmic other, not in actual action. In reviews online, readers seem to love this rare action scene where the narrator escapes from the hotel, through the town, and across the fields. I was kind of “meh” about it, as it requires you to hold a map of the hotel and town in your head, but that DID draw the size and emptiness of the town into a character of its own.
- The “epilogue” where the narrator discovers he is a fish person and joins his brethren in the sea.
For me, the best part of the story is where the narrator discovers his grandmother was the daughter of Marsh’s fish-daughter and that he is beginning to transform into a fish-person. Perhaps this is because it echoed my own mental health anxieties. To give some context: Lovecraft’s father was institutionalized due to hallucinations brought on by syphilis when Lovecraft was a toddler, and while Lovecraft was not told the truth of his father’s illness, he must have had some awareness of what was going on. His mother supposedly raised him as physically frail and predisposed to nervous disorders until she was institutionalized when he was a young adult. Having two parents institutionalized in a time when mental illness was an unspoken taboo, mixed with a lifetime of night terrors, must have left a great impression on Lovecraft. I spent my lifetime in the shadow of my family’s mental illness: fathers and brothers with night terrors and an uncle with bipolar disorder, among other issues that were probably undiagnosed. The night terrors were particularly frightening for me from a young age, and my family never discussed them. They were, quite literally, a source of not-so-silent terror in our house.
I lived my teens in fear that I would begin to have them as well. (Luckily, I only had two years of night terrors, and then my brilliant mind decided anxious depression was good enough for me). Now, as a parent, I have a certain amount of guilt and fear about passing these issues on to my children. When my son started having night terrors from a young age, I was devastated. So I definitely get the anxiety of inherited mental illnesses. (Of course, it’s not so difficult to reject eugenics in favor of long term generational healing… for some of us).
With the background of inherited mental health issues in mind, if we take a look at the Innsmouth epilogue, there’s a potential to read the story about late onset mental health issues — where a child can be completely “normal” and, as they age, they display more and more symptoms, until they descend into madness (the institution or the sea, take your pick). It begins to make more sense of how the fish people are hidden away in abandoned buildings, a source of shame even among the people of Innsmouth. In a way, the narrator’s decision to free his cousin and not be locked up, but to embrace his “madness” becomes inspiring. You wonder if the sea-life is so bad or if the real horror is a society that locks up and hides away people with mental illness. Honestly, there are times (especially as a young adult) when it was just easier and felt better to let myself slip into a manic episode rather than try to “fix” myself to be part of this society. Sometimes I want to swim with the fish people, slippery and cold and free.
Of course, now days you don’t have to choose either a life locked up or a life swimming in the unspeakable. There are many more humane options for managing mental health issues.
The Cult as Caregivers
Now, this is where this allegory will get a little dicey, and I may step on a few toes. If Innsmouth is about mental health, then what’s the cult doing? Honestly, it’s probably just part of the story, because what are gods without cults? But when I think about it in the mental health framework, I see the cult as the people in the lives of those with mental illness. We have these flashy fish-people who offered the town countless treasure if they bind their lives together. But as things progress, the fish people demand more, and the townspeople experience a mixed feeling: that of being trapped by the fish-people’s threat to destroy the world while also having familial obligation and a certain amount of love for the fish people. I don’t want to paint the mentally ill as a burden, but I can see the complexity my mental issues bring to my relationships — with my parents, my romantic partners, my friends, and my children. There are times when I offer beautiful insights and experiences not despite of but BECAUSE of the different way my brain and body operate — those would be the abundant fish and rare jewels. But there are also times when I stress my relationships, lean too hard on others and, honestly, there are more aspects of support I need. I imagine in Lovecraft’s time there was even more stigma and familial obligation, so he must have had real issues coming to terms with the mental health issues in his family and self.
In the story, the townspeople started with appreciation for the fish people, then they tried to cut them off, and now they’ve reached a certain balance where they hide them away when they’re on land, but they also allow them the freedom to return to the sea. It is far from perfect, and it’s difficult a lot of the time, but it is an existence that results in the fish-people being able to exist AND not destroying the world. A sort of melancholy win-win.
In a way, I see the story as saying there are different types of people we can show our true selves to: some will lock us up and tell us we’re crazy, and the others will go along with us, letting us be who we are. If I was living in the 1920s, I’d choose the sea and the cult.
