The Shadow Over Innsmouth

I liked this story. I really did. It was active, the characters were engaging, and the plot stimulated and held my interest. I’m a history buff so I found the back story – of how Innsmouth came to be what the narrators learns from Zadok Allen it is – very compelling. The setting was richly detailed as well.

However, if I had to sum it up this piece in one word, it would be this: Overkill.

Yes, I said overkill, an overabundance of unnecessary description of setting and characters. I get that the seeming frog people are “repellent”; Mr. Lovecraft tells me so on practically every page. Naturally, I expect a city of amphibians to smell a little fishy; there’s no need to reacquaint my nostrils with the stench in every other paragraph. When our narrator’s in jeopardy in his room at the Gilman house, Lovecraft goes into such excruciating detail about the potential escape routes that I lost track of how he finally did manage to escape. I could make similar remarks about all the descriptions of the town we get as Lovecraft moves the narrator about it. Though I knew the narrator had a map, I felt lost through much of his travels.

The amount of “telling” in this piece is another aspect I found somewhat off-putting. Though I realize Lovecraft’s style is/was illustrative of the time in which he lived and wrote, it was difficult to overcome my contemporary biases as well as everything I’ve been told about showing as opposed to telling. I wonder how much of this story might have been edited out of this work had it been published more recently. Having said all that, there was to some degree a nice balance of showing versus telling. There was just so much of both that I found the telling at least to be overwhelming

In conclusion, after having spent so much time pointing out what I didn’t care for, here’s more of what I liked about this work. I enjoyed the premise very much. I loved the historical feel. By that I don’t mean the actual period during which the action took place, rather I mean the amount of history the narrator learns about Innsmouth first from the station ticket agent, later from Miss Anna Tilton and the young grocery store clerk, and finally from old Zadok Allen. I thought the ending of the story was brilliant, when the narrator realizes why it was said he had “Marsh eyes” and decides to accept and even embrace his fate. It was a great plot twist mostly in that I didn’t see it coming.

Of all the Lovecraft we’ve read so far in the course, I’d say this was my second favorite. I liked “The Thing on the Doorstep” slightly more.