I just finished rereading Shadow over Innsmouth and holy mother of pearl, I'd forgotten how hard some of that story was to get through.
I'm gearing up to make a series of videos about it, and I just thought I'd see what the rest of you thought about the story.
The main theme of the story is that other is bad, scary, and evil. And it taps this button almost every paragraph. The entire plot of the story is relayed through two layers of first person voice, as if Lovecraft wanted desperately to capture some essence of Heart of Darkness, but it ultimately becomes tiresome and, frankly, a little silly, because every character the narrator talks to has a twenty-minute soliloquy about how creepy the town is. And the framing for the story is just... oof. We start by learning that he's traveling through Innsmouth on what is essentially an accident and has never heard of the place, and end by learning that he's descended from fish-frogs, is acquiring the dreaded "Innsmouth Look" and somehow manages to skip taking the oaths of Dagon to go live forever under the ocean.
And yet.
And yet, I got to that final line, where the narrator's overwritten voice suddenly works, where we get a sense of this insane blood-bound cultist slowly turning into a murloc, and walked away mostly happy about what I'd read.
The story has strange power. Almost nothing about it works, but that final line ties together the story, holes and pitfalls all, so nicely that reading about adjective-shadowed Innsmouth becomes a mostly pleasant memory.
How the hell does that even work?
I'm gearing up to make a series of videos about it, and I just thought I'd see what the rest of you thought about the story.
The main theme of the story is that other is bad, scary, and evil. And it taps this button almost every paragraph. The entire plot of the story is relayed through two layers of first person voice, as if Lovecraft wanted desperately to capture some essence of Heart of Darkness, but it ultimately becomes tiresome and, frankly, a little silly, because every character the narrator talks to has a twenty-minute soliloquy about how creepy the town is. And the framing for the story is just... oof. We start by learning that he's traveling through Innsmouth on what is essentially an accident and has never heard of the place, and end by learning that he's descended from fish-frogs, is acquiring the dreaded "Innsmouth Look" and somehow manages to skip taking the oaths of Dagon to go live forever under the ocean.
And yet.
And yet, I got to that final line, where the narrator's overwritten voice suddenly works, where we get a sense of this insane blood-bound cultist slowly turning into a murloc, and walked away mostly happy about what I'd read.
The story has strange power. Almost nothing about it works, but that final line ties together the story, holes and pitfalls all, so nicely that reading about adjective-shadowed Innsmouth becomes a mostly pleasant memory.
How the hell does that even work?