A Look at Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth

[ChrisTheLovableJerk]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E3Y8vogX90[/youtube]

Fun Fact: Nintendo Published a game based on this story (or an early 90's TV show based on it) back in the mid-90's but it never saw a release outside of Japan. It was on the freaking Virtual Boy. Yes, Lovecraft on the Virtual Boy.

[IronySandwich]

Yes, Lovecraft on the Virtual Boy.

Ah yes, horror beyond imagining, a tale of terror to strike fear into the bravest of men, pain and suffering unimaginable, and also Lovecraft.

[mystechj]

I liked the review, but a couple of points. Even for the time, Lovecraft's racism was extreme. Not to dismiss the eugenics movement or the culture of bigotry but he wasn't just a product of his time. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of his work, but I also am aware of his faults. Secondly, the mythos as it has come to be called was never so formal as all that. Lovecraft repeats motifs and names and places, but in the works, there isn't really much of a connecting thread. The commonalities hint at larger truths, but much like the horrors in the stories, they don't show much. I would argue that it is the ambiguity and inconsistency of the mythos that provides its power. You can speculate endlessly on the nature of the great old ones and other creatures that inhabit his stories.

[CrypticMirror]

I liked the review, but a couple of points. Even for the time, Lovecraft's racism was extreme. Not to dismiss the eugenics movement or the culture of bigotry but he wasn't just a product of his time. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of his work, but I also am aware of his faults. Secondly, the mythos as it has come to be called was never so formal as all that. Lovecraft repeats motifs and names and places, but in the works, there isn't really much of a connecting thread. The commonalities hint at larger truths, but much like the horrors in the stories, they don't show much. I would argue that it is the ambiguity and inconsistency of the mythos that provides its power. You can speculate endlessly on the nature of the great old ones and other creatures that inhabit his stories.

Yeah, old HPL was out there even by the standards of his time. The mythos thing was more a construct of Derleth who did a lot of organising things after HPL died, and did a lot of his own writing in the same general construct too. He also was a whole lot less racist, which is one of the reasons HPL's stories have made it to the present day. They might not have if the only person behind the whole thing was a racist as Lovecraft was.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I left The Shadow Over Innsmouth half-finished and only read a handful of his other short stories and novellas. My somewhat-informed opinion of him is also a pretty common one at this point of time. With that said-

Lovecraft deserves due credit for his ability to evoke a certain mood/atmosphere and for being a true pioneer. Of course we can find antecedents in Edgar Allen Poe and a few others, but the guy really did earn the use of his name as an adjective with his originality and distinctive style. Clearly Lovecraft provides something that plenty of horror/sci-fi/speculative fiction fans crave.

So for me, it's pretty unfortunate how mediocre his other qualities are. I'm not even as down on his prose as some critics, even if some of his syntactical and word choices are odd and very often seem to run in the same rut. My bigger issue is that the protagonists in the stories I've read are colorless and virtually indistinguishable, and the action of the plot tends to be "long-windedly recounted" rather than shown. There's an odd layer of separation between the plot itself and the way it's written. It could be argued that that ties into Lovecraft's overarching themes of unknowable terrors and the insufficiency of language, but it also can look suspiciously like awkward, clunky writing that's overly reliant on the author's single strength.

Then there's the whole racism issue. I'm normally fine with just accepting writers with crappy views who tell good stories, overlooking problematic passages, etc. But with Lovecraft it's arguably an inextricable strand of the DNA of his work, which makes it something that has to be addressed in a way I don't find necessary for many other writers.

[Rodan56]

I do feel it's important to understand WHY Lovecraft was racist, regardless of how extreme he was in his era. He was a fearful man, insular and guarded. You can't really deny or excuse any of it, but it came from somewhere. No one is just born like this, it has to start somewhere in order to get as bad as it does. Lovecraft led a sheltered life built on various phobias, knowing what made him what he became can help us better contextualize his work and properly analyze it overall.

For this reason, I highly recommend the documentary "Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown", featuring various experts on the man's work, including a number he probably would've done his best to avoid due to his bigotry and racism.You can find it online, but I do encourage buying it. It gives you a better loke at Lovecraft's life and helps you understand him, even if you can never truly excuse him.

Maybe I have slightly more empathy for him than I should. Lovecraft was a racist and far more extreme than some. The most I can say is that he was never in a position to hurt anyone, at least not directly. I like to think, had he lived long enough, he might have changed. No one stays the same person they are forever. But mostly I understand his fears, mainly his insular ones, about himself, his mind, about what he doesn't know and cannot know. I understand what it feels to be small, helpless, alone, like the world doesn't care. That doesn't excuse any of his racism, I've never blamed people of color or another religion for my problems or lot in life. I know I'm far better off than most but through no fault of my birth, only circumstance and luck. I'm not superior to anyone, but I do understand fear of things from within and without. One thing that terrifies me is not being able to remember everything, like I can't be sure if my life is real beyond a certain point. I can only remember so far back, everything is a blur. It frightens me because I can never be sure it is real, that anything before that truly happened.

That's the horror Lovecraft taps into, unfortunately he equated it more often with other cultures. Me... I know better. I just know it's the universe itself, no genetics or religious background required. Fear is universal, scrapegoats for it are a distraction. I suppose that's why other creatives who have gotten into the mythos have been so quick to discard the racial allegories. They were distracting from what was truly scary about Lovecraft's work. The nonsense about interracial breeding and the degeneration of man in Innsmouth can be more accurately transfered onto insular communities, isolated fearful townships and groups that judge outsiders harshly against their own kind. The Horror of Innsmouth works better as a town of bigots and racists than of so-called "race traitors" in modern times.

[Madner Kami]

Lovecraft's racism is fed and founded by his fear of the unknownable or disunderstandable, the very thing that als fed and founded his work. It's kinda unimaginable to have the later without the former, so you kinda have to just gloss it over when reading his stories. At least the man never actively assaulted anyone (to my knowledge), if that is a consolation.

[Coyote's Own]

I do feel it's important to understand WHY Lovecraft was racist, regardless of how extreme he was in his era. He was a fearful man, insular and guarded.

I wouldn't call HPL insular or guarded.
The traveled a lot around New England and had a large group of friends which who he corresponded.
He was also in turn and active member of what we today would call fandom being a editior for fan publications.
The idea of Lovecraft as a loner is contrary to evidence left behind by the man.

He was also deeply racist, in way that contradictory to many others of his characteristic.
HPL was a science buff (he was fascinated by Astronomy since an early age), keeping with science news.
Yet he wholeheartedly embraces scientific race theories that had been debunked long before his time.

[Rodan56]

I wouldn't call HPL insular or guarded.
The traveled a lot around New England and had a large group of friends which who he corresponded.
He was also in turn and active member of what we today would call fandom being a editior for fan publications.
The idea of Lovecraft as a loner is contrary to evidence left behind by the man.

He was also deeply racist, in way that contradictory to many others of his characteristic.
HPL was a science buff (he was fascinated by Astronomy since an early age), keeping with science news.
Yet he wholeheartedly embraces scientific race theories that had been debunked long before his time.

He travelled... at the behest of a woman he was courting at the time. Who, by the way, was Jewish. She left him eventually of course, because he was unwilling the change or ultimately leave his hometown. His own fault really. Innsmouth was written after this break up and when he returned to a more closed off look of the outside world.

To a degree that travel helped him become LESS paranoid of the outside world. But when I say guarded and insular, I don't mean he had no friends. He of course had friends. I mean he didn't really like many people outside of his very safe little corner of the world, and even then it was fairly limited.

There were many things that led him to embrace stuff that was quite clearly debunked. Being big on science does not mean you cannot come to very wrong conclusions or hold onto things that not true. As a less extreme example, how many people will throw a fit over dinosaurs having feathers? Even though they know it's true, they don't like to accept it. Obviously there were things in Lovecraft's life that convinced him that theories on genetics were real, despite everyone telling him they weren't. How many people have convinced themselves the world is flat no matter what evidence you show them?

None of this is a defense of his beliefs, it is simply a matter of trying to understand the why of his psyche. If you understand that, you can better understand who he was, why he wrote the stories he did and what they meant. And thus better recontextualize them in the modern era, with any luck expunging the racism along the way.

[Scififan]

Like Lt. Cable said in South Pacific concerning racism: "You have to be carefully taught".