eleanorfranzen 's review for:

The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft

---

[Sort of spoilers follow] This is part of a huge Lovecraft Collected Works I bought for 37 p, which I’m reading through slowly. It would be hard to be an even marginally active reader, let alone one of speculative and horror fiction, and not be at least a little bit aware of what the shadow over Innsmouth actually is. Lovecraft’s racism, which I remember finding distinctly absent from At the Mountains of Madness, is rather more in evidence here: the fears and anxieties he evokes are clearly those of miscegenation and racial mixing, although I would argue that it is far more reasonable not to want to inter-breed with fish-frog creatures than it is to be racist about a mixed-race marriage. (Of course, the fact that Lovecraft clearly considers them analogous tells us all we need to know about his position re. the humanity of non-white people.) Something that always fascinates me about discussions of this kind of fiction—fiction that posits a kind of third, part-human race, and is repelled by it—is that it rarely seems to acknowledge rape. Most specifically, this happens when people talk about Tolkien’s Orcs. There are various accounts of their development (Tolkien wrote two or three, mutually exclusive, versions). None of them are really possible without accepting the presence of, at minimum, sexual coercion; logistically, it’s far more likely that there were rape camps. Yet Tolkien never mentions these, and neither do his critics. The same is true for the Innsmouth villagers: yes, it’s horrifying that their town fathers made this unholy bargain, but isn’t it more horrifying for the town’s young people, who were forced into planned inter-breeding by the power their fathers and grandfathers held in the social hierarchy, with no meaningful ability to consent or dissent? I don’t think that’s Lovecraft’s point at all, but that’s where the horror of Innsmouth comes from for me. The best part of this novella, as a set-piece, is the narrator’s nighttime escape from the dingy town hotel as a baying mob of villagers attempt to murder him; that really is chilling. If you read it as a portrayal of an evaded lynching—which is not an unreasonable reading for the 1930s—it throws an even more curious light on Lovecraft’s racial politics.