A review by hb_bookworm
H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth by Gou Tanabe

4.0

gou tanabe's adaptations are the only way i want to read lovecraft. you get all the creeping cosmic horror without having to spend quite so much time in lovecraft's head/with his words, and the illustrations are stunning. tanabe does an excellent job capturing tension with the layout of his pages, sharply contrasting shadows, and unsettling imagery. i'll be thinking about that picture of the man hunched over the door with spiky shadows on the wall for a while. as i understand it, the whole point of a lot of lovecraft's work is that the beings are supposed to be unfathomable/you see it and you go mad, and I think adapting that can be pretty hit or miss. tanabe finds an excellent way to convey this by making the images both physically hard to look at and incredibly compelling. there's a staticky grid overlay on each panel, and the images themselves are grotesque. the detail is so fine and small and draws you to look closer to comprehend what's happening. many scenes - and not just those depicting the crowds of sea monsters - seem to move and writhe on the page. i was much more impressed by this one than the mountains of madness adaptation, and I'll definitely read more.