Halloween Special: H. P. Lovecraft

It would be incorrect to describe Howard Phillips Lovecraft as a troubled man. It seems more like he's a bundle of trouble walking around in a more or less bipedal approximation of a man. Chronically depressed, hypersensitive to criticism, almost certainly agoraphobic, prone to terrible nightmares and nervous breakdowns, and downright racist, even by the standards of the time. It would be easy to conclude that HP Lovecraft was simply afraid of everything, but that's not true either. He was simply afraid of anything other than his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. Lovecraft is known for codifying the Lovecraftian horror mythos: a cosmology he created whose central themes are cosmic horror, unknowable evil old gods, and anything that smells vaguely fishy.

Lovecraft's writings are known today for an overwhelming sense of sheer desperate terror in the face of an unfeeling cosmos, wrapped in visceral descriptions of omnipresent rot and decay. All themes that make perfect sense if you compare them with Lovecraft's life story, which was a downward depressive spiral from the first minute. Lovecraft was born in 1890 into one of those well-to-do New England families who still considered themselves respectable English semi-gentry, an image that was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain due to their continued financial decline. Lovecraft attended school intermittently, but never completed his education. He had access to a decent library of excellent scientific texts, but was too weak at mathematics and therefore unable to advance beyond the basics in any area of ​​scientific study, reflecting his deep misunderstanding of non-Euclidean geometry. and non-visible light. and the concept of air conditioning is explained.

His mother was admitted in 1918, but unfortunately we have no idea what was really wrong with her, because medicine at the time tended to diagnose only women with hysteria, or the disease of "femininity." When she died in 1921, Lovecraft took it very hard, became deeply depressed, and began writing The Call of Cthulhu, one of the first stories to introduce themes of existential horror into the evolution of her mythos. Lovecraft's lack of marketable skills ceased to be a problem when, in 1924, he married a businesswoman and moved into his wife's Brooklyn apartment, which he hated most, e

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ly since New York is one of those places where immigrants are found. .

Oh yes...racism. Lovecraft's New England upbringing was a great source of pride for him, and in fact, all of his stories have classist and racist themes, with his heroes being educated white people without phonetically transcribed accents, and his villains being literally all of them. . Racism being old English, it cared less about skin color and more about upbringing in general, so there are also some white villains, albeit uneducated, inbred and poor, but it's no coincidence that many of their horrors come from people that intersect. with other races. This may be partly due to Lovecraft's obvious discomfort and disinterest in all things sexual, but there's also a lot of racism involved in it.

Lovecraft was eventually overwhelmed by the horrors of the outside world and returned to Providence, living off a dwindling inheritance for the rest of his life and dying almost unknowingly of colon cancer at the age of 46. In short, an unpleasant life, full of daily misery and paralyzed by fear. In the context of Lovecraft's overwhelming disgust and horror for everything he did not understand, almost all of his work becomes clear. What makes Lovecraftian horror, and keeps it popular, is the overwhelming fear of the unknown, a concept that translates easily even as the "unknown" changes with social and scientific advances.

Although Lovecraft's works have not aged well at all, the underlying principle is sound: if you don't fully understand something, you can interpolate existential horror, turning each mystery into a nightmare of things man should not know. And aside from that, the horror aesthetic he chose is also quite effective in itself. Lovecraft's overwhelming fear of the ocean created a memorable and viscerally unpleasant horror aesthetic, based on slime and rot, that was a far cry from the cold, stony sterility of the earlier gothic horror genre. So let's take a look at some of the genre-defining short stories of Lovecraft's darkest nightmares in "Horrible Phobias." The Call of Cthulhu is conceived as a personal account of Francis Wayland Thurston, whose adventure into the unknown begins when he reviews the notes left by his great-uncle George Angell, a Brown professor who recently died under mysterious circumstances.

The notes describe a series of interactions between Angell and Henry Anthony Wilcox, an artist and noted airhead who recently began dreaming about ancient sunken cities. An earthquake shook New England on February 28, and that night Henry had a crazy dream in which he was navigating a creepy ancient city covered in green slime and hieroglyphics, and from deep within the structure a very creepy voice sounded saying something. about "Cthulhu in a language he didn't understand. Angell is disproportionately concerned about this dream and asks if Henry might be part of a cult. But Henry is just your average decent New England artist who dreams of things beyond the reach of man.

New dreams come to him every day, all in the same city, but sometimes in different parts of it, and with the same creepy voice saying creepy things Until one day, March 23, it doesn't come anymore, because. It seems that Henry has become very ill and delirious because of a huge monster. Nine days later, Henry abruptly improves and stops dreaming completely. Angell conducts a survey and asks a large group of people what their dreams were like during the period in which they dreamed. that Henry was acting so strange. He discovers that the ordinary working class didn't mind, that scientists had occasional nightmares, and that artists and poets were almost incapable of living normally because of their nightmares.

Many of them dreamed of the same city as Henry, along with the same sinister song that he told. Between February 28 and April 2 there was a worldwide surge in madness, mania, and general unrest. That's creepy in itself, but it turns out that Angell asked Henry about the cult's activities for a reason. This was not his first encounter with the name Cthulhu. 17 years earlier, in 1908, Angell is attending an academic archeology meeting, when tough New Orleans cop Inspector Legrasse invades the party with a creepy ancient figure they recently confiscated from a particularly nasty cult, and they want to know what is. half.

The statue looks like a strange thing that is half human, half octopus and half dragon. Archaeologists pass it, but no one can identify the culture of origin and no one can read the signs. But one man claims that he has dealt with a tribe of devil worshipers who worshiped a similar figure. When asked how he obtained this image, Legrasse explains that they had heard from the friendly swamp residents of New Orleans that strange things were happening in the swamp and that their women and children were being kidnapped. The police raided the party and found a large number of very naked cult members dancing around a burning monolith with the statue on top, surrounded by the extremely dead corpses of all the kidnapped swamp dwellers.

Oh, but don't worry, 1920s New England readers, I know you'll want to know the exact ethnicity and skin color of these cult members before you make any moral judgments. Don't worry, Lovecraft has you covered. We have some Native Americans, some Black people, some biracial people, some ethnically ambiguous people by taste, and basically anyone who is definitely not white. I won't say that Lovecraft has gotten any more subtle about his deep hatred and terror of anyone with a skin color darker than Pantone 727, but this is probably the most comprehensive thing he's ever written. In any case, Lovecraft's charming and diverse death cult explains that they worship the Great Old Ones, ancient gods who predate humanity and are currently dead, but still dream and can communicate with humanity through their dreams, thus facilitating the formation of this ancient world. possible worship.

The Elders are currently being held in the ancient city of R'lyeh, which sank into the ocean some time ago, making it difficult for them to psychically encounter humanity. Cthulhu is the name of one of the Elders, specifically the one who babysits everyone else while they are dead and waiting for the stars to align so they can return. So our narrator Francis understands why Angell was so scared to hear Cthulhu's name, 17 years after dealing with the murderous cult, but he's pretty sure it was some kind of prank and decides to investigate for himself. He also begins to suspect that Angell may have been murdered by the cult, because he ran into a black man shortly before his death!

I can't emphasize enough how difficult it is to read this today. After checking Angell's contacts to develop the story, he finds a newspaper article from the same era as Henry's crazy dreams, which mentions an abandoned ship found at sea with a survivor on board. A man named Johansen, who you know you can trust because he is Norwegian or very white. According to the article, Johansen claimed that the ship was attacked by a yacht full of suspicious people who were not white, but they managed to kill them all, board the yacht, and sail the original course, ending up on an island called Not Appearing on Any Map.

Six crew members died somehow, and Johansen and another managed to return to the ship, after which the other also died. Francisco is crisscrossing the world to try to find Johansen, who died tragically recently, but he conveniently left behind a pile of notes to examine. Hurrah! So the notes are really just Johansen's horrible memories of his ordeal, filling in what the newspaper left out. The ship lands on an island that's not supposed to exist, surprise surprise, the top of R'lyeh, and during their exploration the sailors notice that the island is extremely creepy because all of the architecture is non-Euclidean.

For those of you with a background in Lovecraftian geometry, non-Euclidean geometry is simply geometry on a curved surface. Since we live on a globe, all of our geometry is non-Euclidean. Anyway, despite the terrifying geometry of the island, the sailors press on, until they come across a very large door. Following video game logic, the sailors agree that opening this big door is a fun idea, and surprise, surprise, out comes Cthulhu. How nice to do the sect's work for them, geniuses! Then two of the sailors die of fear, one trips in a corner and falls across the map, and three of them are crushed.

Johansen and another man are chased by Cthulhu, and once on the ship, Johansen, brave snow-white Norwegian, turns the ship around and rams the chasing Cthulhu right in his big jelly face. It smells terrible, there's gelatin everywhere, but when the ship pulls back, Cthulhu is seen recovering again. Because if you could kill an Elder God the same way you kill a Disney villain, most Lovecraft stories would have a very different tone. Anyway, Johansen's hair turns white from shock, his crewmate stared at Cthulhu too long and went crazy, and that's where the story ends. R'lyeh has apparently sunk back under the sea since the island disappeared, and Francis concludes the story by reflecting that now that he knows so much about Cthulhu, his evil death cult is likely to come after him at any moment.

Oh no! How can you function in polite society if you're wildly paranoid and think every non-white person you know might try? I'm just kidding. It's rural America in the 1920s. No one will notice. “Cool Air” was written while Hippo Potamus Lovecraft was living in New York City, so it is set in a busy apartment building full of immigrants, every element of which the narrator hates. Worse yet, one night something unpleasant begins to leak through the ceiling, and the landlady explains that a lonely and mysterious doctor, confined to the house by a permanent illness, lives in the apartment above and needs one of his chemicals to have been spilled. .

The knowledge that his upstairs neighbor is a doctor becomes relevant when our narrator suffers a heart attack one day and goes upstairs to receive free medical care. He discovers that his neighbor, Doctor Muñoz, is a very decent and well-groomed guy, whom our narrator considers to be of superior blood and race, but for some reason he keeps his apartment very cold and also inexplicably creepy. he talks the entire time he treats our narrator, but apparently never pauses to breathe. Bet on it, people! Anyway, Muñoz tells the narrator not to get too discouraged by his poor health, because modern science is incredible and the bodyhuman can function almost indefinitely.maintain.

He himself has had a complex series of medical problems over the past 18 years, which is why he keeps his apartment so cold and rarely goes out. (Fun fact: This story was written a few years after air conditioning began to become widespread in major U.S. cities, which is why Muñoz takes the time to explain exactly how his air conditioning system works. cooling and also why Hates Progress Lovecraft is so afraid of it). Regardless, the narrator enjoys such interesting company and returns periodically for visits and conversations, although he notices that the doctor's health continues to deteriorate and adjusts the air conditioning more and more madly to compensate.

He ends up looking so creepy that he gives a hardened war veteran a fit just by looking at him. In short, the boy at home's face is very strange. On a warm night in mid-October, the air conditioning breaks down and the doctor goes crazy and locks himself in the bathroom while he sends the narrator to bring him as much ice as possible and fix the air pump. The narrator subcontracts a guy to bring him ice cream while he looks for repairmen, but when he returns home it's total chaos. Apparently the iceman became curious and looked inside the bathroom, before running out of the building screaming.

Upon investigation, a trail of God knows what leads from the bathtub to the desk and then ends up in a pile of something horrible on the couch. It's so terrible that the narrator doesn't even want to describe it, trying to preserve the horror of the unknown, even though we all know now that he is the Doctor. Anyway, he wrote a final confession about how he has been dead for 18 years and has avoided decomposition through cold and many chemicals, but now, thanks to the failure of modern technology, death has finally come for him. Hurrah! At this point, most of us learn the basics of the electromagnetic spectrum at some point in high school.

You have that small area of ​​visible light and then a huge amount of radiation that our eyes can't detect, from gamma rays to radio waves. Because we can only see such a small part of the spectrum, our concept of color is very limited compared to the full spectrum of light, but we are trapped in it. But if you told Lovecraft about the wide spectrum of light that humans can't see, he would put on a funny look and say something like, "You mean there are colors that man has never seen? What could they be capable of?" ? and began writing "Color Out of Space," a story about a color of visible light, which does not occur anywhere in the visible spectrum.

This is what happens when you "have no constitution for mathematics anyway." , the narrator of “The Color Out Of Space” is a supervisor who is investigating an area in the middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts because they plan to build a reservoir there. During his wanderings he comes to an area called "destroyed heather." but nothing grew back. The trees at the edges are sick and rotten, all the plants are growing strangely, there is an inexplicably creepy hole in the middle, and the narrator wisely decides to return to the city and asks some NPCs to help him. inform about regional tradition.

Coincidentally, the area has a crazy old man, always a gold mine of information in a Lovecraft story. This one is called Ammi Pierce, who likes to entertain him with colorful horror stories. So the story begins with a meteorite crashing into the well on the quiet, charming forest estate of one Nahum Gardner; a friendly farmer with an idyllic and charming family. Some people from nearby Miskatonic University come to examine the meteorite and are surprised by its small size. Nahum says that he has shrunk since he landed, and also that he glows in the dark and hasn't cooled down since the impact.

The Miskatonic people try to decompose some samples, but discover that the meteorite is soft like plastic and sprouts instead of breaking apart. They take it away for testing and then come back for more because the material reacts very strangely to everything they do with it and also disappears completely overnight. While excavating another section, they struck a small bell in the rock. It is a small sphere embedded with a "mysterious color unlike anything seen on Earth." and when they hit it with a hammer, it explodes and disappears. The next day they return in search of more meteors, but they have completely disappeared.

A storm raged overnight and struck the rock with lightning more than half a dozen times, apparently causing it to cease to exist. Of course, Nahum becomes an instant celebrity thanks to the magic stone, and as a bonus, all of his crops grow really big and shiny. But when it comes time to harvest them, Nahum discovers that they are not edible. They have an unpleasant aftertaste "like no other on earth!" and they have to throw away the entire harvest. The farm animals also start acting strange. Nahum's family is nervous and everyone avoids the farm as they silently realize that what the meteor has done is not good.

All the trees begin to bloom in "mysterious colors like you've never seen before" and seem to move on their own without wind. The Gardner family locks themselves in the farm and suffers a collective and silent nervous breakdown. No one is even surprised when Mrs. Gardner goes crazy and is locked in the attic, and she begins to glow in the dark. Just go! All the plants in the area begin to turn gray and disintegrate, and although Pierce warns the Gardeners that the spring water is starting to taste suspicious, they continue drinking it anyway. Then one of the kids goes crazy and starts screaming about "colors in the well, apart from-" and they lock him in the attic too.

Then the crazy boy dies and the younger boy disappears one night when he goes to get water. After two weeks of radio silence, Pierce finally dares to check on Nahum and finds him sick, delirious, and very alone. Pierce goes to see his wife and finds something indescribably hideous curled up in a corner that "exudes mysterious colors like nothing on Earth." and he dismisses her as quite dead. As he goes down the stairs, he hears some unpleasant noises, plus a splash, coming from the well outside. He also notices that the house now glows in the dark and discovers that a very disintegrated Nahum has crawled to the bottom of the stairs for a last-minute explanation.

He explains that the "mysterious color, etc., etc." He is alive and well in the well, absorbing the life of everything around him. It came from the meteorite, those strange colored balls were probably seeds, and they feed on the family and their farm as they grow. Anyway, Nahum dies and Pierce runs off to report the deaths. He returns with some researchers, they investigate the well and find a bunch of skeletons, including the two missing children, plus some strange spongy matter at the bottom "like nothing ever seen before" and then everything starts going crazy. The horses go crazy, the trees go crazy, everything starts glowing, and the group wisely decides to leave the area before anything else happens.

As they leave the light beam, they see a large amount of "mysterious colors like no other" coming out of the pit, and then the entire area lights up and the light shoots into space, leaving nothing but the destroyed heather. But Pierce reveals one last piece of horror. When the light faded, he saw a fainter patch of light as he tried and failed to escape the pit before falling back down. He is still down there, which is why he is so surprised and also so happy that the area will soon be completely flooded. The narrator, completely shocked, decides to never drink the water from this reservoir and also briefly considers whether Pierce is still affected by the horrible color and whether that would explain why he never left the area.

If there's one thing Lovecraft hates more than non-white people, it's the crushing existential terror he feels every time he leaves the house. If there's one thing he hates a little less, it's lower-class white people. This story has no narrator and takes place entirely in the rural town of Dunwich, Massachusetts, a smelly old town that is generally creepy and repulsive. The story begins when Wilbur Whateley is born on February 2, 1913, the son of Lavinia Whateley, an albino, deformed, inbred woman who likes to wander the hills and hang out in creepy stone circles. His father is Old Whateley, sometimes called "Wizard" Whateley, due to his large collection of spooky occult books.

And who Wilbur's father is... That's not very clear, and old Whateley is ominously cryptic about the whole thing. But this is Lovecraft's cryptic, so it doesn't take a genius to figure out from his mutterings that Wilbur's father is something called Yog-Sothoth. Shortly after Wilbur's birth, the Whateleys close one of the barns and also start buying a lot of cows, although strangely they never seem to have many cows, and the cows they do have look very anemic and have strange spots on their necks. Okay, deploy everyone. Wilbur is growing abnormally fast and can talk and walk at 11 months.

But he is also super ugly, goaty and neurotic for never having been seen naked. And dogs hate him, so you know he's bad. So old Whateley continues to repair the house, and at one point built a large ramp to the second floor from the outside. This is also around the same time the closed shed opens. The story pretends this is a mystery, but we all know there is something unspeakable in the barn and Wheatley moved it into the house. Understood? Okay, let's move on. Wilbur is four years old but looks ten and carries a gun to shoot all the dogs that attack him every day.

In case you're wondering if you'll like him. People also hear mysterious noises coming from the locked second floor of the Whateley house, you know, where they took that horrible thing out of the shed. What a mistery. Anyway, twice a year Wilbur and Lavinia perform strange rituals on one of the nearby hills with a stone circle. Wilbur and old Whateley continue renovating the house, by which I mean they tear down all the walls on the second floor because that horrible thing keeps getting bigger and bigger and then old Whateley has some kind of seizure and dies, but not before explain in The Longest Death Monologue Ever About How Wilbur Should Be Careful Of The "Thing In The House!" and then he will be able to "open the doors to Yog-Sothoth with the chant found on page 751 of his textbook." Anyway, he dies, Wilbur continues to grow rapidly, and Lavinia is now very afraid of him.

She disappears one Halloween, probably because of the giant, horrible monster in the Whateley house (just a guess, of course), and Wilbur moves all the stuff into the shed and knocks down all the remaining walls of the house for reasons I can't figure out. understand. possibly breaststroke. Anyway, Wilbur, who now looks like an adult and is about three meters tall, seems to be a little desperate. He has a copy of the Necronomicon, but it is damaged, incomplete, and missing the crucial page 751. So he searches for an intact copy. When he goes to Miskatonic University, the librarian, Dr.

Armitage looks over his shoulder as he looks at the page and sees a lot of useful information about the Ancients and how they exist in the spaces between reality and that this Yog-Sothoth is the key and the gatekeeper and the Ancients. Those who are outside can reach the spaces between reality. Armitage is very surprised and when Wilbur asks to take the book, Armitage refuses and also warns all the other universities in the area to reject him. Armitage immediately begins investigating Wilbur and the Elders, and while he does so, an increasingly desperate Wilbur breaks into Miskatonic University to steal the Necronomicon.

Unfortunately, Wilbur comes into contact with the university's guard dog, who absolutely kills him, and upon finding Wilbur dying, the horrible truth is revealed... He looks... really dirty. The only human parts of him are his face and his hands. His chest and back are scaly and below his waist he is completely crazy, covered in black fur, with strange mouth tentacles hanging from his waist, eyeballs on his hips, a proboscis on his tail, and crazy pads on his paws. Wilbur dies muttering something about Yog-Sothoth, and his body completely disintegrates, revealing to the horrified onlookers that he apparently had no bones.

Anyway, everyone is already pretty scared, but on the night of September 9th, about a month after shit happened at Miskatonic University, things went wrong in Dunwich when what was growing in the house Whateley's became too big and too hungry to stay where it was, and is now rampaging through the town. And he is also invisible, which doesn't make it easier for anyone. Back at Miskatonic University, Armitage and the other professors are trying to decipher Wilbur's journal and figure out what's going on with the monster he keeps talking about, when he disappears.They find out through an innocent newspaper article that it has been released.

They then head to Dunwich to discover that the monster has crushed and devoured at least one family home and spends its days lurking in the Glen and its nights out to feed. A quick recount suggests that the local cops went to Glen to harass the monster and got eaten, but the teachers are much better prepared. Armitage has some Latin spells, Rice has a bug syringe full of magic juice that shouldn't be invisible, and Morgan just brought a really big gun. That night nothing happens, but the next day the monster eats another farm and Armitage gathers the men to go after it.

When they see him moving on the hill, Armitage and the other teachers separate from their group of terrified villagers, who are observing the events through a telescope. The unlucky one who has the telescope sees the now visible monster and immediately, but descriptively, panics and starts shouting adjectives. Anyway, as they watch, they see the teachers go to the stone circle and shout something in Latin, and the monster responds with a bunch of shouts about Yog-Sothoth in a language other than English, before switching to English to shout. he helps before he is struck by lightning and disappears. The professors return and explain in general terms that the monster couldn't exist in normal reality because it was half-Yog-Sothoth, so they "conjured" it out of existence.

Anyway, Mr. "I looked through the telescope and saw the face of madness" starts yelling that the monster had a huge face and looked like the Whateleys. And yes, the big plot twist is that the giant monster is Wilbur's twin. brother although she looked much more like his father. Most of Lovecraft's narrators, if they exist, are horrified spectators of an otherwise very distant nightmare. They find notes about it, interview people who experienced it, or live next door to the monster and miss all the excitement. Written near the end of Lovecraft's life and long after his return to Providence, The Shadow Over Innsmouth seriously deviates from its form in that the narrator and main character, Robert Olmstead, follows the action closely and is, in fact, personally involved in the story.

So the story begins with Robert warning us that he is breaking a long government-imposed silence about what exactly happened in Innsmouth in 1927, and you'll see why he breaks that silence when he explains what's going on. His story begins with a tour of New England, where his mother is from, trying to get in touch with his roots and explore his family tree a little. But since he doesn't have money or is frugal, he tries to take the cheapest route, and that's how he initially hears about Innsmouth. There is a very cheap bus route that runs through it, mainly because no one goes there.

The man explaining this tells Robert, unprompted, and goes on for pages, that Innsmouth used to be a decent town, but has recently fallen into decline after a nasty epidemic wiped out much of the population. . All they do is fish, except a gold refinery run by an old Marsh, who is the grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who supposedly traded a lot with the South Sea Islanders and perhaps married one of them, although he is confusingly worded. is. The local people are ashamed and hiding their Innsmouth heritage, and although the exhibition indicates that all of Marsh's descendants appear quite normal, Old Man Marsh himself is said to have developed some form of skin condition or deformity in his old age. .

Innsmouth has many old and unpleasant rumors, including devil worship and some tell of a very spooky reef in Innsmouth Harbor called Devil's Reef. The exhibitionist says that most of the hate is probably racial prejudice, but he can't say that he disagrees. So, congratulations on the self-awareness, I guess? Anyway, he says most of the people in Innsmouth look funny, with big bulging eyes and stuff, and they go bald very young. Deploy to all. So yes, Innsmouth is strange and private and they don't like strangers, but the bus is very cheap, so what do you do about it?

Robert investigates some more and finds some strange-looking gold jewelry with strange ocean motifs and humanoid fish-frog monsters. The curator says the Marsh family is still trying to recover this piece of jewelry and she suspects it is part of a shadowy horde of pirates that Obed encountered centuries ago. He also explains that rumors of devil worship are not completely unfounded, as locals have apparently taken to worshiping Dagon, who in actual mythology is a Mesopotamian god of grain and fertility, but in Lovecraft's land is a nightmare between fish, demons and nightmares. Anyway, our hero Robert "what's the alarms" Olmstead gets on the bus the next day and is immediately freaked out by the bus driver, who is decidedly ugly.

Big bulging eyes, sunken forehead and chin, general fishy appearance and also smells very bad. It's probably nothing. Anyway, Robert begins his walk through Innsmouth and finds the place very creepy, very smelly, very empty and very unwelcoming. He notices that almost everyone seems as suspicious as the bus driver and goes into a store to try to find anyone who looks somewhat normal. Luckily, the merchant is a normal 17-year-old boy from Arkham, Massachusetts, who also doesn't feel comfortable in the city. He warns Robert to be careful where he wanders and to stay away from churches. He also adds some explanation that the other man missed.

The older ones always seem much meaner than the younger ones and, despite spending a lot of time in the town, he doesn't actually know any of the people in Innsmouth. They are all alone. In fact, the only person from whom Robert can get much of an explanation is Zadok Allen, a normal-looking 96-year-old man who spends his days wandering around the city, getting very drunk and muttering ominously to himself. The merchant, fulfilling his role as the video game's NPC, draws a letter for Robert and sends him away. Robert finds Zadok, lures him to a deserted area of ​​town with a bottle of alcohol, and makes him talk.

Zadok is a drunken fountain of explanations. Hooray, more of this! -and starts from the beginning with stories of Obed Marsh, who begins his exploits by sailing to a South Sea island, on which, he heard, there was disproportionately good fishing and luxurious but spooky gold jewelry. Obed discovers that these people sacrifice their young men and women to a kind of underwater community of fish and receive all kinds of favors in return, including fish and gold. The fish also come to the surface twice a year to mate with humans, after being told that their offspring will first look human, but will gradually become more fish-like until they become full-fledged fish and can live completely submerged. .

And if you're a fish, you're immortal unless you're killed outright, which is a pretty good deal. At this point you can close the book because you've basically discovered Innsmouth, but just for fun, let's focus on the story. Obed then carries on a very lucrative trade with this island for years, until one year he returns to find the island completely destroyed by the neighboring islands, who had found out about his pranks with The Shape of Water and burned them to the ground. This is bad for Obed because his other trade routes aren't doing as well and if he stops bringing in money, Innsmouth will stop prospering, so Obed uses some of the things he learned from the people of Fish Island to make contact with some fish. people just off the coast of Innsmouth, on Devil's Reef in fact, and renounce the Christian God to worship Dagon and collect fish and gold.

Of course, this is not a unilaterally positive decision, e

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ly given the series of disappearances necessary to maintain the fish business, and after a while the townspeople rebel and Obed and his cult are arrested. A few weeks later, however, the fishermen leave the port and descend on the city, enraged by the lack of sacrifices. They wipe out over half the city, which is the so-called epidemic in the history books, and Obed takes control and goes completely crazy, leading to things like "starts fucking the fish people." Zadoc mentions how Obed took a second wife who is clearly a fishmonger because she literally was never seen in public, and they had three children together.

One of them seemed completely normal, was educated in Europe and went to live and marry in Arkham. In reality, she is the only one who has left Innsmouth. Anyway, Obed eventually died, but Old Man Marsh is still very much alive and a complete transformation is probably only a few years away. Zadok becomes increasingly manic and tells Robert that the fish are up to something and that they are pulling things out of the water and hiding them in the old abandoned houses. He also mentions shoggoths, a Lovecraftian phenomenon that are basically large monsters with many eyes and mouths.

Anyway, Zadok goes crazy because he sees something swimming toward shore, orders Robert to leave town because now they know he knows too much, and then runs into town screaming and is never seen again. Robert nervously returns to the bus, but everything is fine. Suddenly, the bus has an engine problem and Robert has no choice but to spend the night at the Gilman Hotel. The Gilman..."Gill man"... Okay... So Robert gets a room, but he's too full of adrenaline to rest, partly because they unlatched his door and he needed some time to get back to place it.

Which is good, because a few hours into his stay he hears someone trying to get into his room. At this point, Robert wisely decides it's time to make a quick getaway and manages to escape through a window, while a growing horde of not-quite-human-looking people try to break down the doors. Robert reaches street level and sees a large crowd of suspicious-looking people with flashlights coming out of the hotel, clearly looking for him, but with no idea where he has gone. So he tries to find his way out of the city Metal Gear style, and when he realizes they'll block his escape route, he decides to follow the abandoned train tracks to Arkham and hope they're not guarded.

He imitates the movement of the Innsmouth fish to avoid attracting attention and manages to reach the trail before having to hide in the undergrowth to avoid a large and very inhuman procession of completely fished Innsmouth people looking for him. Overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of it all, Robert passes out and wakes up the next morning, fortunately not dead, after which he flies to Arkham, cleans himself up, and goes straight to the authorities. What follows is a series of raids on Innsmouth, with many arrests and at least one torpedo fired at Devil's Reef. But while all this is happening, Robert isn't done yet.

He does some genealogy research and discovers that that daughter of Marsh's who married some guy from Arkham was actually his great-grandmother and that he is part fishman. He begins to have strange dreams in which he communicates with his grandmother and great-grandmother, a fish woman, who tell him that his destiny is to live in luxury under the sea with them until the day they rise, consume the surface world and worship. to the Old Man. Some as they return. Surprisingly, Robert agrees, and when he wakes up and discovers that he has been given the distinctive appearance of Innsmouth, he decides to do it as quickly as possible and also free a cousin of his who was committed to a sanatorium four years ago and who resigned due to a disfiguring illness. which he now understands was nothing more than the puberty of fish.

I can't help but feel that this story would have been written very differently in today's fish culture.