"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" - H.P. Lovecraft (12-21 August)

It took me a while to make a solid impression about this one, I think because the first few pages (A4 - first chapter) are so loaded with stories about The Esoteric Order of Dagon, The Marsh Refinery, the Miskatonic University at Arkham, that I quickly forgot how the narrator had begun the story: "there was something unspeakable down below Devil Reef, and he was going to tell the truth of it."

Although the "matter-of-factly" tone of the conversation between the travel agent and the narrator kept these "horrors" at arm's length for a while, I was slowly absorbed by the language in which everything was told. Perhaps this has more to do with the books I've chosen to read lately than with my English proficiency, but it had been a while since I felt like looking up so many words in a dictionary (with pleasure), and not only that, but every detailed description gave me an overwhelmingly whole image of whatever the topic was. When describing the first tiara he encounters:

"Among these reliefs were fabulous (as if he didn't believe they were possibly real) monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity (describes both the physical appearance and the perceived spirit of the creatures) - half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory (of course, later one realizes it might have been his actual memory, but at this point I thought of these creatures being distantly connected with humans, thus the pseudomemory, and not actual memory), as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral (perhaps, inevitable? like genes one can't simply scratch out)"

This I enjoyed. A lot. Not a word is wasted. Had it been, for example, a George R.R. Martin story it could have easily taken him over a few hundred pages to narrate just the same. Of course, I think George R.R. Martin's case is different because his stories are largely based around extremely widespread and dense genealogies, a greatly expanding imagined geography and so on, so his sometimes-unnecessarily long descriptions serve another purpose - as in, you're already a few thousand pages into a same story, to read three hundred words describing the banquet that such and such morbid lord and lady were feasting their hostages with, doesn't seem like it's unnecessary anymore, really.

I felt this guy telling the story of Innsmouth was slightly more pedantic, maybe? Not witty like Tolkien, or incisive like Gaiman, but still as rich. I think I'll stick to what I said before about it: perhaps at the cost of making the narrator somewhat dull or lacking personality, not a word is wasted. Somewhat hand in hand, I had never felt so geographically well-located and oriented in a story as I did walking around Innsmouth: every time he stopped to describe his immediate surroundings I felt, at first a bit bored, but later thankful that I could turn around anywhere in Innsmouth and know, more accurately than usual, what I would be looking at.

Come to think about it, all of these meticulous descriptions seem somewhat off balance with the ending of the story. Assuming the narrator is telling everything in hindsight, after he has decided not to commit suicide and join "the deep ones", it seems a bit odd that his "narrator persona" actually conveys the dread and vertigo he feels when running from Innsmouth. Although he is an architect, isn't he? Measured, careful, precise.

Enough about style... I now realize it's hard to get rid of the dredges of boring academic analysis.

Along with all the careful descriptions and impressions packed with hints and connotations (when describing the Innsmouth locals one of the first times, he says "they seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding - despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of being". Wonderful.), one thing in particular I enjoyed about the story and the writing, and this is the only feature I can compare to other pieces I've read: I felt the sole purpose of the story is to build upon a single point of emotion.

The plot is not surprising - from the very beginning one knows there's some kind of terror in Innsmouth and that the narrator will have some sort of horrific (but not deadly) encounter with it, as he is alive to tell it now. The narrator (I'm tired of calling him the narrator now, and I looked up that his name is actually Robert Olmstead, so I'll call him Robert from now on) is a bit of an empty fictional character, which makes it easier for me, as a reader, to experience what he does - the fear, the tension. All other characters are only passers-by that build around the history of the place, but there are no intricate relations or anything. The core of the story is to build this impending and inevitable realization: the abhorrent and croaking horror within Robert.

Taking this realization of the horror within oneself a bit further, I read it as a modern horror-version of the myth of the wolf inside us all. After all, someone in the story also refers to these fish-frog-men as being all around the world, and being able to take over at any moment, if only they felt so inclined. I guess the oceanic associations are very useful not only because it is most unknown (I seem to remember reading that scientists know, presumably, proportionately more about visible outer space than about the deep seas) and mysterious, but also closer to all of us than, say, ideas about a "cosmic collective consciousness" or extra-terrestrial life or whatever. We all (think we) know the sea, but if we're daring or unfortunate enough (or fortunate, perhaps?) to try to dig below the surface, as Robert tried to do with Innsmouth, we might be surprised by what we find. After all, was it his own uncle who took it upon himself to do a similar trip years before, and also disappeared or committed suicide? But even after that, it doesn't seem to be a destructive nature they give in to. Yes, they're creepy and they chased him all around Innsmouth with no clear purpose, but that I remember, these "deep ones" weren't really guilty of anything else besides freaking visitors out. And, well, the disappeared tourists here and there could be attributed to them, but I'm inclined to think they disappeared because they somehow discovered their true calling, as Robert did.

Or that's what they would have you believe, I suppose.

(this is what http://quantumbranching.deviantart.com/ believes would happen, should Cthulu awaken and the deep ones arise. would definitely be more interesting than a zombie apocalypse, and seems much more realistic given sea level variations in the last decades, right? ...right? I am, however, more inclined to give in to them rather than planning all that military defence nonsense)

The only story that comes to mind (as I had never read any horror literature before, besides another Lovecraft short-story) is the poem "The Raven" (Edgar A. Poe), in which, similarly, the core purpose (that I could discern, at least), was to express this ever-growing and all-consuming feeling of loss - the irreparable void that comes after losing a loved one.

Of course, Lovecraft does build much more than just "disgust", "grotesqueness", fish-frog men and the stench of the sea around this, and yes, there is a well elaborated imagery around the myth of Cthulu, and The Esoteric Order of Dagon, and Innsmouth, and Arkham. But reading the story by itself, I felt that this creeping realization was something enjoyable in and of itself, and for me, that was the marrow of it.

And now I realize that I don’t practice what I myself appreciate: this ecology of language that I appreciated in Lovecraft. Here I am, two pages later (A4), having covered only two of the points we said we’d cover... I’ll try to persuade you that it’s OK because this is the first one we publish, but you’ll decide whether you forgive my carelessness or not. Maybe the following, as an epigraph, will serve to justify some of my opinions above, at some level, in spite of this transition completely devoid of delicacy.

At the moment I am spending the summer back where my biological family lives – Caracas, Venezuela. As I write this I feel goose bumps  down my spine because I feel an odd parallel between myself and Robert, digging into his own family history and realizing where (at least half of) his blood actually comes from.

Caracas is nothing like Innsmouth. If you anything about either one, that might have been stating the obvious. But I seem to have a love/hate relationship with this city, probably having a lot to do with the fact that I don’t live here most of the time, but only come and spend a month or two every few years. This makes it hard to link myself to some parts, some of the changes, some of the people, but at the same time, most of my childhood and (only a few of my) old friends are still here, so of course there are tracks that never get old. I spent the previous year in Northern Norway, and these two months are a kind of interlude before I move back to England again for another year, so this just adds to the feeling of arriving/departing almost at the same time. Perhaps because of this I might have slightly romanticised Innsmouth and fallen for the tale of “rushing back to the primitive” – but only as I read it.

Still without a better idea for a fitting musical piece other than a stereotypical classic horror movie soundtrack – though some lyrics in Epica’s metal symphony “We will take you with us” make me think of the potential gospels sung deep down Devil Reef, the music itself is far from oceanic.