H. P. Lovecraft has a special place on my bookshelves.

He was where my own reading of weird fiction really began. Since then, I’ve wandered considerably further into the territory:  Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Jeff VanderMeer, and plenty of other writers who have persuaded me that the most interesting monsters are often the ones we can’t clearly see.

I –think– I’ve read everything Lovecraft produced, plus a few pastiches too. But if I had to choose one Lovecraft story to take with me, it would probably be ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’.

[SPOILERs follow]

What I love about Innsmouth is that the horror doesn’t simply come from discovering that monsters exist. It comes from discovering that you might be one.

The narrator arrives in Innsmouth as a naive outsider. He observes the strange and distinctive inhabitants, learns their history, and guesses at their rituals. He is fascinated and repelled in roughly equal measure.

Then Lovecraft turns the gaze around. The stranger becomes the subject. And eventually the narrator begins to look at himself.

I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm.

That’s the moment that gave me goosebumps first time round …

Because the mirror doesn’t reveal a monster. It reveals a possibility.

And the final horror of Innsmouth is not simply that the narrator discovers something terrible about his ancestry. It is that, gradually, his response to that discovery changes.

Like the character in the classic Iron Maiden song, ‘The Number of the Beast’.

I feel drawn towards the chanting hordes

They seem to memorise me – can’t avoid their eyes.¹

What he once feared begins to feel like home.

Cthulhu’s done spectacularly well for an entity that seems to sleep like a teenager the day after a house-party. I’m a huge fan of the cosmic cephalopod. The Cthulhu mythos can sometimes feel like an extension of ‘the sublime’, though – man well and truly put in his tiny, insignificant place. And other favourites like ‘The Colour out of Space’ and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ do this superbly.

But Innsmouth belongs to a second type of story, I think – ‘The Whisperer in the Darkness’, and ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ are unsettling for different reasons. They feel more intimate, more about protagonists as individuals rather than the entire human race. Assumptions, boundaries, and categories defy easy definition in these stories: human/alien; civilised/monstrous; even alive/dead. 

Lovecraft keeps finding ways to put his finger on the boundary between them and asking us: ‘are you quite sure that’s where the line is’?

So the weird can be about vast frightening entities and ideas. Or it can also be about making the familiar unfamiliar.

And sometimes, to do that, all you need is a mirror …

Join the conversation: I’d especially like to hear from other Lovecraft fans – which are your favourite stories, and why?

1. Iron Maiden, “The Number of the Beast,” The Number of the Beast (London: EMI Records, 1982) ↩︎