It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind.
There are quite a few different flavors of horror. Some horror stories focus on one particular monster, or a haunting, or some kind of disaster. I’ve never been much for the hack-and-slash type (although strangely enough that one scene from Cabin in the Woods made me happy), and most psychological thrillers only work for me if there’s a supernatural element as well. By far my favorite type of horror is the one that’s hardest to pull off: it has to be clever and creepy. For the most part you never see the monster, since the one you imagine is scarier than the one you see. There’ll be this looming terror of the unknown, of waiting in the darkness hoping you won’t be found by something that you’ll probably never understand. Characters in these stories don’t know if they’ve gone completely out of their minds and made up everything that happened, or if whatever happened has made them go completely out of their minds. Basically I’ll accept any horror recommendation if you use the magic words: Inspired By Lovecraft.
H.P. Lovecraft is famous for creating the Cthulhu Mythos; the concept of a race of godlike beings who are imprisoned/asleep somewhere in the depths of the sea, or in outer space, or just there, in a dimension separated from ours by a thin wall that’s getting thinner all the time. Just seeing The Elder Gods causes people to go insane, and any worship ceremonies for them are filled with odd phrases that try to capture how unknowable they are. (If you watch any Doctor Who, the phrases that the Ood chant in the episode The Impossible Planet are pure Lovecraft: “He is the heart that beats in the darkness. He is the blood that will never cease. And now he will rise.”)
But Lovecraft wrote stories about other races too, ones a little younger than the Elder Gods, but a whole lot closer. Lovecraft’s novella The Shadow over Innsmouth tells the story of an entire town taken over, and rotting from within, by a race that’s close enough to be family.
The story takes a little while to get going, since the prose isn’t so much flowery as it is dense. Lovecraft takes his time creating the setting, and he starts by hinting at the end of the story first, although not what the ending actually means or how things got to that point.
The narrator is fairly standard for Lovecraft: young, enthusiastic, and intelligent enough to have a lot of curiosity without actually believing some of the stranger things he hears. He’s on a sightseeing tour of New England, and on his way to the fictional city of Arkham (yes, that’s what the fictional insane asylum was named after) he has a chance to visit the seaport town of Innsmouth. Innsmouth is a strange little town, and over the years it’s gotten stranger. Locals in nearby cities talk about a mysterious plague that took out a good part of the town’s population, bizarre gold jewelry brought over by an enterprising sea captain, and a new religion with “better” gods, brought in by the same sea captain. The town is very old, and somewhat run down; the residents of Innsmouth keep to themselves, which is just as well since they’re an odd group, possibly inbred or the result of marrying “foreigners”. None of this discourages the narrator, who’s looking forward to the architecture he’ll be able to see, and the town’s reputation makes it sound like an interesting tourist stop. It’s only when he boards the bus to Innsmouth and then reaches the town that he starts to feel that things are a little…wrong.
The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
The narrator does his best to convince himself that the town is just old, the townspeople a little set in their ways, with maybe some kind of hereditary problem that gives everyone that flat-headed look. But he can’t ignore all of the buildings with boards over the windows on the top floor, or the derelict buildings that have more noises coming from them than the inhabited ones. Or how those strange bulging eyes of the townspeople don’t seem to blink.
The story really gets moving with a desperate escape attempt through the rooms of a hotel while something with the key is trying to open the doors one step behind. For me one of the most chilling parts wasn’t the chase through the hotel, but the chapter where the narrator interviews the old town drunk. Imagine the two of them standing near the tide line, bright sunshine and open water, the old man in rags telling the whole horrible story of the town, and finally working himself up to the point where he’s just screaming.
The last few pages went in a direction I wasn’t expecting, and came with a revelation that was hinted at a few times in the story itself. And of course there’s also a very Lovecraftian “The end…or IS it?” type of ending. I read this story in the H.P. Lovecraft collection Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, and yes the title is a little over the top, but the stories themselves aren’t. If you can get through places where Lovecraft gets overly wordy, the stories themselves have a way of getting into your head. If nothing else they’ll give you a new appreciation for the modern stories that were inspired by Lovecraft, the ones where you never get a good look at what’s terrifying you. Like Stephen King’s short stories Crouch End and N, or John Carpenter’s movie In the Mouth of Madness. Actually, I think I may watch that movie tonight. And then sleep with the lights on.