Review: Shadows Over Innsmouth

JONES, Stephen, (Ed.), Shadows Over Innsmouth, Titan Books / Titan Publishing Group Ltd., London, 2013.

Octavo; paperback, perfect bound with illustrated wrappers; 496pp., with many black and white illustrations.

If anyone ever needed an indicator as to the staying power of Lovecraft’s oeuvre, the sheer quantity of emulative writing that pours out on a yearly basis from publishing houses across the planet must surely prove the point. It seems that each year that goes by, another book of new Mythos fiction, or a new collection of the old mainstays, or a new Cthulhu-themed board- or card game, rolls off the production line. I enjoy stumbling upon these new vehicles which follow in HPL’s footprints, and coming across this volume was a good instance.

As a new innovation, this collection takes as its starting point, one of the best-loved (if not the best) of HPL’s short stories, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, and then, having laid it before the reader, follows it up with the stories of modern day writers taking their inspiration from it. Having, myself, derived my own short fiction from the decaying waterfront hovels of this inbred, benighted town, I was greatly looking forward to seeing what other authors would do with it. Given that those writers included Ramsay Campbell, Brian Lumley, Basil Copper, Kim Newman and Neil Gaiman, it promised to be something quite special.

To kick off though, I’d like to discuss the editorial aspects of the book. Stephen Jones does a highly expert job in keeping his authors wrangled and pointed in the right direction, as far as the source material is concerned. Especially pleasing (to me at least) is the fact that there is not a single instance of the ‘Devil’s Reef’ heresy, although I’m sure many first drafts had to be culled of this persistent eyesore. Under his sure guidance it’s ‘Devil Reef’ all the way! Too, the geography of Lovecraft’s fictive county is deftly corralled: except for one instance, names of places and people are as they should be and the whole project lines up neatly, four-square under Lovecraft’s aegis. As well, the artwork has been thoughtfully commissioned and executed, seamlessly augmenting the text with sympathetic images. There are a few typos towards the end of the book, but nowadays, this is pretty much par for the course in modern publishing: on the whole, this is quality helmsmanship.

Then we get to the stories themselves. An opportunity to re-read HPL’s masterpiece is one I’m always willing to take, and putting it first in this collection helps to set the bar in terms of expectations. It’s a good idea but also a gamble: if the rest of the material doesn’t make the grade, then they’re reduced to a pale, fish-belly wanness by comparison, which is great for highlighting HPL’s accomplishments; not so good for showcasing the state of modern horror short fiction. An effort to avoid this is probably the reason behind some dubious selections:

The pieces presented by Ramsay Campbell and Brian Lumley are not new. “Dagon’s Bell” by Lumley is a solid mainstay of the Innsmouth canon and possibly not often encountered these days; trotting it out here gives it a new lease of life and admirably supports the source material. On the other hand, Campbell’s “The Church in High Street” is an old trouper that is very familiar, but it doesn’t really tick all of the boxes that an Innsmouth work should: benighted, crumbling town? Check. Inbred, half-human denizens of the deep? Um, not so much. This is an excellent story, no question; but is it an Innsmouth story? I’m not convinced. Since the receipt of his Lifetime Achievement award in 2010, I imagine that Lumley is quite content to rest on his laurels and dust off “Dagon’s Bell” for a new(er) audience; but would it have really hurt Campbell to squeeze out something, not only new, but more apropos? But then, “The Final Revelation of Gla’aki” is doing the rounds, so maybe he has his energies tied up elsewhere.

So sadly, these contributions, while solid mainstays of the Mythos in general, come off as something of a marketing exercise by the publishers, which is a pity.

Moving on to the other ‘big name’ contributors, there isn’t really enough pizzazz to get the fireworks flying here either. Both Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman decide to poke fun at the canon material, rather than trying to move it into interesting new areas. In “Only the End of the World Again”, Gaiman takes the hackneyed old route of writing from the perspective of the monsters – a gimmick that has served him well time and time again – and which misses the point of the exercise entirely: in Innsmouth, the Outsiders are to be feared; we are not part of them or privy to their ways. And the schtick of tossing in a standard Hollywood Universal Studios monster with the Mythos mainstays doesn’t make it fresh either: rather it makes for a rather sneer-y, belittling commentary on Lovecraft’s work, as if it’s just as trite as anything else shambling out of Hollywood. It’s unworthy.

“A Quarter To Three”, Kim Newman’s contribution (surprisingly, of his two pieces represented here, the one he attached his actual name to), is simply a long-winded shaggy-dog tale with an appalling pun as its punchline: along with its sexist aside that ‘large member equals chick magnet’, it’s simply not worthy of inclusion in a volume that’s already pushing the 500-page limit. I suspect that he deliberately published this waste of ink under his own name to ensure that it got included: the publishers obviously wanted to capitalise upon his inclusion in the exercise and, faced with the choice of yanking the relatively anonymous ‘Jack Yeovil’s’ decent effort, or Newman’s crap, the easiest compromise was to leave both in. So, yes Mr. Newman, well played, and thanks for letting us suffer for it.

The pseudonymous ‘Mr. Yeovil’s’ story (“The Big Fish”) is actually very good, combining the gumshoe detective fiction of Raymond Chandler with Lovecraft’s verbiage. Not that this is actually a very new concept either (“Cast A Deadly Spell” anyone?), but it’s nicely pulled off here. I was strongly reminded of Barbara Hambly’s Bride of the Rat God while reading this, a novel that’s not without its flaws but which has a similar sense of place and time.

This brings us to Basil Copper, the last of the ‘big guns’ assembled for this project. Coppers’ Mythos stuff always has a Rider-Haggard-esque feel to it, an adventure story, ‘maps and chaps’ sensibility, to round out and reveal the Mythos nastiness; his novel The White Space is a case in point. His story here, “Beyond the Reef”, is of massive scope and sits nicely as a bold follow-up to the 1928 Federal Raid, in which those shameless Esoteric Orderers of Dagon try to enact revenge on the eggheads of Miskatonic University whilst snatching back their holy books from the Orne Library (with a few snacks along the way). It has twists and surprises a-plenty and ticks all of the boxes for an Innsmouth tale.

My one quibble about it is a geographic one: the collective consciousness of the Arkham landscape firmly places Innsmouth east and north of Arkham; in the story, the Deep Ones (and their associates) dig tunnels from the benighted town to Miskatonic University, which our heroes later trail down westwards to the sea. West from Innsmouth gets you closer to Arkham and Boston, but you have to travel east from Arkham to get to Innsmouth. This is the one instance where the editor’s otherwise ruthless adherence to the landscape slips up; maybe he decided to let it stand since, sadly, Basil Copper died shortly before this book went to print. R.I.P.

So much for the headliners. The other contributors are less well-known and, for the most part they not only take the job seriously, but they deliver the goods. That’s not to say that they are all perfect by any means; but, in that they honour the source material and generally strive for homage, rather than pastiche or mocking humour, they approach the project with some degree of respect. It’s certainly remiss of me to include Guy N. Smith in with these others when, for me, the inclusion of his work was what clinched the deal in my buying this book; sadly though, his effort – “Return to Innsmouth” - was generally lacklustre, essentially a re-telling of HPL’s original story, and lacking all of the marauding giant crabs that I was anticipating. Well-written; nicely paced; nothing new.

Brian Stableford’s “The Innsmouth Heritage” plays with the genetics of the Innsmouth Look, and follows a researcher trying to get to the bottom of the science behind the Deep Ones’ chromosomal virulence. The writer’s take on Innsmouth is gentrified rather than crumbling, which felt odd, and any shocks or creepiness in the tale happen – disappointingly - off-stage. Meanwhile, in “Deepnet”, David Langford transforms the town into a gleaming IT technology park and cyber-enhances the ‘Look from a physical taint to a computer-promulgated psychological one, underscoring the disturbing potentialities within the availability of real-world, pornographic internet product.

Some writers riff on a “Wicker Man” theme, showing their narrators stumbling into Innsmouth only to flee in terror after the role of unwilling participant in the worship of Dagon is foisted upon them. David A Sutton’s “Innsmouth Gold” treads this path, as does Peter Tremayne’s “Daoine Domhain”, which is set in a similarly dark, and possibly older, Deep One settlement off the Irish coast. His playing with the notion that the Deep Ones have been pressed into legend as the ‘Formorians’ of Irish myth is a cute concept. However, both of these tales – nice concepts aside – are short of menace or scares, most of the horror being flagged well in advance: any twists involved are only the expected ones.

Brian Mooney’s “The Tomb of Priscus” is a piece strongly redolent of Brian Lumley’s Mythos fare, with its Ancient Roman references and archaeological leanings; it too however, suffers from being a little ho-hum in the horror department. D. F. Lewis’s “Down to the Boots” is a frothy piece of well-written inconsequence about a man drowning in a bog after an argument with his wife concerning his undergarments – ‘not seeing the influence of Dagon at all in this. “The Crossing” by Adrian Cole posits a magical doorway between a sleepy British village, Rowling-esquely named ‘Appledore’, and the deadly town of Innsmouth, the crossing to which locale serves to reveal some rather obvious secrets about the narrator’s dad. I was left wondering why the author bothered with the trans-Atlantic shenanigans at all, except that, without them, this is just “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” all over again.

A hallmark of most of these stories is that they are beautifully crafted and couched in glittering prose; they just don’t shock, and I’m confused as to why that should be. “The Homecoming” by Nicholas Royle is a superlative descriptive work concerning a woman’s return to Bucharest, in Romania, after the fall of the Ceausescu regime; it’s evocative, bleak and terrifying all at once, but I was left wondering what it was doing here. The connexion to the Mythos, and especially the Deep Ones, felt forced, as if it had been worked in just to make it fit in with the rest of the stories in the book; but, as in so many of these kinds of tales, the real-world horrors of such times and places make the fantastic elements seem childish and hollow.

By far the stand-out piece of the volume is Michael Marshall Smith’s “To See the Sea” although it’s not perfect by any means. This is the tale of a stressed urban British couple who seek a relaxing weekend escape in the village near where the woman’s mother nearly drowned in a nautical misadventure which almost claimed over 100 lives. As we expect this far into the volume, the run-down, sleepy village is populated by a cast of physically and mentally deficient types who unnerve and bewilder the young pair; the atmosphere is drab – despite the fact that a local festival is due to take place the same weekend – and the only intellectually alert person in the district is the restaurant owner and waiter (also the cook) who doesn’t actually live in the village (or stay there after dark). The sombre and brooding quality of the story is only marred by a ludicrous sequence towards the end, where one half of the couple pursues a parade of festival goers through the town, always just missing them as they turn a corner: I had the “Benny Hill” theme tune running through my head all the while I was reading this. The ending of this tale is in fact a surprise, so working through the farce was worth it in the end.

In the final analysis, it seems that, if you’ve seen one sleepy, inbred, run-down coastal village populated by pelagean horrors, then you’ve seen them all. While well-written in and of themselves, the majority of these tales lack punch and don’t really have anything new to tease out of the mix. That’s fine, if you’re a “Shadow Over Innsmouth” fan, or have some Deep One ancestry, but you may be stifling some yawns before you reach the last page of this effort. The presence of old favourites in the canon lore helps signpost some possibilities and potentialities, but they’re still old; and Gaiman and Newman’s goofing around, making hamburgers out of sacred cows, certainly doesn’t help things at all. It’s worth it for the art; for Basil Copper’s last hurrah; and one or two other little gems along the way. And of course, also for the opportunity to wade through HPL’s fishy freakshow once more.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.