Have any of these yokels even seen a Black woman before?
—Sarah Hans, “U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Inspection Report No. IF-32651” in Arkham Institutions (2024) 137
“The Shadow over Innsmouth” is one of Lovecraft’s most quintessential tales, not just in the sense that it has become one of the core stories for his artificial mythology, but because when you strip down the story to its fundamentals it is one of the quintessential stories of its type: a civilized intruder tale. Someone from wider civilization travels to a liminal community, someplace that is, whether or not it is physically far away, somehow isolated culturally from the wider network of the world we know, and there’s something wrong there.
What is wrong and who does the intruding vary. In The Wicker Man (1973), a police officer finds a neo-pagan religion up to no good. In Midsommar (2019), tourists go to a remote Swedish village and find a pagan survival group up to no good. The essential framework is supremely adaptable, and most importantly, it leaves a great deal of room for novelty and reinvention. When Lovecraft used the idea in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the idea wasn’t new; he was riffing off stories like Herbert Gorman’s “The Place Called Dagon” (1927) and Algernon Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries” (1908). What Lovecraft added was the twist: that the intruder was not really an intruder at all, but was akin to the horrors.
Innumerable versions of this basic idea have played out through the Cthulhu Mythos, sometimes revisiting and recapitulating “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” sometimes with other locations. Stories like “Satan’s Servants” (1949) by Robert Bloch and “The Moon Lens” (1964) and “The Horror Under Warrendown” (1997) by Ramsey Campbell all riff on the basic concept, while La Planète aux Cauchemars (2019) by Mathieu Sapin & Patrick Pion, “The Chabad of Innsmouth” (2014) by Marsha Morman, and now with “U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Inspection Report No. IF-32651” (2024) by Sarah Hans are examples of revisiting and updating the Innsmouth story itself.
With a few changes.
Before I exit the truck, I get my gun out of the glovebox. I do have a permit for it, but I’m not supposed to carry one while I’m on official duties. I can’t risk being caught in the middle of nowhere unarmed, though. I work alone most of the time and sundown towns don’t exactly advertise themselves
—Sarah Hans, “U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Inspection Report No. IF-32651” in Arkham Institutions (2024) 138
The pitch for Arkham Institutions is “to explore how the people who run these towns and their institutions deal with the eldritch abominations of Lovecraftian terror” (back cover text). Which is as good a reason why a Fish & Wildlife Service agent will pop into Innsmouth for an inspection of the Innsmouth Fisheries as any other reason why someone might intrude on this liminal community.
Hans’ Innsmouth isn’t exactly Lovecraft’s, and the story doesn’t try to recapitulate the whole narrative. It is a contemporary setting, there’s no mention of the government raid of 1927, no reference to the Marsh Refinery. The business of the town is fishing, and Agent Cherise Brown has no ancestral links to the inbred locals. What plays out is a very different story that takes inspiration from Lovecraft—and probably wouldn’t be very comprehensible unless you’re familiar with that story—but tries to do something original with the idea.
The central idea is one I can dig: no liminal community can remain unvisited forever. Innsmouth was always going to receive some outside visitor who would cause problems. The question was not a matter of if it would happen, but who would intrude and when, and how the community would respond to that intrusion. It is an idea that suggests different possibilities—when would Innsmouth be no longer able to hide? As timeless as the locale seems in Lovecraft’s tale, in the context of how the world has developed after his death, it is easy to see how fragile Innsmouth’s isolation really was.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 