La Sombra Sobre Innsmouth (1936) - Plot & Excerpts
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is one of Lovecraft's most popular works, and it's probably the story I would suggest as the ideal first read for some outsider who is not familiar with the great master and his style. It incorporates not just his usual favorite motives like a decaying New England town, and hidden worshipers of Cthulhu, but it also boasts an action sequence (quite unusual for Lovecraft), and a grim ending with rather unexpected and modern twist. With all these elements in mind, The Shadow Over Innsmouth offers almost ideal material for adaptations to other media (which had happened many times already), and for me it felt like a perfect surrounding for some dark first person crawler video game.But this novella is not just some generic wide-appealing horror story, it also has a lot of special moments that only true Lovecraft fans would appreciate. What I especially liked about it was the way how the author managed to draw inspiration from one of his own earliest stories (Dagon, written back in 1917), and to smoothly improve it with many elements of Cthulhu Mythos that he developed over time. This includes not just the undersea deity and its human cultist followers, but also a marine race of Deep Ones, which would in turn fit perfectly as one of the other alien races mentioned in the Old Ones' true history of the Earth, from In The Mountains of Madness. In other words, at this stage of Lovecraft's career, all his work started to fit in together as part of a brilliant bigger setting, and his stories from this period are a true pleasure to read. The final result is this amazing world of darkest fiction, that is still growing and being developed by his epigones even today. Ya mas acostumbrado al estilo de Lovecraft y su eleccion de palabras tomando en cuenta la epoca en que se escribieron. Debo decir que este es uno de los libros que mas me ha gustado de el, sin elegir una locacion exotica Innsmouth es un pueblo que pudo haber existido lo cual hace la historia mas interesante, la intervención del gobierno y el estudiante que va a conocer un pueblo; El final en especial no lo vi venir lo cual me gusto. Recomendado.
What do You think about La Sombra Sobre Innsmouth (1936)?
"Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen?"
—nick
Lovecraft es siempre un poco de lo mismo, pero un mismo que siempre mola.
—Maryann
