5 scholarly sources citedmain text sourceAbout H.P. Lovecraft

Themes in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”
Stories can be used very profoundly to express both ideas and views of authors. Since ancient times, people have expressed their beliefs and systems through stories and literature. The art of writing is in itself the expression of human views. These views manifest themselves in different genres like romance, adventure, mystery and horror. While horror is not a regular form of expressing one’s views and opinions, it contains traces of author’s original thoughts about humanity. Good examples are H P Lovecraft’s stories that are raft with different explicit and implicit themes like xenophobia, eugenic beliefs, and ideas of racial degradation and the fear of doom of humanity as a result of it. These themes can be vividly observed in many of his stories, primarily “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.
“The Shadow over Innsmouth” follows the story of Robert Olmstead who is a student passing by New England. On his tour, he is intrigued by a piece of jewellery (a swastika) that he traces to a seaport in Innsmouth. To find out more, he travels to Innsmouth and finds the place to be weird and forlorn. The residents of the place have strange looks and walk in a weird manner. In his quest to discover more, he meets with a few people and finds out the story of some aquatic monsters that can both eat humans as well as interbreed with them. Being forced to spend the night in Innsmouth, he is attacked by the creatures but not survives. On escape he informs the authorities who attempt to destroy the creatures’ lair. However, he himself takes to studying his lineage and ancestory. Eventually, he discovers that he belongs to the same breed of the so-called “Deep Ones” and that he is destined to return to the sea.
Lovecraft’s writings though subject to some controversy regarding their implicit themes, have been created through an elegant style of writing that is both vivid and highly imaginative. He makes constructive use of mythos in his stories and lures readers into a mystical world of problems. Even though we find a lot of inconsistency and loose ends in his stories, we realize that these have been deliberately made by Lovecraft in order to give his stories and the myth a touch of ancient legends. Gafford states that “Lovecraft used the mythos as a literary tool” (8) and not as a story itself.
The singular style adopted by HP Lovecraft often referred to as ‘cosmic horror’ emulates the appearance of “uniquely god-like monsters” who are often eternal and undermine humanity in some or the other way. Alluding to this Omidsalar describes the effect of cosmic horror against fear. He states that “While fear is the obvious emotional base of all forms of horror fiction, it takes on a specifically ontological weight in cosmic horror” (1). Lovecraft takes upon himself to magnify the fear he instils in his readers. This he does by using various techniques like analogy and poetic metaphors. (Matolcsy, 1 & 4). In describing his choice of style in creating horror, Lovecraft states that “The one test of the really weird is simply this- whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown spheres and powers” (Matolcsy, 1). So Lovecraft basically takes horror to a whole new level while incorporating some of his central themes within his stories.
Lovecraft explores various themes in his horror stories most of which are dark and depressing. These include forbidden knowledge, Civilization under threat, Race, Risks of a scientific era, Non-human influences on humanity, inherited guilt, Fate, and Superstition. One of the primary themes in “the Shadow over Innsmouth” is that of fear or hatred of people or race that are distinctly different from the protagonist or the regular people.
We find that the residents of Innsmouth’s are avoided by the people of the neighbouring towns. This is found to be based on “race prejudice” (507) since they look and behave differently. They are known for “a strange kind of streak….Some of ‘em have queer narrowheads with flat noses and bulgy starry eyes…and their skin ain’t quite right”...