H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth

In July of 1927, a young man decides to take a tour of New England to acquaint himself with its sights and do some research into his family history.  When traveling from Newburyport to Arkham, he finds that there’s another route between these towns that most people try to avoid.  This route goes through Innsmouth, a once respected community that is now only talked about in whispers if mentioned at all.  His imagination stoked by these words of disdain that also creep into dread, the traveler decides that he will go to Arkham by way of Innsmouth and see what all the fuss is about for himself.

Even if this manga wasn’t based on a story written by H.P. Lovecraft, it wouldn’t take much to imagine that this guy is going to be in for a bad time.  The latest adaptation of the writer’s works from mangaka Gou Tanabe follows in much the same vein as his previous ones from Dark Horse, “The Hound and Other Stories,” and “At the Mountains of Madness.”  Which is to say that its meticulous illustration does justice to the inherent creepiness of the story, to the point where the reader will likely have some trouble sleeping after having read it.  Tanabe also nails the slow burn of the narrative, twisting the screws tighter as things get increasingly worse for its unnamed protagonist as he finds out that Innsmouth isn’t so easy to escape.

That last part is key to the story’s final twist, as well as a reminder that racism drove much of Lovecraft’s stories.  Where it was easy to ignore this or look past it in the previous adaptations from the publisher, the bits about intermingling of other races and an entire town filled with dark-skinned, inhuman-looking people who worship an evil god make the author’s bigotry painfully clear here.  I’m not saying you can’t enjoy “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as a horror story about a naive tourist who stumbles into eldritch horror, but you should be aware of where those scares are originating from.