Recently, the cable television station HBO aired the first season of a series called True Detective which was filled with uncanny, eerie, and weird imagery, symbols, and dialogue. The show became a major hit, and brought a great deal of attention to the various American literary traditions of horror and weird fiction. One of the major writers mentioned as an influence on the show was H.P. Lovecraft, one of the most famous of American horror writers. However, H.P. Lovecraft was himself part of a tradition that went back to nineteenth century American writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote dark romantic fiction, and Edgar Allen Poe, inventor of several styles and subgenres of horror, like the detective story genre, psychological horror, and horror tales stemming from the psychotic or insane narrator. While gothic stories, and the idea of the uncanny, have a European heritage as well, Americans made innovations to the form. However, even American writers not working in the gothic or horror field, like Jonathan Edwards, have made use of the supernatural world or hellish imagery to convey the power of their religious belief.
. While it would be possible to read “A Shadow over Innsmouth” as a critique of certain strains of American fundamentalism in religion, especially as exemplified by Jonathan Edwards in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a more profitable comparison will be with the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Lovecraft idolized Poe, and found Poe’s methods of constructing both suspense and terror in the reader to be a key development in this genre of fiction. A comparison of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “A Shadow over Innsmouth” with the works of Edgar Allen Poe will reveal both how Lovecraft was influenced by the work, but also how both writers were dealing with similar themes, experiences, and social practices in present in American life over the span of a century. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” can be used as a model for reading H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, while at the same time a reader can detect a similar building of tone and suspense in Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Lovecraft’s tale of an ancient cult on the seashore of Massachusetts.
The beginning of the Lovecraft story sets a very strong tone of something being very weird. Lovecraft establishes this by use of the secret, as the reason why the government is in Innsmouth, or blowing things up, or making arrests in unclear at the opening of the story (Lovecraft). This raises the interest of the reader. Lovecraft plays upon his historical situation, as he makes his readers think at first this was a federal raid upon bootleggers, but the way the government treated the people arrested is a hint to the keen reader that something far more unusual went on here (Lovecraft). This feeling is built up by Lovecraft mentioning that newspapers investigating the arrests quickly let the subject go, and that there were rumors in a tabloid about a navy submarine blowing something up in an area under the sea called Devil’s Reef (Lovecraft).
Two of Poe’s most important rules for horror writers from “The Philosophy of Composition” are that the writer must develop an original idea or setting in his story “keeping originality always in view”, and that he must always write with an eye “toward the consideration of effect” (Poe). Poe basically says that if a writer is not original, especially in the field of horror, neither the writer, nor the audience will be interested. If the exact same ghost story, or tale of a murder, is told over and over again, without alterations or changes, to elements of the story, no one will care enough about it to develop any feelings. And the development of feelings, or affect as Poe calls it, is crucial for a writer of horror or suspense. The feelings that a reader gets when reading (or watching) a horror, or weird suspenseful story, are for Poe, and Lovecraft after him, exactly what makes a successful horror story or tale of suspense. If feelings and effects of weirdness, worry, suspense, and anxiety, just to name a few are not built up in the reader, the story is basically failure.
One of the reasons Lovecraft is so famous is because of how well he invented new elements and alterations for the horror genre. In fact, Lovecraft was so creative, there is now an entire subgenre of horror stories, called the Cthulu mythos, based only on the inventions he made to the field. For example, Lovecraft invented a race of elder gods and aliens which had visited earth many millions of years ago from deep space, and were in the process of returning here. These elder gods, the most famous is Cthulu, but Dagon of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is another of them, seek to establish a religion on earth, and plan to either dominate or destroy humanity when they return. At the beginning of this Lovecraft story, even the invention of the federal agents making a weird arrest is enough to really raise the reader’s interest in the story.
According to Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition” the best way that the writer can create and sustain the effects of horror in the reader is by a writing technique he called “unity of effect” (Poe). What I believe Poe meant by this was that once the writer has decided what effects and feelings he/she wants the reader to experience, he/she should make sure that everything that he/she writes works together to create these effects. In other words, if the writer has decided to make the reader feel suspense and weirdness, he must make sure that all the elements in the story seem either weird, or slow down the pace of the story. If the writer gives something important away to early, or makes something seem to normal, the respective effects of suspense and weirdness will be destroyed.
Lovecraft is as masterful at the technique of unity of effect as he is as the technique of invention. Every new detail he adds to the federal action at the small town of Innsmouth doesn’t clear up the event, or explain it in any way, only makes it weirder. By the time he gets to the tale of the submarine firing torpedoes at a reef connected to the beach area of the town, the reader is almost certain that something weird is going on, and they want to find out what it is. That second desire of effect in the reader is the feeling of suspense, and likewise, as Lovecraft adds more and more to the narrative, the answers to the puzzle seem farther and farther away, increasing the level of suspense. Indeed, when the narrator of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” finally reveals that he has visited the town and knows what happened there, Lovecraft has him reveal this detail without revealing anything else to the reader. He writes, “what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper” (Lovecraft). Lovecraft follows the law of unity of effect, because all the narrator does is confirm that something very unusual occurred there, and that the narrator may not tell the reader what it was, which only heightens the suspense.
Works Cited
Lovecraft, Howard P. “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. Web. 11 May 2016.
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Philosophy of Compisition” Web. 11 May 2016.
