The Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft

“You mean in your nightmares like the fantastical one about your grandmother.” I rubbed the engravings vigorously with my thumb as if I could smear the gold and blur their hideous features. He showed me a piece of jewelry with grotesque depictions of insidious looking creatures engraved on its surface. It might have been the uncertain light from the flickering fire casting deceptive shadows across my friend’s face or maybe it was the way the lush, aromatic smoke from our smoldering cigars circled around his head, but I could swear that I was seeing changes morphing the features of Robert’s face as he told me his tale. She had changed-as those who take to the water change-and told me she had never died.” She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. ”One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.Īlthough Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.

The Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft