aWarlock

The Shadow over Innsmouth is probably my favorite Lovecraft work I've read so far and I kind of hate that. The horror works for it actually pretty well, but the horror is, shockingly, racist. You have a main character who shows up in a weird spooky town where no one seems to like him. Everything feels simultaneously rundown and inhabited, everyone stares at him, the one non-local is desperately happy to see a non-local face. He feels incredibly unsafe as an outsider, and then he goes poking around in the town's history and that makes things even less safe for him. That's good horror! Sure, it's maybe a little overused these days, but it's a solid base! Buuuut the reason everything is Scary is actually because everyone is mixed blood. I mean, sure, mixed blood with "monsters," but the subtext is about as subtle as being slapped in the face with a half-rotten fish. Lovecraft thinks being mixed blood is bad.

i Love the Yog-Sothoth chant in The Mechanism's song "Red Signal" Wonderfully ominous.. the thing is...

Yep! The chant itself is word for word from the Lovecraft story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (it's not a great story, I don't really recommend it).

One of my biggest problems with lovecraft's writing (not with the man, we've all got much much bigger problems with him) is that every character has a very similar reaction to interacting with the otherworldly madness, that being immediate suicidal ideation, and a feeling of entirely overwhelming hopelessness in the face of the unknowable vastness beyond