Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“I quickly became intrigued by what must have happened to them, and how they might well constitute the original precedent for the troubling, terrorism-era US policy of endless detention without due process.

“The anomalous ocean recording in ‘The Same Deep Waters as You’ was a real-world event that I’ve wanted to play with for years. In an irresistible coincidence, the Bloop was triangulated to have originated close to where Lovecraft located the sunken city of R’lyeh. A few weeks after I finished this story, NOAA announced that the sound was similar to the sonic profile of icebergs recorded in the Scotia Sea. They would know, although I’d love to learn more about how there would’ve been enough ice around Polynesia that August that its calving was heard for 3,000 miles.

“It’s more fun living in a world where this remains a mystery.”

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CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, The Red Tree and Blood Oranges. She has recently scripted a graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics, Alabaster, which continues the misadventures of her character Dancy Flammarion.

Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores, To Charles Fort with Love, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others and the retrospective volume Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). Subterranean Press has recently released The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, while Centipede Press is planning expanded and illustrated limited editions of her novels The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and The Red Tree.

About the sequence of stories the author has in this volume, she reveals: “‘Fish Bride’ has a somewhat complicated origin. In December 2005, I mentioned something in my blog about wanting to write a humorous story about a ‘whorehouse in Innsmouth, circa 1924’. I’m not very good at humour, not usually, and the idea sat fallow for a long time. A couple of years later, I wrote ‘Fish Bride’, a very different sort of tale, not the least bit humorous, but one that grew out of that concept of a ‘whorehouse in Innsmouth’. Though ‘Fish Bride’ isn’t set in Innsmouth, the locale clearly mirrors Lovecraft’s doomed seaport. It also owes a debt to R. H. Barlow’s ‘The Night Ocean’, which was one of those stories that Lovecraft ‘revised’ in an attempt to scrape by and make his meagre living.

“‘On the Reef’ came about in the autumn of 2010,” continues Kiernan, “because I was looking to write a Halloween story, and a story about masks and the role they play in mythology and religion. And because I wanted to write a story that returned to Innsmouth long after the events of Lovecraft’s story. It’s not like the town could have been completely erased. So, in essence it’s a kind of ghost story. Only the ghost isn’t the disembodied spirit of a human being, but the force that a dead town and what happened continues to exert over the present day.

“‘The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings’ is one of those stories that I wrote because I’m so often more interested in looking at a superficially ‘horrific’ situation from the point of view of the ‘Other’. Probably, John Garner’s Grendel set me on this path. In this story, I’m not interested in provoking fear from the reader, but sympathy for the protagonist, an understanding of her sense of alienation, her loneliness, and her longing for a life forever out of her reach.”

Kiernan’s story ‘From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6’, which linked Lovecraft’s Deep Ones to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, appeared in Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.

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HOWARD PHILIPS LOVECRAFT (1890–1937) is one of the twentieth century’s most important and influential authors of supernatural fiction.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he lived for much of his life there as a studious antiquarian who wrote mostly with no care for commercial reward. During his lifetime, the majority of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry and essays appeared in obscure amateur-press journals or in the pages of the struggling pulp magazine Weird Tales.