Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and

The Red Tree, which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards.

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, Alabaster

, A is for Alien and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Subterranean Press has recently released a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One).

“‘From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6’ probably started taking shape in 1996,” recalls the author, “after David J. Schow sent me a beautiful reproduction of the Devonian-aged fossil hand shown in the opening scenes of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Dave has the most awesome collection of Creature memorabilia anywhere on earth, I suspect. I sat the model atop a bookshelf in my office, and from time to time I’d think about it’s plausibility as an

actual fossil, about coming across it in some museum drawer somewhere, forgotten and dusty with an all but indecipherable label, and what implications to our ideas of vertebrate evolution such a fossil would have.

“And then, late in 2001, when I was doing research for my fourth novel, Low Red Moon, I began attempting to figure out where precisely Lovecraft had meant the town of Innsmouth to be located. I finally settled on Crane Beach and Ipswich Bay, west of Cape Ann. Anyway, the two things came together—the ‘fossil’ hand of the Creature, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—and I stopped working on the novel just long enough to write this story. I borrowed Dr. Solomon Monalisa from one of my earlier stories, ‘Onion’.”

“As for why I decided that Ipswich Bay was Lovecraft’s Innsmouth Harbour, here’s a quote from my online journal, from my entry for November 26, 2001:

Lovecraft indicates that the narrator’s bus, after leaving Newburyport, is travelling south-east, following the coast. HPL writes: “Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich.” This definitely indicates that the direction of travel is, in fact, south-east. A little father along, “At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left.” At this point the road on which the bus is travelling begins to climb to higher ground; at the crest of the rise, the passengers... beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head [another HPL invention] and veer off towards Cape Ann... but for a moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.” The narrator must, at this point, be looking to the east or south-east.

For me, the key is finding the Manuxet River. Of course, there really is no Manuxet River, per se

—it’s yet another of HPL’s geographical fictions, but there are many rivers between Plum Island and Cape Ann, winding, swampy things that eventually empty into Plum Island Sound or Ipswich Bay. The river closest to Plum Island (and the bus doesn’t seem to travel very far from the point where the narrator loses sight of the island before reaching the crest of the hill from which Innsmouth is visible) is the Ipswich River. A little farther on, there’s the Castle Neck River. It’s the mouth of this river that I’m favouring at the moment as the location of Innsmouth, based on HPL’s statement that the Manuxet “...turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater’s end.” Now, as the sea lies to the north, most of the rivers along this part of the coast do not make southerly turns, but flow north and east to the Atlantic. Notably, the Castle Neck River does have a distinct south-east kink just as it enters the estuary at the north-west end of Ipswich Bay.

Of course, HPL obviously took considerable liberties with the local geography, and I suspect that he may have also shortened the distance between Cape Ann and Plum Island in his head, recalling some excursion or another and compressing or expanding distance as we all tend to do. So, blah, blah, blah, and in my story at least, Innsmouth Harbour is at the mouth of the Castle Neck River (i.e., the Manuxet).”

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HOWARD PHILIPS LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) is one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors of supernatural fiction.