The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

What's It About? 

In the winter of 1927-28, the isolated coastal settlement of Innsmouth, Massachusetts was assaulted by U.S. government agents—its waterfront burned and dynamited, and its people were taken away to internment camps.

Yet that was neither the beginning nor the end of the horror uncovered by a young antiquarian who traveled to Innsmouth in search of rumors from the town's dead past, only to find them still very much alive...and find truths lying underwater deeper and colder than any earthly grave!

The Shadow Over Innsmouth has a story and art by Gou Tanabe. English translation is by Zack Davisson, lettered and touched up by Steve Dutro. Published by Dark Horse Manga (November 28, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

A caveat before I begin: The Shadow Over Innsmouth has been interpreted by some literary scholars as dealing with a brand of xenophobia known as miscegenation, which is when people of different races have children, and it's accounted a negative term today. If you look beneath the surface of this story, there are many views that are deeply uncomfortable, and much of the book's brand of horror is rooted in the social sensibilities of 1931. (The book was written then; it wasn't published until 1936, the only one of Lovecraft's stories to see print during his lifetime.) If that makes you uncomfortable, or if I've just ruined Lovecraft for you, there's nothing wrong with giving this a pass. The brief suicide ideation could easily feel like small potatoes here.

With all of that said, this is a spectacular adaptation of the original work. Gou Tanabe's art is deceptive; at first, the narrator's wide-eyed expression, which is a constant and often the focus of entire panels, feels like a flaw in the art. But as the story unfolds and we start to put the pieces together, it becomes clear that this is not only purposeful, but a major piece of the overall puzzle, and the build-up to that reveal is masterfully done. The same goes for the pacing – what at first feels a little plodding as the narrator decides, against all local advice, to visit the mostly forgotten Massachusetts town of Innsmouth turns into a nail-biting race against time. Although it isn't a haunted house story, it feels like one as it goes on, giving us the sensation of things lurking just out of sight, and that's impressively effective.

It's certainly helped by the way Tanabe draws Innsmouth in comparison with Newburyport and Rowley. (Both are real towns, by the way.) The latter two look like typical New England towns even as they appear today – comfortably lived-in by not hugely crowded. Innsmouth, on the other hand, is claustrophobic. Its decrepit buildings lean on each other and slump towards the streets, signs are battered and fallen, debris litters the shore, and even the boats at the wharf give the impression of being leaky and unseaworthy. It's a ghost town, northern New England-style, and if you want a comparison, look up Hurricane Island in Penobscot Bay: Hurricane was a bustling granite quarrying town that was abandoned. (There's an environmental school there now, so you want pictures from the 1930s – when Lovecraft wrote this.) All of this forms a solid backdrop for the unsettling, creeping terror of the story, because these places exist, at least in the stories of the oldest residents of coastal towns. Lovecraft plays on it beautifully, creating an enduring nightmare.

It's not perfect, of course. If you haven't read much old New England dialect, some of the dialogue could be hard to parse, and there's a clear thread of xenophobia even without the underlying issues mentioned in the first paragraph – a fear of people “from away,” as the expression goes. The narrator finds that he's subject to this just by virtue of being from Toledo, even from the denizens of Newburyport. It forms a backbone to the Cthulu elements of the story, and the fear of the Other is important to the overall plot. But overall this is a stellar adaptation of what was already a significant work of horror fiction. If you like the original or Lovecraft in general, it's absolutely worth it.