The Shadow Over Innsmouth

"The Shadow over Innsmouth" is a novella by H. P. Lovecraft in the horror fiction genre. The themes of the story are degeneration, tainted ancestry, forbidden mysteries, and a reality which human understanding finds both incomprehensible and intolerable.


The story is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, the narrator begins by recounting to the reader of a secret investigation that was undertaken by the government at the ruined town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and that the story told to them by the narrator himself is the reason for this investigation. He proceeds to describe in detail the events surrounding his initial interest in the town (antiquarian and architectural), which lies along the route of his tour across New England, taken when he was twenty-one. While he waits for the bus that will take him to Innsmouth, he busies himself in the neighboring town of Newburyport by gathering information from local townsfolk; all of it with superstitious overtones.