The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Chronicles #20 ｜ The Shadow Over Innsmouth

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Chronicles for something approximating a Halloween special. I do believe

00:00:21.420 this will actually come out the day after Halloween, but you'll have to work with it.

00:00:25.840 And as you can see, we're actually in Studio One today because we have a bigger cast of hosts.

00:00:30.900 Joining me for this episode of Chronicles is Harry.

00:00:33.900 Hello.

00:00:34.640 Who you obviously know very well. And today we're going to be talking all about The Shadow

00:00:39.940 Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft, because what better thing to mark Halloween with

00:00:45.280 than some classic Lovecraft. And a great opportunity for me as well, because as I've said to you

00:00:50.800 both many times, this is actually the first time I've been able to read some Lovecraft and

00:00:55.160 it seems like a great opportunity to bring in some more learned heads, some people who

00:01:01.400 enjoyed his work, you know, longer than I have. And so looking forward to having the discussion.

00:01:06.360 Yeah, we've been wanting to cover Lovecraft at Lotus Eaters for a long while, and we've

00:01:10.200 covered quite a few things that are Lovecraft adjacent on the screen. I don't know if you

00:01:14.640 can see it on the video you're watching. We've got Junji Ito's picture of H.P. Lovecraft

00:01:19.320 that he drew a portrait of. Junji Ito being a Japanese comic author who's heavily inspired

00:01:24.940 by the works of Lovecraft. And speaking of which, Lovecraft is probably one of the most

00:01:31.480 influential horror writers of the modern period. You can't really go anywhere without Lovecraft

00:01:39.240 having inspired some author or some work which has gone on to inspire things that you've

00:01:45.120 probably heard of. Stephen King, I mean, being the most notable example of somebody who was

00:01:50.140 heavily inspired by Lovecraft, which is ironic given the complete divergence of their own

00:01:55.420 social views.

00:01:56.700 Right. Yeah.

00:01:58.200 But Lovecraft is someone that I've appreciated for a long time. I was introduced to him through

00:02:02.680 the music of Metallica, because they're big Lovecraft fans and have at least three songs

00:02:08.360 written about the Cthulhu mythos. Call of Cthulhu, obvious, thing that should not be,

00:02:13.420 which is based directly on The Shadow Over Innsmouth. And one song off of their 2016 album,

00:02:19.180 which name I cannot remember, but which the chorus is just James shouting, Cthulhu awakens.

00:02:24.520 So I assume it's based off of the Call of Cthulhu.

00:02:26.700 Sounds pretty badass.

00:02:27.740 Yeah. So as a young teenager learning about that, I thought, well, I'd heard of him as well.

00:02:33.460 I'd heard of Cthulhu, a big squid monster. Sounds awesome. So I got some of the collections

00:02:38.020 and read those stories, but this was my first opportunity to go back and reread in about

00:02:42.660 10 years, maybe a bit longer than that. I'd not read it in, not touched in a long while. And it was

00:02:48.320 a great experience to do so. I'll also preface by saying that we were originally going to be

00:02:53.780 focusing primarily on At the Mountains of Madness, which is one of his most famous stories and one

00:03:00.300 which has influenced, again, a lot of people. John Carpenter was influenced in the naming

00:03:04.900 convention for his film, At the Mouth of Madness. The problem is, for as famous as that story is,

00:03:10.480 and as well regarded and loved, it's kind of like a lawmaster story. It's slow, it's plodding,

00:03:18.240 it's mainly a guy going around a mountain describing the hieroglyphs that he is able to see,

00:03:22.900 which gives a huge law dump for the actual Cthulhu mythos. But as a moment-to-moment and

00:03:27.400 narrative, it's not very thrilling. So I suggested we switch to Shadow Over Innsmouth.

00:03:32.500 I just arbitrarily picked At the Mountains of Madness because I thought, oh, it's about

00:03:36.900 100 pages, so it's a longer story, it'll give us plenty to talk about. And then Harry just saw

00:03:41.240 my face just slipping into regret and despair as I was like, am I supposed to understand?

00:03:46.660 Well, it's the fact that about two pages in, you kind of looked up at me with this

00:03:50.200 confused, physical look and said, are all of his stories written like this? And it clocked for me

00:03:57.260 because I remember reading it as a teenager, and I thought, oh, yep, yep, that was my reaction as

00:04:03.160 well, because I started with Call of Cthulhu and then moved on to Shadow Over Innsmouth,

00:04:07.660 Dunwich Horror, which are the three stories I reread in preparation for this. All very well written,

00:04:13.400 all exciting, they've got some mystery, they've got drama, they've got action in them.

00:04:17.700 At the Mountains of Madness, very drawn out, very plodding, and it didn't really thrill me. And so

00:04:25.740 I'm glad it wasn't just me. Perhaps, I know you've listened to them in audiobook. Does it work

00:04:30.880 better with an audiobook?

00:04:32.140 I didn't think that about At the Mountains of Madness. It's like The Thing, you know,

00:04:36.160 John Carpenter's The Thing.

00:04:37.520 Yeah.

00:04:37.820 Like, it's like that. So my relationship with Lovecraft, I'll let you know where I am.

00:04:42.400 Yeah, please.

00:04:43.180 I read, years ago, when I was like 20 or 22, I read that one, I can't even remember what it's

00:04:48.640 called now, about where it's a short, very short one, where it's The Mummy Wakes Up. So I read that,

00:04:54.500 and it's actually kind of almost abstract. And I read that, and I was like, I don't really like

00:05:02.080 that. And I was young, and it's not one of his best stories, I don't think. It's like called

00:05:07.180 Inhotep or something like that. And so from then on, I was like, I'll give Lovecraft a

00:05:12.820 swerve. And he's inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. I'll just read it, Edgar Allan Poe. I love

00:05:16.940 Edgar Allan Poe, right? I don't need Lovecraft. He's an American, 20th century American, not

00:05:21.140 interested. I don't, you know, I'm only joking with that. So for years, I didn't get into

00:05:27.620 Lovecraft for years and years. And then, I don't know, maybe just for a lot to say, maybe

00:05:32.700 five, six years ago, something like that. I listened to on audiobook, what must have

00:05:39.600 been the Dunwich Horror. That's the one where there's that kid that grows up abnormally fast,

00:05:45.460 right? Yeah. And then gets killed in the library. Yeah, right. Okay. So at that point, I was

00:05:50.960 like, oh, I've got Lovecraft wrong. This is great. And then in the years since then, every

00:05:55.120 now and again, someone will send me a link to something Lovecraft has said that's like really

00:05:58.880 based. Stroke completely racist. I'm like, oh, well, maybe. Too overlapping. Yeah. Very

00:06:04.940 often. I'm like, oh, well, you know, Lovecraft, okay. And then, but I still hadn't really done

00:06:09.600 much Lovecraft until about a month ago, maybe a month ago, maybe five weeks ago. Sure. It

00:06:14.680 came up in the office. Do you want to do At the Mountains of Madness? And I was like,

00:06:22.000 sure, okay, I'll read it or listen to an audiobook. And anyway, so I did. I thought it was brilliant,

00:06:27.140 but realised I didn't know anywhere near enough about the law. I hadn't read anywhere near

00:06:31.500 enough Lovecraft. Well, hardly read any Lovecraft. So in the last five weeks or so, I've gone

00:06:36.700 back and listened to an audiobook, because tons of it is on YouTube. You can find whole

00:06:41.460 playlists. I believe Mr. H Reviews has done a few audiobooks. Yeah, he pointed a few out

00:06:46.240 and sent us some links. Yeah. Yeah, you're all putting eight. So over the last five weeks

00:06:51.600 or so, I've listened to 12, 15 of them. You've probably read more than me in that. The long

00:06:57.280 ones, all the long ones as well, like where I'm like playing a computer game. I'm not interested

00:07:01.060 in a 15 minute short story. I want the one that's two hours long or more. Yeah. And

00:07:04.480 I even listened to one the other day that was a collaboration. It was basically Night at

00:07:09.260 the Museum. It's Night at the Museum. So yeah. Just as funny? Just as slapstick? No, no. Did

00:07:16.560 you imagine Owen Wilson? Really horrible and dark. So I've just been Lovecraft maxing for

00:07:22.680 the last few weeks and it's been really, really enjoyable. Yeah. I mean, a lot of his stories,

00:07:26.560 to start the literary criticism, a lot of his stories are the same, but most people like

00:07:31.260 that, right? Most recording artists, they've got a sound and all their albums more or less

00:07:35.840 sound similar. A lot of writers. I mean, I'm thinking of Arthur Conan Doyle. A lot of his

00:07:42.120 stories are very formulaic. It's basically, basically the same story over and over and

00:07:46.720 over again. Once you've found your theme, your stories become variations on the theme.

00:07:53.240 And it's a, it's something that works. And for Lovecraft, I mean, I believe he was writing

00:07:56.840 stories to get paid, to make a living for the publications, most notably weird tales that

00:08:03.960 he was being published in. So if he finds something weird tales are going to keep accepting,

00:08:08.400 he can expand on it as he goes, maybe write a larger novella here and there, like at the

00:08:13.000 mountains of madness. But he's got a formula that works, then he'll go with it. And he

00:08:18.460 did. Also, just to say, just to build on that, that's absolutely true. But also people that

00:08:22.680 know Lovecraft and have read lots and lots of Lovecraft will also say, what I just said

00:08:25.680 there's really unfair because there are loads of exceptions to that. There are loads of other

00:08:29.340 stories he wrote, which actually aren't anything like his sort of the classic formula of a single

00:08:34.940 first person narrator, going somewhere creepy, getting chased by something you don't really,

00:08:41.700 you never really described properly. And then going mad. And then at the end,

00:08:44.460 wondering if it was all a dream or whether he's mad. Like, so not all of his stories at all,

00:08:49.220 like a lot of them are. And Shadow Over, this one is, this one is, is like cut to that template.

00:08:54.540 Yeah. To AT. Yeah. Yeah. The ending, the ending is slightly different because instead of going mad

00:09:01.020 or refusing to accept what's gone on, the character that you're following, um, finds out that he's

00:09:07.500 deeply connected. Spoiler alert. Oh, well, yeah. Spoilers, spoilers for almost a hundred year old

00:09:13.660 stories. Yeah, no, I'm joking. I'm joking. Uh, but, but I like your idea of Lovecraft, Maxime,

00:09:18.860 because I, I, now I like to think that you've discovered and embraced all new prejudices that

00:09:24.540 you never before thought possible. Your powers have doubled since before you read Lovecraft.

00:09:28.940 Well, that's, that's one thing I think that's worth saying right off the bat, um, is put it in

00:09:33.980 his context. So he died of natural causes before World War II, like 1937. There you go, 1937.

00:09:40.860 And he was only in his stories hadn't been published by then. A lot of them. Yeah. And he was only in his

00:09:45.020 mid forties. So he died young. Yeah. But so that's important to remember that he's basically doing all

00:09:50.380 his writings in the 1910s, twenties and thirties. So, and he's a man of his time. Right. His hometown

00:09:57.100 is Providence, Rhode Island. So he's a New Englander, not all of his stories by any way, but the majority

00:10:03.580 of them are in New England, right? Right. So I think that's one of the first things you've got to say

00:10:10.140 about Lovecraft before you actually go any further. Yeah. Because, uh, he's a very, very in today,

00:10:15.660 a very controversial author because of his overt and explicit racial prejudices. Which is extremely

00:10:23.820 overt in this particular story, which isn't at all why we chose it. Yeah. Um, social prejudice as well.

00:10:29.740 Yeah. You know, I was going to say, and his class prejudices, uh, he very clearly is of the

00:10:35.820 wasp middle and upper business classes and holds the lower orders, particularly those that he

00:10:43.820 perceives as inbred backwards, rural folk with complete contempt. Yeah. He has strong views on

00:10:50.700 the white. Comical contempt. The white trash. Yeah. Uh, but then you read about how he moved, 1.00

00:10:56.380 as we were discussing, uh, before to New York. Um, and he was in such a traumatic shock

00:11:03.820 at the level of what he considered to be human detritus that occupied the city in the early 20th

00:11:10.700 century that he couldn't eat and lost a load of weight. Yeah. Plus like 40 pounds. Yeah. He was

00:11:15.980 always, he was always very sickly, but he became particularly sickly in New York because he hated 0.99

00:11:21.740 the fact that it was full of Jews, Italians, the lower orders, anyone who wasn't a prop blacks. The fact, 0.98

00:11:28.620 anyone who wasn't a properly bred wasp was utter scum to him. Yeah. This really is a point as well, 1.00

00:11:35.100 isn't it? When it's like, oh, Lovecraft was a white supremacist. It's like, no, he was an English

00:11:39.340 supremacist. Well, yeah. One of the reasons why he wanted, um, advocated for intervening in World

00:11:44.780 War One, uh, on the American side was because of the fact that no, we need to go save the motherland.

00:11:50.460 We need to go save the homeland. We need to save the English. Yeah. And help them out. 0.74

00:11:54.620 Uh, there's one thing to say about New York. I believe he moved there for like about two years

00:11:58.060 towards the end of his life and only, uh, found out a day or two ago that, um, he got married

00:12:04.380 briefly. He was like married for like, is that right? For like a year or two and then that fell

00:12:07.900 apart and all of that happened in New York. Yeah. Ironically enough to a Jewish woman. 1.00

00:12:12.860 Oh really? But he did say that she was well assimilated. Oh, okay. So yeah. And it did fall apart

00:12:18.620 anyway. There's one of the lesser known stories I listened to, uh, that's, I can't remember the name of it,

00:12:23.980 but other than it's got the word Brooklyn in it and it, I don't know, like horror in Brooklyn or

00:12:28.300 something or terror in Brooklyn or something like that. And, um, and, um, and it's, uh, quite a good

00:12:34.700 one. Uh, but you can tell, yeah, it just comes, drips through it. These absolute disgust of New York,

00:12:42.460 like in there, the sort of the, the premise of that story is sort of the, um, you wouldn't think

00:12:46.220 that there'd be like ancient rights going on and Britain, like human sacrifice and stuff

00:12:50.380 in Brooklyn, but there is. Oh, that's the thing. I certainly think there would be actually.

00:12:55.740 Right. Um, so yeah, I mean, one of the things I would say again, before we get on to sort of

00:13:01.500 really the detail of, um, the Innsmouth story is a little bit more about his life.

00:13:08.220 When you learn a little bit more about that, I think it puts a lot of the stuff. It explains a lot

00:13:13.420 of his stories while he keeps returning to the same themes over and over and over again.

00:13:18.060 One thing is that in these various stories, I listened to one just yesterday about, um, how

00:13:23.420 he feels like perhaps our real waking reality is just virtual and sleep is real, your dreams and

00:13:30.700 the sleep state. That's, that's the real reality. Was that the Dream Quest? There's one called the

00:13:37.340 Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. No, it wasn't that one, I don't think. And there's, there's another one that's

00:13:42.220 got sleep in the title. The point is he talks about sleep and dreams all the time. And that

00:13:46.300 corresponds very well with the ending of this particular story. Right. And apparently he suffered

00:13:51.500 from sort of night terrors most of his life or had crazily vivid dreams all his life. And the first

00:13:56.220 thing he ever wrote when he was a little kid, he was like six years old, he did a little kiddies

00:13:59.900 attempt at a story. And it was about these crazy dreams he's got. And then another thing, his dad was

00:14:05.340 institutionalized as insane when he was like three. Yeah. Oh, I wasn't aware of that. Died

00:14:09.980 in an asylum. And then, and then years later, well, syphilis eventually sends you mad. Right.

00:14:15.580 And then years later, his mum went to an asylum as well. No wonder they pop up so much in his stories. 1.00

00:14:21.820 And it makes it quite appropriate that the name of the fictional town that he created for his stories,

00:14:27.420 Arkham was also appropriated in the Batman series as Arkham Asylum. Yeah. Yeah. It all connects

00:14:35.020 together. So that's the other theme that Lovecraft just returns to. It might be every single thing

00:14:40.700 I've ever listened to or read is madness, the theme of madness. Do the characters go mad in Herbert West?

00:14:48.780 I know that's the reanimator. Yeah, the reanimator, because that's one of his stories that also got a

00:14:54.860 loose adaptation in the 1980s, I believe, where it's a film just called reanimator, a video nasty

00:15:00.780 B movie type thing, which I I've not watched, but I need to watch. See, I don't think the main where

00:15:06.460 they're just basically reanimating corpses and creating Frankenstein zombies. Yeah, like a

00:15:11.100 Frankenstein thing. And the various monsters come back and get get the guy. So, for example,

00:15:15.500 that's a good example. I think I might be wrong, that the main character, the main narrator doesn't

00:15:21.260 go insane. But the other main character in it, the the reanimator, he does, he is sort of going insane

00:15:28.220 slowly. And still in that story loads, it's like, you know, something happens. And he said,

00:15:34.540 and in that moment, I, I figured it was the first kernels of insanity were creeping in, like,

00:15:38.780 he just talks about it all the time, all the time, something or other happens or something or other,

00:15:43.900 someone says. And it's like, and that's insane. And that's, and that's the first, like, again,

00:15:50.140 kernel of madness creeping in. Did I imagine it? Or am I mad? Just that over and over and over and

00:15:55.420 over again. To return to your point as well, though, about what you were saying about the the madness of

00:16:00.220 his parents as well. After the institutionalization and death of his father, I believe he made a reference

00:16:07.740 to the fact, bear in mind, it only have been very early teenage years by this point, perhaps even a

00:16:12.860 little younger, but he talked about being suicidal, wishing to kill himself. And so these dark thoughts

00:16:19.980 of terror were obviously, as you say, from his mind from a very young age. And so you have to ask

00:16:24.700 yourself, well, okay, if he felt like that from such a young age, what kept him powering through?

00:16:30.460 What led him to actually keep going, keep working, keep meeting people, keep caring about life? Because

00:16:37.580 obviously a huge part of the Lovecraftian philosophy is, what is it, cosmicism? The idea

00:16:44.700 that it's just an indifferent ancient universe, and humans aren't at the center of it. There's

00:16:51.100 nothing particularly special about us. So why care? And the true reality is so unknowable and horrifying

00:16:58.540 that it drives you mad to even get a small glimpse of it. Yes. However, he had an insatiable curiosity

00:17:05.900 just about the world, right? It was chemistry. He was actually a bit of a scientist. Astronomy.

00:17:11.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just all number of subjects, scientific subjects, just putting life under

00:17:18.220 the microscope. Even up to his final days of his death, he was, so long as he still had strength

00:17:24.860 to lift his pen, he was chronicling like the pain and how it felt. He was also a famous man of letters.

00:17:31.660 Yes. He wrote volumes and volumes and volumes of correspondence with all sorts of different

00:17:39.020 people. So while he was known as quite a shut-in, his mind clearly wanted to understand and explore

00:17:45.180 the world and to hold relationships with other peoples, even if he himself was not one to

00:17:51.580 often be seen out and about anywhere. Yes. He was friends with loads and loads and loads of other

00:17:58.540 important sci-fi and horror writers. I forget the name of the guy who created the Conan series,

00:18:03.660 but he was friends and in correspondence with him quite often. They would borrow each other's ideas

00:18:08.300 and steal it like deliberately, happily, willingly, steal each other's bits of each other's universe and

00:18:13.580 write them into their own stories. I know that in the books, Conan apparently has a lot of references to

00:18:18.460 the Cthulhu mythos, which outside of it just being awesome Conan barbarian stories. It also makes me

00:18:24.700 want to read those even more. Yeah. There's a few things you mentioned there that I think worth noting

00:18:30.140 again before we sort of dive into the one story we sort of meant to be talking about here. So the

00:18:35.900 idea that his dad went insane and his mum went insane and on some level he is insane, but it's sort of

00:18:42.460 not completely insane, but just aware that he's sort of unbalanced in some way. And that thing where

00:18:49.900 obviously all the stories and all the main characters in it are absolutely obsessed and interested in

00:18:55.660 like the occult and unknowable, unprovable things. And they're very, very often there's a dialogue

00:19:02.940 between that character and a completely materialist, scientific, logical character often.

00:19:08.620 And that's Lovecraft himself. He was a scientist, first and foremost, but also obviously loved all

00:19:17.260 things occult and weird and paranormal. I think they're the best sort of paranormal people are

00:19:23.660 people that do actually have a grounding in real science. So they're not just completely

00:19:29.500 woo-woo, crystal skull, like paper-thin nonsense. It is actually grounded in logic and reason and

00:19:37.420 science as well at the same time. That's what makes it good and believable and has substance to it.

00:19:41.420 Absolutely. It creates a tension within the stories that makes them interesting because the character

00:19:46.780 is always questioning themselves and in conflict with themselves.

00:19:50.140 He's going, I'm a reasonable, logical man. What I just saw could not have happened. It could not have.

00:19:54.220 Yeah.

00:19:54.460 But it did.

00:19:57.420 This is exactly the stock character. Stock's a bit pejorative, but like the type of character in

00:20:04.380 M.R. James' ghost stories, just, you know, the arch rationalist who just comes into contact with the supernatural.

00:20:11.100 I think it speaks to the changing of eras that was happening through the 19th century and into

00:20:18.540 the early 20th century when in the kind of post-enlightenment fashion people were perceiving

00:20:25.660 themselves as having left an era of mysticism and the gods and the irrational and entering an era of

00:20:32.780 science and the rational. And this speaks to the tension that was happening there, that was occurring

00:20:38.860 then, of somebody like Lovecraft seeing that and saying, but what if?

00:20:43.580 Yeah.

00:20:44.620 Yeah, we can do amazing things, we can create wonders, we can catalogue and understand the entire world,

00:20:50.860 but what if there was something to the way we thought before? What if those old ways of seeing

00:20:57.340 the world actually linger? What if they have some impact still that even with all of our advances

00:21:05.420 and technological marvels? We can't catalogue, we can't comprehend, we can't understand, we still

00:21:11.100 look to the stars and we see mysteries. We still, in the case of this and other stories like the

00:21:16.780 Call of Cthulhu, we look to the ocean and we still don't truly understand what lies beneath the waves.

00:21:23.500 Because that was something that's also quite, people term Lovecraft's style of horror as cosmic horror,

00:21:28.700 he's one of the guys who created this concept of cosmic horror, which is true, but also a lot of

00:21:34.380 his stories, particularly Shadow over Innsmouth, deal with what horrors lurk beneath the ocean.

00:21:40.620 And the old gods themselves are not just star creatures of space, they are creatures of the ocean,

00:21:47.180 the deep ones. Lovecraft's Cthulhu is this enormous squid creature, which embodies both at the same time,

00:21:54.540 because it's got the squid-like features while also having wings, so it can exist both in the stars

00:22:01.180 and in the oceans. So it's this whole concept of mystery, how much we know about the world,

00:22:07.180 there are still all of these mysteries that we may never be able to resolve, that I think really

00:22:12.220 shows itself through Lovecraft's work. Absolutely, there's this theme that he returns to again and

00:22:17.260 again and again and again, that humans aren't sort of the first intelligent creatures on the earth,

00:22:22.300 that there's actually eons and eons of time before, where all sorts of things happened,

00:22:28.140 right, you actually get loads of that, finally he gives us loads of that detail in, at the mountains

00:22:33.820 of madness, but it's in loads of his work before that, that yeah, whether it's creatures or more than

00:22:38.140 one type of creature from the stars, or it's creatures that live under the ice in Antarctica,

00:22:44.140 or creatures that live under the sea, or a mixture of all those things going on all at once.

00:22:49.580 One last thing I think it's, I really want to say about Lovecraft, the man, before we go into the

00:22:55.260 story, is just a tiny bit more building on his real life, because I think it's like an important

00:23:01.180 insight. So he was born to like a waspish New England, Rhode Island, rich family, his dad goes in 1.00

00:23:09.900 an asylum when he's like three, so him and his mum went to live with one of his grandparents.

00:23:15.340 Yeah, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, right, was his name. And he was really rich, they lived in a giant

00:23:21.260 house, right, and they were really, really rich. Yeah. Well, not really, really rich, but in the

00:23:25.020 beginning, they had a big house and loads of money. And then when Lovecraft's about 13 or so, I think,

00:23:32.540 the grandfather dies of natural causes, and they have to, like what's left the family,

00:23:38.540 have to sell the estate or something. So they go from living in this big grand house to living in

00:23:44.620 just a normal small house, and then just living off the money, eking out the money for the rest of

00:23:52.300 his life. So like Lovecraft never had a normal job, apparently, just a normal job where you earn a wage,

00:23:57.420 and that's how you get by and pay your bills. I could never imagine him working a normal job.

00:24:00.940 Imagine him doing a paper round. So eking out the money and making ends meet with selling

00:24:07.180 stories a bit, because he never got critical or sort of commercial success in his own lifetime,

00:24:13.500 right? He was never a big... He was like a Van Gogh character who only attained notoriety and fame

00:24:18.700 after his death. He's not like Stephen King, a millionaire in his own lifetime, nothing like that. So

00:24:23.100 it's another classic thing that someone that's aristocratic or used to have money or their

00:24:27.980 family used to have money, and now they don't. And there's a little bit, if not a massive chip on

00:24:33.580 your shoulder about that, right? It's like the world screwed us in some way out of our proper position

00:24:39.740 of being aristocratic and better than everyone else. But we have to actually scrabble around in

00:24:44.140 the dirt like everyone else, actually, though, and make ends meet.

00:24:46.940 It's a common story.

00:24:47.900 Yeah.

00:24:48.300 Yeah.

00:24:48.620 You can even find it within my own family.

00:24:51.980 Most... A lot of... Yeah. I mean...

00:24:53.820 I suppose if either of you went far enough back, you'd probably find a similar story as

00:24:58.300 well with me.

00:24:58.860 Oh, yeah. Most families have got something like that.

00:25:00.460 It was a great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather spending all of the family money on his mistress

00:25:07.020 slash replacement wife after he became a widower.

00:25:11.500 Yeah.

00:25:13.020 It happens. It really happens.

00:25:16.780 And no chips on your shoulder, Harry.

00:25:18.700 Well, I only learnt about it in the past few years, so I've not had enough time to develop

00:25:22.460 the chip on my shoulder.

00:25:24.620 But he definitely... He definitely... One of the few things that he says is the word decadent.

00:25:32.060 Okay, so when you read someone that's old-fashioned, whether it's early 20th century or older,

00:25:37.340 quite often their usage will be different. They'll have a word that we still use today,

00:25:42.700 but it's got a different meaning essentially. And so the only real one that really jumped out at me

00:25:48.460 sort of again and again and again is when he says something's decadent. He means sort of

00:25:54.940 disgusting and inbred. And we don't really use the word that way, do we? 0.96

00:25:58.860 No.

00:25:59.500 A decadent to us, to me, just sort of means over the top. Not much more than that,

00:26:05.500 but he uses it to mean basically inbred.

00:26:09.340 And he uses it a lot.

00:26:10.220 Which is a bit odd.

00:26:11.340 I've come across the word in that usage before, but that might be because I read Lovecraft when I

00:26:17.500 was a young teenager. So it just became part of my understanding of that vocabulary. So I'm used to

00:26:23.820 seeing it that way.

00:26:24.700 It's like the word queer just used to mean anything odd or strange. It's nothing to do with homosexuality.

00:26:30.060 Right?

00:26:30.300 A perfectly good word.

00:26:32.540 Yeah.

00:26:33.180 And they took that from us.

00:26:34.140 Yeah. But one last thing, just to wrap up the discussion from where we started it,

00:26:39.820 regarding the modern perceptions of Lovecraft due to his prejudice. It is an awful shame that most of

00:26:46.380 the time people now, if they recommend Lovecraft, they have to add a little asterisk, or one of the

00:26:53.180 worst things is if they are adapting Lovecraft, because no matter your social views these days,

00:26:58.780 Lovecraft has to be acknowledged and appreciated as a pioneer of this kind of cosmic horror,

00:27:05.660 the unknowable horror that he was the one who really put out there.

00:27:10.300 He has to be acknowledged in that way. So people will read his stories, they'll go,

00:27:15.260 damn, this is good. I'll do an adaptation of this. But they have to switch all of the social 0.98

00:27:20.700 messaging to be the complete opposite of what he was suggesting. They have to, at the same time,

00:27:26.540 adapt his work, and as we're so familiar with these days, spit in his face at the same time.

00:27:32.700 Um, I know that one of the literary horror awards is a bust in the shape of Lovecraft's head.

00:27:39.900 Um, and some people, uh, black American authors in particular, if they've been awarded this,

00:27:47.340 have been horrified. They've been horrified at the idea that they're getting the image of this

00:27:53.260 virulent racist that they get to proudly put on their shelf in pride of place. I do find it amusing,

00:28:00.860 the idea of Lovecraft staring down at them in disgust. Apologies. Um, but I don't think that

00:28:09.900 you should have to add all of these asterisks and anything like that. I think whatever you

00:28:15.820 think of his social views, the stories are excellent in their own terms. Uh, they are reflective of the

00:28:22.060 times and frankly, who cares? Who cares? They're great stories. If you agree with the message behind

00:28:29.420 the stories. Great if you disagree with the message behind the stories. Great what I disagree with

00:28:34.700 is people trying to bastardize and skin suit his work in the modern day. It's such a shame that we

00:28:41.180 don't have, as far as I'm aware, a proper filmic retelling of many of his stories. That they've not

00:28:49.340 been adapted because I understand it would be difficult given that a lot of the horror is supposed to be

00:28:53.820 unknowable and unseeable. But I think there could be some really fantastic films made as adaptations

00:29:01.020 of these stories and so many people are just afraid to touch them. They're afraid to touch them. Um,

00:29:06.540 and they shouldn't be. And they shouldn't be. The only other thing that I'll say before we, uh,

00:29:10.220 before we get into the details of the story, if we've piqued your interest with Lovecraft and you've

00:29:15.180 never read him before in this preamble to the discussion of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Lovecraft's one,

00:29:19.660 actually a really easy author to get into because he didn't have an enormous body of work. He wrote

00:29:26.300 a lot of stories, but they're all, most of them are very short. So you can get something like what

00:29:30.300 Luca has here, which is a single volume collection of all of his fiction. All of it just there. And

00:29:37.580 it's pretty reasonable. You can get it for what, like 20 quid? Yep. So if you want to read his stuff,

00:29:43.180 you can get it very, very easily, all in one place, nice and convenient. Oh, on YouTube,

00:29:48.060 one of the first things that will come up if you search for HP Lovecraft audio book is like a

00:29:53.340 playlist of like 40 of all the, all the best ones just right there. So you don't even need to spend

00:29:59.020 a penny or, um, or go to a bookshop or anything or read. You could just have it playing while you're,

00:30:05.580 while you're playing a computer game or doing the ironing or whatever it is.

00:30:08.860 You don't even need to read. So get on it. You don't even need to be able to read to enjoy

00:30:14.140 Lovecraft these days. Something that I'm sure would absolutely horrify him. You just need the

00:30:19.500 internet and some ear balls. If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,

00:30:24.540 head to our website where you can find more.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - November 01, 2025

PREVIEW： Chronicles #20 ｜ The Shadow Over Innsmouth

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