Review by Frank Plowright

The Shadow Over Innsmouth stands alone in H.P. Lovecraft’s catalogue of works for two reasons. Firstly it was the only one of his stories that he lived to see in print, albeit in a limited edition he considered profoundly unsatisfactory, and secondly it’s strangely uncharacteristic for actually having action scenes rather than just brooding tension exploding into terror.

Lovecraft’s works are heavy on verbal description, which is at odds with the idea of comics, so it might be assumed the duty falls to Gou Tanabe to produce pictures worth a thousand words. He doesn’t take that route, quoting heavily from Lovecraft’s text, and opens with a series of spreads adapting how Lovecraft sets the scene via a prologue telling of the US government’s complete destruction of the town of Innsmouth over the winter of 1927-1928.

The narrator is never named, but a young man planning a visit to his grandmother’s home town in the summer of 1927. He finds the rail fare expensive, and is told of a bus most avoid as it runs through Innsmouth, a town the people of Newburyport talk about with revulsion. That only intrigues the narrator who duly visits.

For all the portentous text of repulsive inhabitants, Tanabe renders Innsmouth with a precise beauty, making it seem more an Italian coastal village than a Massachusetts town, even investing uninhabited ruins with a grandeur. It’s all very attractive, but at odds with foreboding atmosphere the town is supposed to instil, an atmosphere superbly delivered within buildings especially a scene set in a locked room. The inhabitants are more unsettling, ugly people as if a hybrid of human and amphibian, and when the horror comes, Tanabe delivers it.

Finding the reality matches what he’s been told, the narrator would prefer to leave Innsmouth, but the bus out doesn’t run for another four hours, so he talks to people. Here Lovecraft introduces stories within stories, and we learn of an ancient race risen from the sea and greed prompting betrayal followed by a horrific price paid. It’s dismissed as the delusional fantasy of an alcoholic.

Fully a third of the bulky book is occupied by the narrator being trapped and the subsequent flight and pursuit, and Tanabe drags every moment of tension from the experience in what’s a storytelling tour de force. The fear of the narrator is conveyed along with the strangeness of the horrors they witness. Perhaps when Lovecraft wrote a dream sequence in the 1930s it wasn’t the cheap narrative ploy it now seems, but everything else about The Shadow Over Innsmouth still stands up as timeless horror with a final secret well dropped. A few misgivings about the art being too decorative in places are inconsequential when weighed against how effectively Tanabe spreads terror, and this is a stunning adaptation.