Edward Lee The Innswich Horror

[andydecker]

Edward Lee - The Innswich Horror (Cemetary Dance Publication, 2010, 187 pages, this edition Deadite Press 2010, 165 pages)

Spoilers follow. I mean it.


It is July 1939, and rich Lovecraft aficionado Foster Morley takes a bus tour through Massachusetts. He is following the footsteps of his guru. And he can´t fathom his luck when he discovers that the little fisher town Innswich seems to be the blueprint for Innsmouth, the town in the tale Shadow over Innsmouth. Apparently Lovecraft just changed the names.

Innswich is a nice town and doesn´t look at all like its rotting fictional counterpart. Roosevelt´s New Deal has pumped a lot of money for renovation into the town with its fishing industry, which is healthy, friendly and greets Morley with open arms. The only strange thing are the pregnant woman on the street; every second woman seems to be with child. Like the cute drugstore waitress Mary with whom prim and prude bachelor Morly is instantly smitten and falls in chaste love. And he can´t believe his luck when Mary tells him that her brother spoke with Lovecraft, that he is the drugstore guy in the Innsmouth tale. And there is a unsavory character named Cyrus Zalen, a photographer, who made a picture of HPL. Mary warns Morley not to search this man out, but of course he goes.

Bad idea.

Zalen, whose grandfather was none other than the old town drunk Zadok Allen in the tale, is a pimp and a pornographer who mistakes Morley at first for a customer and offers him a pregnant whore. And guess what, nice Mary used to work for him, as he can prove with pictures.

From then on the novel descends into Lee´s usual themes. Gore, super sleazy weird sex, more gore, violence. Everything is real, the Deep Ones are living in the water and have a pact with the townspeople. For their thriving fishing industry the humans have to supply the fish men with babys for genetic experimentation. To put up with the quota, out of towners are kidnapped, gets their arms and legs amputated and their teeth pulled (so they are helpless and can´t bite) , then they have to impregnate the townswoman. And the Deep Ones have the power to resurrect the dead with their alien science. It mostly follows the plot of the original from there on. And guess whom Morley meets at the end ...

Edward Lee has now written a couple of these Lovecraft pastiches, all published by Deadite Press as affordable trade paperbacks, and I guess some Lovecraft fans will be appalled. At the moment it seems to be kind of novel to drag the subtext of Lovecraft´s tales kicking and screaming unto a stage of a sordid live-show; even comic-scribe Alan Moore does it in his Neonomicon where he has his heroine raped on panel by a Deep One.

I am in two minds of this short novel. It has some suspenseful writing and it captures the backwood aspect quite well. Also it has some well-developed ideas. And it is as splatterpunk (or shall I say squirtpunk?) as they come, what of course you expect from the writer.

On the other hand I mostly detest novels where you put real persons into the narrative, especially in all things Lovecraft. Of course a lot of writers before Lee thought it the height of originality to put him into the text. I always thought the "Oh my god, there was a writer named Lovecraft who writes about this monster in my cellar 30 years ago and his tales are NOT fiction!" idiotic, but they all did it, from Leiber to Lumely. So I really can´t fault Ed Lee for that.

But do one really need to this? Let me put it this way. If horror fiction shall make you uncomfortable, Lee succeeds admirably. Not in the horror category, but in the sexual violence category. It is like the proverbial car wreck in this regard, and it is the literary equivalent of those euro-sleaze cannibal movies of yesterday.

If you prefer your cosmic horror and HPL pastiche a little less shrill and in your face, avoid it.

[dem]

in the unlikely event of a copy turning up at any of my haunts, i wouldn't have looked twice at it until i read your review. must admit, latter day cthulhu mythos stories tend to bore me more often than they excite, but this sounds fun. If you get Best New Horror 22, you might like to try Michael Michael Smith's Substitutions and Norman Partridge's Lesser Demons.

[erebus]

Just got through reading Lee's SLITHER not to long ago. He isn't the most gifted of writers, but you have a good time with what he gives you. As I'm a fan of the trashy bugs and critters attack novels SLITHER delighted me. Its depraved and extreme to the core. Pink worms entering and pouring out of every orifice. Whats not to like ?