That reading of that one had never occurred to me. The hotel chase scene is one of the bits of Lovecraft that actually scares me, so I don't reread that story very often. (There are two bits of Lovecraft that actually scare me and the other one is a huge chunk of 'Under the Pyramids'.)
What do you make of the protagonist discovering at the end that Innsmouth is his ancestry and turning into one of them, then? I've always thought of it as rather like the bits with the Great Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness, where the protagonist realizes that just because they don't look human doesn't mean they aren't sentient and civilized and that his initial revulsion was completely unjustified, but I've seen people argue for the end of 'Innsmouth' as one of those horror twist endings, which I guess is reasonable though it makes no sense to me at all.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-10-25 06:40 pm (UTC)That reading of that one had never occurred to me. The hotel chase scene is one of the bits of Lovecraft that actually scares me, so I don't reread that story very often. (There are two bits of Lovecraft that actually scare me and the other one is a huge chunk of 'Under the Pyramids'.)
What do you make of the protagonist discovering at the end that Innsmouth is his ancestry and turning into one of them, then? I've always thought of it as rather like the bits with the Great Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness, where the protagonist realizes that just because they don't look human doesn't mean they aren't sentient and civilized and that his initial revulsion was completely unjustified, but I've seen people argue for the end of 'Innsmouth' as one of those horror twist endings, which I guess is reasonable though it makes no sense to me at all.