Tales from Innsmouth… ‘Return to Innsmouth’ (Guy N. Smith) & ‘Only The End of the World Again’ (Neil Gaiman)


My Halloween usually involves a scary movie and/or some similar reading but this year… When I woke up and realised that I’d slept through half of ‘The Thing’, that told me things weren’t going to plan (and that I could do with more sleep in general). My copy of ‘Shadows over Innsmouth’ hadn’t turned up either (and I didn’t fancy reading anything else) so I went back to sleep and I’ll see if I can do Halloween better next year instead 😊

‘Shadows over Innsmouth’ actually turned up yesterday so it wasn’t as if I had to wait too long 😉 It was the promise of a Guy N. Smith Mythos tale, that I hadn’t read, that originally had me hitting the ‘Order’ button and even though I’ve already read ‘Only The End of the World’, that was years ago and it’s in this collection so that was an easy decision to make.

Quick thoughts again for this post, I hope you don’t mind 😉 These were two very quick reads and I’ve got a few other bits that I need to get done today… 

‘Return to Innsmouth’ – Guy N. Smith

A young man must journey to Innsmouth or risk insanity arising from a vengeful curse. What he finds, and loses, in Innsmouth may well rob him of his sanity anyway…

At only six pages long, there is just enough time to return to Innsmouth but not much left, after that, to get things done while you’re there. At least that’s what I thought, when I saw the page count, but Smith still manages to get a lot done here. Innsmouth is beautifully drawn and is clearly the real main character of the piece. We’re not just here to admire the scenery though. Stuff happens and it’s creepy, especially as our hero has no idea what is going on or why (only that something is trying to get into his room…) It felt like ‘Return to Innsmouth’ perhaps had a little more to say but a word count said otherwise? I don’t know but it still does its job very well.

‘Only The End of the World Again’ (Neil Gaiman)

Is this the same werewolf that featured in Gaiman’s ‘Bay Wolf’…? I couldn’t say for certain but my gut feeling says it is and if you can’t trust your gut… Anyway.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoy this slice of Chandler-esque Mythos and it was good to be reminded. I mustn’t leave it so long next time.

There is more than one mystery to be solved by Lawrence Talbot and I couldn’t help but chuckle that the one mystery Talbot isn’t interested in is the one that everyone seems to want to help him with. Life is like that sometimes, people just assume that you don’t want to be a werewolf and maybe Talbot doesn’t but the alternative isn’t helpful.

You can see the answer coming to the second mystery but that wasn’t why I was there. I was all about sightseeing in Innsmouth and it’s exactly as you’d expect, shadowy and full of secrets. It’s somehow reassuring though that landladies are the same wherever you go 😉 I was also all about seeing the world through the eyes of a werewolf, as only Neil Gaiman can show you, and that was exactly what I got. Gaiman is a superb storyteller who instinctively gets his subject matter and ‘Only The End of the World Again’ is another great example of this.

And then I realised that while I’ve read a few Lovecraft tales, I’ve never read ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’. It’s in this collection so I’ll have to do something about that over the weekend… 😉

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