No one asked, but one of my most controversial takes on any of Lovecraft's stories is "The Shadow over Innsmouth."

This is a story about miscegenation...except not in quite the way most people think. So let's talk about that a little.

The first thing to understand is that "The Shadow over Innsmouth" has its whole mythos built up about it. I don't mean the dozens of stories and novels that is has spawned, but the ways people talk about the story have been repeated so many times it has its own mythology.

You'll often hear something along the lines of "Oh, Lovecraft found out he had a Welsh grandmother and was so shocked he wrote this whole story about how horrible it was not to be a pure Anglo-Saxon," for example. Or how the whole Deep Ones thing was a metaphor for miscegenation.

These takes are sort of like the blind men feeling the elephant. They're only looking at part of the picture. It is very likely, for example, that Lovecraft's genealogical research informed the story, but HPL wasn't pissed and self-hating he had a Gaelic great-great-grandma.

The concept of interracial relationships is absolutely core to the story - but it's not a metaphor. Read the story again, with an eye toward the details, and you'll see at the beginning of the story the nameless protagonist is clearly building Innsmouth up as this mixed community

...citing incidents in real life and media where New Englanders had brought back non-white peoples from various parts of the world and intermarried with them. The neighbors of Innsmouth hate and distrust them because of their supposed mixed race status. That's text, not subtext.

When Lovecraft writes about a New Englander bringing back a Chinese wife, for example, that's a reference to the film JAVA HEAD (1923), which was in turn based on a popular novel, and is all about racial prejudice and the stigmata of marrying someone foreign/non-white.

What gets weird is that the racial prejudice is the red herring of the story. The narrator and the folks around Innsmouth have no idea what's really going on. That's the key to the whole story: Lovecraft isn't making the Deep Ones a stand-in for any other racial group.

Which makes sense, when you think about it. Lovecraft had already written a story about the horrors of passing ("Medusa's Coil"), he'd written about a family with a single non-human ancestor ("Arthur Jermyn"), this was something bigger and weirder than that: this was a community.

This was, basically fantasy racism. It was taking the reader's expectations and subverting them a bit, but also leading them into really weird territory. It did so with the language of racialism that the readers were familiar with - something which is more apparent in Lovecraft's

notes for the story, where he discusses the subsequent generations of the town in the same way people used to talk about "quadroons" and "octoroons." A lot of that doesn't make it into the final story, but it was explicitly part of the background Lovecraft was using.

There are other influences on "The Shadow over Innsmouth" - notably "The Place Called Dagon" by Herbert Gorman and "Fishhead" by Irvin S. Cobb - but this is all being filtered through Lovecraft's particular lens.

So when we talk about "The Shadow over Innsmouth" as an example of how Lovecraft's understanding of race influenced his fiction - it's not because Lovecraft wrote this as some parable how the horrors of miscegenation. Instead, the intermarriage aspect is a way to lay the ground

for one of Lovecraft's favorite themes: biological determinism. The inherited horror. The ticking time bomb of biology. Except instead of a genetic predisposition to male pattern baldness or a nervous disorder, you start to become ichthyic and batrachian.

Which comes down to the ending - and this is a different ending than any that Lovecraft wrote before or since: the nameless narrator embraces their newly discovered heritage. Now, you can argue that Lovecraft was playing this for horror, implying the mental changes were behind it

...but many writers have taken it on the face as a genuine change of heart, of connecting with a part of themselves that they had not known about.

That change of heart resonates for a lot of Mythos fans; there have been all sorts of readings of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" as, for example, an allegory for homosexuality, where the narrator finally emerges from the closet and embraces their sexuality.

Many transgender fans find the idea of dealing with changes in their body toward a different, maybe more ideal, form resonates with their own transition experience, or what they wish it would be.

Which is fair; Lovecraft didn't intend these readings, but they're still valid.

So when I sometimes say "'The Shadow over Innsmouth' isn't an allegory for miscegenation," I'm not denying the influence of that idea on Lovecraft, I'm trying to point out that there is more to the story than just that. A lot of people prefer simpler readings of Lovecraft's

stories because they're pithy and fit what they think they know or want to be true about Lovecraft, but if you sit down and actually pick the story apart a bit, you see that simple readings don't always work. There's a lot more going on in this story.