The Shadow Over Innsmouth

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a novella written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1931 and published as a book in 1936, the only one of his works to appear in book form during his lifetime; the rest came out in magazines.

We are located in the decadent and fictional town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. The book narrates the origin and discovery of the half-human half-fish hybrid beings that inhabit it. These townspeople worship Cthulhu together with Father Dagon and Mother Hydra; Lovecraft took the name Dagon from an ancient Semitic god known from the Hebrew Bible.

The narrator reaches Innsmouth on a cheap bus during a tour of New England, finds a town of boarded-up houses and evasive residents, and hears a drunkard's account of the bargain its people once made. What he learns forces him to spend the night there, and afterwards to look rather closely into his own family.

"During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth."

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was legally published within the United States (or the United Nations Headquarters in New York subject to Section 7 of the United States Headquarters Agreement) before 1964, and copyright was not renewed.