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The Weird Shadow Over Derleth
One almost wishes that August Derleth
had never read Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth". The story
seems to have possessed his imagination, casting its "shadow" over at
least half the Cthuloid tales Derleth wrote. Two of them, "The Watcher from
the Sky" and "Innsmouth Clay", are little more than re-tellings
of "The Shadow". Two more, "The Seal of R'lyeh" and
"The Black Island", borrow Lovecraft's device of having the narrator
be a Deep One himself. And in general, elements from Lovecraft's story tend to
recur tiresomely in Derleth's, crippling any effectiveness the stories might
otherwise have. Lovecraft himself re-used Innsmouth and its finny folk In other
tales, but with a good deal more originality. For instance, in "The Thing
on the Doorstep" the villainess/villain Asenath/Ephraim is a member of the
Waite clan from Innsmouth, but this fact leads to esoteric and malign activities
much different from those in "The Shadow over Innsmouth".
By contrast, Derleth could not help
rephrasing the same old horrors, making them commonplace, if not laughable. The
one exception might be "The Fisherman at Falcon Point", which defies
the stereotype largely because it borrows heavily from "The Strange High
House in the Mist". In this story said fisherman, originally no relation to
Innsmouth stock, winds up becoming one of the Deep Ones, that set of amphibian
hybrids whose fascination for Derleth was endless. These denizens of Yha-N'thlei
are ubiquitous in Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos tales, and they provide the point of
departure for the present discussion. For we want to focus on his use of two
adjectives to describe them, namely "ichthic", or "ichthyic"
(= "fish-like" or "of fish") and "batrachian" (=
"frog-like", "of frogs"). They come from the Greek words for
fish or frog respectively.
Re-ke-ke-kex
From Lovecraft's description of the
full-fledged Deep Ones (those who have undergone the "change"), they
have not merely the "Innsmouth look", but the look of "the
Creature from the Black Lagoon". They have scales, fins, and gills, but
like frogs, have a basically humanoid skeletal structure and a broad, flat face.
And like either frogs or fish, they have bulging, glassy eyes and wide, flabby
lips. Lovecraft has Zadok Alien describe them as "fishlike frogs or
froglike fishes," or "toad-lookin' fishes". The narrator
describes them as "blasphemous fish-frogs". It is this description
that set the tone of Derleth's characterizations of the Innsmouthers and the
Deep Ones. Lovecraft's categories were (intentionally) a bit vague. For
instance, he not only straddles the fence on whether they are fish or frogs; he
also calls one of the Marsh women "reptilian-looking". In other words,
they cannot be easily pigeon-holed, and are thus not simply "fish-men"
on the level of Flash Gordon's "hawk-men" and "clay-men".
Derleth maintains this fluidity of categorization. And from here on in we will
be able to distinguish various trends in his selection of adjectives for those
coldblooded creatures. The one characterization from which he never departs,
however, is "batrachian". Whatever else the Deep Ones may be, they are
frog-like.
In the series of stories collected
under the title of The Trail of CthuIhu, Derleth calls the Innsmouthers/Deep
Ones simply "batrachian" seven times, and uses expressions indicating
combined frog-fish nine times (e.g., "batrachian but scaly"; "batrachian,
and fish-like"; "batrachian and ichthic"; "batrachian or
ichthic"; "fish men or frog men"). Twice he calls them simply
"ichthic". Twice he adds a reptilian element ("almost
reptilian"; "saurian, reptilian, batrachian").
The fish-frog combination predominates
again in "The Shuttered Room". Derleth speaks of "Gilled people.
Resembling frogs or toads more than fish, but eyes iththic". The Deep Ones
are spotted "swimming . . . among fish and amphibia and strange men, half
batrachian in aspect. . . ." The stories collected in The Mask of
Cthulhu tend to couple "batrachian" not with "ichthic"
but with "amphibian." Here, obviously, the terms alternate, being
synonymous, instead of supplementing each other as do "batrachian" and
"ichthic" which mean different things. He calls them now
"amphibious creatures", then "batrachian hybrids".
In "The Survivor", Derleth's
completion of a Lovecraftian story outline, he supplements "batrachian"
not with fish but with "saurian". For instance, "some kinship
with batrachia, and hence very probably also saurians, could be traced."
There must have been "saurian or batrachian ancestors". One particular
figure's skin was "very scaly", but "ichthyc". He had a
"saurian look".
Language of the Lilypad
Though Lovecraft did use the adjectives
"reptilian" and "amphibian" once each, it is surprising that
he never once used the words "ichthic" or "batrachian" in
"The Shadow over Innsmouth". Instead, he relied on brief descriptions
of physiognomy, gait, and smell. The classic passage describes "a limitless
stream --- flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating --- surging inhumanly through
the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic
nightmare." The passage itself might be called a "nightmare saraband"
of verbs and adjectives, but it makes its point. If Lovecraft poured on the
adjectives, at least he barraged the reader with a respectable variety of them,
whereas Derleth used the same two or three over and over.
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