Shadows Over Innsmouth - Down to the Boots, The Church in High Street, Innsmouth Gold, Daoine Domhain, A Quarter to Three and The Tomb of Priscus

Same collection, different cover.

Another set of short stories from Stephen Jones' Shadows Over Innsmouth, and this time we begin with 'Down to the Boots', a short short by D. F. Lewis. High on mood, short on action, this is the tale of an Innsmouth woman whose husbands are forever going to the dogfish, whether transformationally or digestively is not completely apparent.

Ramsey Campbell's 'The Church in High Street' once more brings the action, such as it is, to England, for a tale of dank cellars, hidden catacombs and dungeon dimensions. Cambell is one of the seminal modern Mythos authors (contributing the Great Old One Gla'aki to the canon, such as it is) and as might be expected manages the creeping horror aspects of the story with aplomb. Overall, however, this entry suffers from a certain familiarity (protagonist searches for a friend, is warned off the same thing the friend was warned off, goes anyway and encounters mind-shattering evil), and in context from a total lack of connection to Innsmouth.

That criticism at least can not be leveled against 'Innsmouth Gold' by David A Sutton, in which a fortune hunter ventures into the blighted and abandoned wreck of the town in search of a horde of Deep One treasure supposedly buried and lost by the federal agents who raided it in the 20s. This is a pretty good opening pitch, although sadly the story ends up in the same wild flight from a gibbering mob as so many other Innsmouth interpretations.

'Daoine Domhain' by Peter Tremayne takes us to Ireland, and an entirely different Deep One-haunted community. It's a fair effort as far as it goes, although the use of a naval officer as the primary narrator-protagonist makes the fatalism common to Mythos narratives a little odd. One might expect a military man to express more preparedness to fight when anticipating the arrival of a (lone) abductor than the fatalism shown here, even if such efforts were proven futile. In addition, there is little of actual horror in the story, neither in fact or in implication, leaving the impression that the narrator is more likely delusional than demon-hounded.

'A Quarter to Three' is the second Kim Newman offering, under his own name. It is a very short short, and primarily - by the author's own admission - exists as an excuse for a bad play on the words of an old Sinatra number. So it goes.

Finally this time, 'The Tomb of Priscus' by Brian Mooney takes us into the territory of the muscular Mythos, name-dropping Brian Lumley's god-punching Titus Crowe and featuring an honest to Cthulhu cavalry moment. Prior to that it's a pretty good offering, with a secret tomb and dark offerings (although again, as a follow-up to 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' it takes rather too many liberties with the nature of the Deep Ones and their hybrids.)

Six more stories. The last is the Gaiman, but I'm getting less tolerant with each passing tale*; let's see how we go along.

* Whatever else, I am not planning to go straight on to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.