'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' was not one of Lovecraft's favourite stories, although it is widely rated as one of his best, and certainly best known works today. It holds a core place in the wider body of weird fiction known as the Cthulhu Mythos for its combination of elements from the earlier short stories 'Dagon' and 'The Call of Cthulhu', and for the introduction of the amphibious fish-frog-men known as the Deep Ones. It is the story of the narrator, who visits the eerie and decrepit New England town of Innsmouth, intending merely to pass through and look at the architecture, but finds himself exposed to and then threatened by the repulsive secret history of the town and its strangely degenerate inhabitants.
Lovecraft's writing style is circuitous and self-consciously vague, the author having realised early on that hinting at indescribable horror was by definition more effective than describing it. The horror is thus primarily in the mental effect of the events and terrors of the tale on the narrator. In many cases, the bulk of a Lovecraft story is taken up not with current events but with the uncovering of the unsettling truth of past events, and so it is here. It's not everyone's cup of tea, and it is far more effective in the quiet seclusion of a teenager's bedroom than on a crowded train, but 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' is a good example of the form.
The first of the following tales is 'Beyond the Reef' by Basil Copper, a writer with a long history not with Lovecraft himself but with his (possibly self-styled) literary executor, August Derleth. It is a direct sequel to 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', set a few years after the raid on the town and the torpedoing of Devil's Reef reported in the original. The action is moved to nearby Arkham, where an academic, a pathologist, a detective and a surveyor walk into a bar... I mean, encounter a plot by Innsmouth ancient, aquatic patrons to extend their influence to the university city.
'Beyond the Reef'... is really bad. It's bad as a sequel, and it's also bad as a short story in its own right.
As a sequel it fails to adhere even to the hinted facts about the Deep Ones in the original. My friend James often criticises what he calls the collector tendency in many Lovecraft fans, which he explains as the urge to codify and catalogue the creatures and events in the stories to produce a coherent universe and bestiary. For myself, I don't see this as a bad thing necessarily, but it is certainly not an approach supported directly by the text (rather like trying to create a definitive chronology of classic Doctor Who). It was primarily Derleth who coined the phrase 'Cthuhu Mythos' and imposed a kind of order on it.
That being said, a sequel ought to take note of the original text, but 'Beyond the Reef' replaces fish-frog-men who interbreed with humans to produce hybrid offspring who eventually transform and join their immortal parents in the oceans with amorphous beasts capable of transforming humans into their own degenerate kind, and the locally powerful Esoteric Order of Dagon and its allies with an inhuman psychic force which appears to be practically all-knowing and all-encompassing. Instead of infiltrating by stealth, inbreeding and the offering of monetary gain and good fishing, the faceless antagonists now burrow beneath Arkham, and are basically unrecognisable as the Deep Ones of the original short story.
It also refers to an earlier period of civic expansion in the city most famously described (in 'The Dreams in the Witch House') as "changeless, legend-haunted Arkham", which just isn't trying.
I would take less issue with all of this, I suspect, were the story itself better. It opens with a monologue from a character preparing to give his statement to a group of men including the Chief of Detectives and the local ME, but then cuts into a third person narrative most of which the original speaker could not possibly know and much of which concerns only the Chief of Detectives and the ME. It also makes a point of describing the speaker in embarrassingly glowing terms. The style of the writing is stilted and somewhat repetitive, and the evocation of cosmic horror nowhere near as effective as Lovcecraft's, despite the more insidious and overtly horrific threat.
After the strong opening provided by 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', 'Beyond the Reef' is a real disappointment (although a lot of Amazon reviewers seem to have loved it.) Still, there are fifteen more stories in here, including two by Kim Newman and one by Neil Gaiman; although admittedly there's also a Brain Lumley, and having read either two or three of the Necroscope novels (I seriously have no idea if it was two or three, that's the impression that they made) I'm not looking forward to that so much.
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