Fishers of Men: Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Martin's Beach”

Something gooey this way comes

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I’ve read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft over the years, a habit that might stem from an impulse similar to the one that made me shake salt onto slugs when I was a kid: it’s cathartic to watch bad things happen, especially when oozing ichor is involved. And there’s a whole lot of ooze in Lovecraft.

2024 marks the 101st anniversary of the publication of several of Lovecraft’s most memorable stories. Now, Lovecraft aficionados know that to find the gems, you have to sift through a lot of silt, some of which takes the form of mere bad writing, and some of which falls into the less comfortable category of vitriolic racism. Luckily, the story “The Horror at Martin's Beach,” written in collaboration with Sonia H. Greene and published in November 1923 in Weird Tales, is mercifully long on fun storytelling and short on xenophobic tripe.

The setup is simple: a New England fishing vessel catches a gargantuan sea creature (like his heir, China Miéville, Lovecraft loved size words: “gargantuan,” “cyclopean,” “monolithic”) the likes of which science has never known. The creature dies in captivity, only to be avenged by another of its kind.