#16: Innsmouth — “The Shadow over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft published this in 1936 and described a Massachusetts fishing town whose inhabitants made a deal with aquatic entities called the Deep Ones generations ago. The arrangement guaranteed fishing prosperity and near-immortality in exchange for interbreeding, and the results are visible in the residents’ posture, their smell, and what Lovecraft calls the Innsmouth look: a progressive fishlike quality that becomes more pronounced with age. The narrator discovers, toward the story’s end, that he has relatives in Innsmouth, which is the specific detail that makes the story a horror and not merely a description.
