blood will tell

'' i never heard of innsmouth till the day before i saw it for the first and-so-far last time. ... "innsmouth?" well its a queer kind of town down at the mouth of the manuxet. ... more empty houses than there are people, i guess, ... and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any innsmouth blood they have in `em ... and why is everybody so down on innsmouth? ... they`ve ben telling things about innsmouth--whispering`em mostly--for the past hundred years ... some of the stories would make you laugh ... about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves ... about the black reef off the coast, devil reef, they call it ... the story is that theres a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef ...

'' but the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice ... what a lot our new england ships used to have to do with queer ports in africa, asia, the south seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with`em ... well there must be something like that back of the innsmouth people ... some of `em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin aint quite right. rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up ... nobody around here or in arkham or ipswich will have any thing to do with `em and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town ... they seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other preferable spheres of entity ...

'' their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut-was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. it was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night ... it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public ... one wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the "innsmouth look" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced ... many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoor in someplaces ... what kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had it was impossible to tell ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

i: squint-wail by michael hsu, id-mag may 10, 2008.