lovecraft's townscape

'' i had, i realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed innsmouth. it was a town of wide extant and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visable life. ... the vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, ... i could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. ... i could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. all the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed ...

'' soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur ... i strolled out on the square and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly. one side of the cobblestoned space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings ... eastwards i could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful georgian steeples. thus i began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of innsmouth's narrow shadow-blighted ways. ...

'' i struck a region of utter desolation which somehow made me shudder. collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish decapitated steeple of an ancient church ... down unpaved side streets i saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles ... certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather then arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. ... and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigal fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse ...

'' mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds ... in all these streets no living thing was visible ... furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and i could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut ... innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable.''

h.p lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.