In this second part of my exploration of Sea Horror the tales will take us from the ports of Innsmouth and Faring Town into the depths of the ocean and even to worlds beyond space and time. Read part one here.

H.P. Lovecraft

Probably the greatest horror writer of the 20th Century, H. P. Lovecraft wrote many tales of horror involving the sea. He himself seemed to have a deep fear of the ocean and even of fish. It is no surprise that his fears find a place in his stories. For example, the title character of “The Terrible Old Man” was a captain of clipper ships.

One of Lovecraft’s earliest stories written as an adult is “Dagon.” After his ship is sunk by German U-boats, a castaway finds himself on an unknown island. There he encounters the title creature. This story is one of Lovecraft’s earliest and one of his lesser ones; however it still has elements of genuine terror.

More interesting is the “The Temple” in which a German U-boat captain has eerie encounters at sea. After a raid on a convoy, in which they gun down the life boats, the crew of the U-boat discovers a corpse with a strange piece of carved ivory. This sets off a series of misfortunes that leaves the U-boat drifting in the current. Soon the U-boat is surrounded by a flock of dolphins. One of the crew members believes they are the spirits of the dead. The U-boat sinks deeper and deeper into the sea until they encounter the ruins from which the ivory piece came.

Interestingly, both “Dagon” and “The Temple” are set during World War One, but are told from different sides of the war.

His best known tale of sea horror, and probably his most famous story, is “The Call of Cthulhu.” The story is a classic and while much of it is set in the bayous of Louisiana the climax is set in the South Seas. The story tells of a ship’s encounter with the risen city of R’lyeh and the awakening of Cthulhu. The ship flees the giant monster; however they can not get away and in act of desperation a brave sailor turns the ship about and rams Cthulhu. This hurts the monster enough to put him back to sleep. Along with “The Dunwich Horror,” this is one of Cthulhu Mythos stories were the monster is defeated; albeit temporarily.

The story that shows best Lovecraft’s feelings about the sea is “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Set in the seaside town of Innsmouth (probably the most well developed of Lovecraft’s fictional towns), the story tells of a tourist’s visit to the remote port. There he discovers that the townspeople of Innsmouth have been interbreeding with the monstrous Deep Ones. Their children start off looking human but over time develop aquatic characteristics. The climax of the story is a chase through the streets of Innsmouth.

Lovecraft manages to imbue Innsmouth with a feeling of wrongness. There is a sense of both decay and rising tension throughout the story. What starts off merely eerie slowly becomes horrific during the climax. And then there is the shocking revelation at the end.

Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard wrote three stories and one poem about the fictional New England port of Faring Town. Probably inspired by Lovecraft’s fictional towns, Faring Town is beset with supernatural horrors.

“Sea Curse” tells of two sailors who are cursed by a witch for the killing of a young woman. The curse involves one killing the other. Soon after, they set sail; however, only one returns. He claims that the other sailor deserted the ship. There is no proof of murder until a phantom ship comes from the sea bearing the other sailor’s body. The townsfolk hang the murderer. 

“Out of the Deep,” probably the best story of the sequence, deals with the finding of the body of a girl’s lover on the sea shore. It soon turns out it is not her lover, but a fiend in human form. It preys on the inhabitants of Faring Town until one person musters the courage to kill it.

“Restless Waters” is the third story. Set in a tavern during a storm, it is a tale of revenge from beyond the grave. It is probably the weakest story in the sequence.

“Sea Curse” and “Restless Waters” are interestingly tales of justice by supernatural measures. In them the guilty are punished. In “Out of the Depths,” however, the supernatural is more predatory. Why the sea fiend chooses to take the form of a human and prey on the inhabitants of Faring Town is unknown and almost random. It is also a story of the importance of courage.

The Faring Town stories, to my knowledge, have not been much studied by Howard scholars. They deserve to be better known.

Clark Ashton Smith

In the Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Uncharted Isle,” a sailor in a life boat comes across an unknown island. There he finds a civilization unlike any of the known ones. The inhabitants of the island, who do not seem to even notice the sailor, have a map showing the isle and an unknown continent. The sailor lives among them unseen and unnoticed until the day he follows them into their temple. There he sees a child sacrificed to their god. He flees the island.

The tale is not among Smith’s best but there is a real sense of strangeness to it.

Jean Ray

Jean Ray, the Belgian master of the macabre, was fascinated by the sea. Though he claimed to have been a sailor, he appears to never have actually gone to sea. Nevertheless, some of his best stories are set at sea or at ports.

“The End of the Street,” deals with a sailor on the cursed ship Endymion. The first half of the story deals with an invisible passenger on the ship. Later, after an encounter with an unknown something in a cathedral, the sailor comes across a tavern that never charges for drinks and where no one gets drunk. The sailor spends his time drinking in the tavern until he and the other sailors are summoned once again to the Endymion. The true nature of the invisible passenger and its purpose on the Endymion is never revealed. The story is ambiguous the way certain nightmares are ambiguous.

Ray’s collection The Grand Nocturne contains two stories of the sea: “The Seven Castles of the Sea King,” and “The Phantom of the Hold.” In the first, an inebriated man in a tavern draws strange pictures and talks about “The Castles of the Sea King.” This scares the other dwellers of the tavern. While this is an interesting start, the ending is a let down because the man is shot by another sailor before the revelation of what exactly the “Sea King” is. It’s possible that Ray meant the ending as a joke.

“The Phantom of the Hold” is a slight but entertaining tale of a drunk who gets locked into a hold of the ship with something mysterious. This read like one of Poe’s lesser stories, but it does have tension for a short while. The revelation of what is in the hold, while macabre, is not very imaginative.

“The Mainz Psalter,” collected with “The End of the Street” in Cruise of the Shadows, is one of the best sea horror stories there is. It is the equal to “The Call of Cthulhu” or “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” It is framed as the tale of a dying man found floating in the ocean. Humorously, Ray says that the man’s tale was taken down by an amateur writer. This explains the literary flourishes in the story which a dying man probably would not use. The dying man tells how he was hired by a mysterious schoolmaster to sail into the seas north of Britain on his ship The Mainz Psalter. The ship enters into unknown waters and the crew eventually realizes that they have sailed into an unknown world. There the crew is mysteriously attacked one at a time until at last the lone survivor discovers a way back home. The story climaxes in which he is attacked by the schoolmaster who turns out to be other than human.

The tale is infused with a nightmarish atmosphere and a sense of cosmic horror. While we never find out what exactly the schoolmaster is or what his purpose his, it just makes the story more horrifying.

Conclusion

The stories I have chose are not the only horror stories about the sea, but they are ones that I believe are interesting. There are probably many reasons that sea seems to inspire horror stories. One is that travelling by sea is dangerous and was more so in earlier eras. A ship could be sunk by an iceberg or overturned by a storm. These are merely some of the known dangers. What is even more frightening are the unknown dangers of the sea. Even today there is much we do not know about the sea. It covers most of the earth but so little of it has been explored. Strange creatures exist on the bottom floor. Real life sea monsters like the giant squid and the colossal squid are known to exist. Who knows what else lies beneath the waves? We may never know.