Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Barnaby Kay, Jana Carpenter, Kyle Soller, Steven Mackintosh, Mark Bazeley, Samuel Barnett, Nicola Walker, Karla Crome, Jennifer Armour, Ferdinand Kingsley, David Calder, Walles Hamonde, Michael Maloney, Phoebe Fox.
One of the most interesting and intense dramas to have found its way to the listener’s appreciation of late is the adaption of H.P. Lovecraft’s dark and frequently disturbing tales that were set in and around his native New England. Julian Simpson’s superb reading and amendments to bring it to a more British viewpoint and understanding of how such a sense of enormity and mystery could begin and take hold in the country.
The third in The Lovecraft Investigations series, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, is perhaps to be seen as the one that truly gets underneath the skin of the listener, for in its continual tightness of script and idea there is not a moment to be found where the pace and fear of the beyond allow anyone who comes across the scintillating novel way in which the series is presented as a factual podcast to feel at ease…for being in control of your fear is not an option as the truth of Kennedy’s association to the past becomes ever clearer, and how the world has turned on the whim and layers of a select group of people to ties to some of the most hideous secrets of our lifetimes.
The sense of the distraught and misdirection unfolds as the story and investigation by Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher continues unabated, and yet as the pair are beset on both sides by an overwhelming corruption of spirit and the face of friends who they can trust becoming ever warped by the damage of a resurrection of an ancient belief, so the shadow that hangs over that New England town, one facing its own decrepit and slow down death, mirrors that in which the team are immersed in the back drop of the Covid crisis that is cleverly weaved into the tale as a subtle reminder that nature and nurture can never be tamed and must not be taken for granted.
Once more the ferocity of Nicola Walker’s performance as the unnerving but tremendously informed Eleanor Peck matches the intensity of the writing, and when placed as the resident expert on all matters that encompass the occult, the alarming nature of close connections that lead to the demonic and the evil that exists in the hearts of all who find Nazism an alluring prospect.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a terrifying delight, it is, at the time, the culmination of a well written and observed homage to one of the greats of the American horror tale, and whilst again we must treat certain Lovecraft thoughts in a locked box and disregarded, the fact is that in literature the casting of literary spells are arguably stoked in reason and understanding of the darkness in the human soul.
A passionate and creative audio drama series that found its near perfect pitch finale, even before the end was announced as being far from finished. Ian D. Hall