H. P. Lovecraft was skilled at borrowing what he wanted from those who came before him. It was a kind of literary game to him that could adopt any monster, book or idea he liked. He did this with Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, even his friends like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. The idea of fish-human hybrids or fish people was no exception. The idea pre-dates HPL’s Deep Ones by at least thirty-five years. “In the Abyss” by H. G. Wells (Pearson’s Magazine, August 1896) may have been the first fish-people story to inspire him. In it, a man in a diving bell goes to the bottom of a sea trench, sees a civilization of underwater fish people, and is almost captured by them. The creatures are described:
“It was a strange vertebrated animal. Its dark purple head was dimly suggestive of a chameleon, but it had such a high forehead and such a braincase as no reptile ever displayed before; the vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being. two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils. In the position of the ears were two huge gill-covers, and out of these floated a branching tree of coralline filaments, almost like the tree-like gills that very young rays and sharks possess…It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a tripod of two frog-like legs and a long, thick tail, and its fore limbs, which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog’s do, carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper. The colour of the creature was variegated; its head, hands, and legs were purple; but its skin, which hung loosely upon it, even as clothes might do, was a phosphorescent grey. And it stood there blinded by the light.”
Read the rest:
