Bobby Derie, at the Deep Cuts blog today, has a new appreciation of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923) by Sonia H. Greene & H. P. Lovecraft.

I see there’s also a new PDF scan of its appearance in Weird Tales as “The Invisible Monster”, because it’s now in the public domain. It can also be seen in its original Weird Tales context.

Magnolia, Gloucester was evidently the inspiration for the moonlight/ropes elements of the story. Though one was to wonder if Lovecraft’s earlier story “The Moon-Bog” (written 1921) didn’t play its part in Lovecraft’s ‘instant inspiration’ on the beach at Magnolia, with its similar moonlight-ladders and bewitched chain of people being drawn to their watery doom. Only published in June 1926, it’s possible that Sonia had not yet seen or heard a reading of “The Moon-Bog” in the early 1920s.

I’d suggest that for the first part of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (the capture and display of the sea-monster) Lovecraft was also splicing the Magnolia atmosphere with the fabled sea-monster of Sheepshead Bay. That was where the amateurs often met, at Dench’s house on the waterfront, and to hint that the setting was similar would add a slick veneer of Jaws-like local interest. Possibly that part had significant input from Sonia? The twist ending in the final line is also a bit ‘off’ in the believability of its twist, I think, and I’m not sure that’s from Lovecraft either.