Deep Ones Stories?

theshaunz said:
Shadow over Innsmouth and Dagon are my only experiences with this sort of story- are there any stories of similar caliber involving Deep Ones or other nefarious sea creatures?
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I urge you to find The Innsmouth Cycle edited by Robert M. Price and Shadows Over Innsmouth edited by Stephen Jones. I also recommend the "Madge" stories of D. F. Lewis. The latter are tales of a forlorn fishwife.
 
At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft
The Thing in the Weeds by William Hope Hodgson
The inhabitant of the Lake by Ramsey Campbell
The Coming of the White Worm by Clark Ashton Smith
The Sea Fit by Algernon Blackwood
 
theshaunz said:
Shadow over Innsmouth and Dagon are my only experiences with this sort of story- are there any stories of similar caliber involving Deep Ones or other nefarious sea creatures?
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Brian Lumley has written a number of short stories and a novels invovling the Deep Ones.

Off the top of my head I can remember:

Haggopian
Return of the Deep Ones
Dagon's Bell
The Taint
 
MorganScorpion said:
There are deep ones At the mountains of madness? I seem to recall them being referenced, but that is all.
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I didn't think they were refernced in At the Mountains of Madness. The spawn of Cthulhu were but not the Deep Ones. The Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness were mentioned in The Shadow Over Innsmouth though.
 
theshaunz said:
Are there any Madge stories on the interwebs by chance?
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The only four I can find are:

Madge: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/22.html
(1991 Best New Horror 2)

Madge II: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=138197636&blogID=393194634&Mytoken=E0851B25-55BA-4DB8-8EAFA0B077D6FC4D8599692 (Chimera 1990)


The Ghostly Time: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/04/ghostly-time.html (Ammonite 1995)



Down To The Boots (Dagon DFL Special 1989 and Shadows Over Innmouth 1994): http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/down_to_the_boots.htm

'Down To The Boots' was recently read aloud alive alive O! by myself here on TLO:
DOWN TO THE BOOTS by DF Lewis - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

des
 
The previous posts seem to have stories dealing with the Deep Ones fairly well sewn-up.

The initial post does ask for other stories dealing with unpleasant submarine aberrations, to which end I offer these:

The Aquarium, Carl Jacobi (it can be found in Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos)

and

The Cyprus Shell
The Deep-Sea Conch, both of which are by the aforementioned B. Lumley. Both may be found in the disgustingly-titled Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi. This is fitting, as both stories made me slightly nauseous. Little wonder HPL had such an aversion to seafood(was it an actual physical allergy? I cannot recall.).

-J
 
Russell Nash said:
The Thing in the Weeds by William Hope Hodgson
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And, indeed, Mr Hodgson's entire Sargasso cycle of stories.

Aetherwing said:
This is fitting, as both stories made me slightly nauseous. Little wonder HPL had such an aversion to seafood(was it an actual physical allergy? I cannot recall.).

-J
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I haven't read anything to indicate that it was a physical allergy. I think that he merely housed a deep-seated aversion to sea food.
 
While the name 'Deep Ones' and Lovecraft's mythos aren't mentioned in Albert Sánchez Piñol's Cold Skin, it is easy to imagine that the sea creatures in the novel are of this race. It's a very good book, that puts quite a new angle on this matter and it even has a (unhappy) love story between a human man and a 'Deep One' woman.
 
"Spawn of the Sea", by Donald Wandrei (Weird Tales, May 1933), published later in "Strange Harvest".

Two men survivors of a shipwreck adrift and starving fighting a sea creature...

"... we had seen a vast, shapeless mass of undulating greenish-white stuff, thick as skin, with a beating motion like a pulse. The revolting odor came from that mass..."

"... it bubbled and flowed with torrential swiftness a mass of sickly green corruption, thick, horrible, noxious, suffocating by reason of its putrid stench, and sinisterly alive... a heap of crawling liquescence, formless yet held together and directed somehow by a rudimentary awareness..."
 
Odalisque said:
Russell Nash said:
The Thing in the Weeds by William Hope Hodgson
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And, indeed, Mr Hodgson's entire Sargasso cycle of stories.

Aetherwing said:
This is fitting, as both stories made me slightly nauseous. Little wonder HPL had such an aversion to seafood(was it an actual physical allergy? I cannot recall.).

-J
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I haven't read anything to indicate that it was a physical allergy. I think that he merely housed a deep-seated aversion to sea food.
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Good call on the WHH story recommendations. He did spin out some seafaring chillers in his time.

I had suspected Lovecraft's 'allergy' to seafood was due to eating bad shellfish at some point or another, something like that. I have become ill from eating too many crayfish and boiled shrimp--iodine poisoning--, and it is very easy for various shellfish to cause food-bourne illness. Mussels, clams, & oysters are all prime suspects.

Back to the topic: another story involving ocean-faring horrors occurs to me...

The Sea-Raiders, by H. G. Wells.

I have found this tale wildly imaginative in times past. Now though, given the intellectual capacities of cephalopods and the savage hunting prowess of groups of Humboldt Squid, the story seems less far-fetched...

-J
 
Aetherwing said:
Good call on the WHH story recommendations. He did spin out some seafaring chillers in his time.
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I'd have been surprised if you thought otherwise. ;) And indeed Mr Hodgson did spin out some seafaring chillers in his time. The best place to find them is probably the first and third volumes of Night Shade Books' Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. Both of these volumes are entirely composed of stories of the sea. (Volume 2 is The House on the Borderland together with Carnacki and some other land lubberly tales... Volume 4 has The Night Land and more land-based stuff.)
 
By John B. Ford, from "Macabre Delights & Twisted Tales", B. J. M. Press, 1997.

"The Things in the Weed"-- pages 19 to 23 --
[...] The nearest descriptive term I can give, is that of a white human-like slug. The skin of the thing I saw to be covered in foul slime, with many long thick tentacles... The face of the thing I will never forget...

"The Sea of Strangeness" -- pages 13 to 18 --
[...] With fear and curiosity, I looked from the cabin windows, to see the phosphorescent green bodies of three immense and repulsive sea lizards... It seems some consolation that we will die together.
 
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