In the crumbling town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, not all as it should be. During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting--under suitable precautions--of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. As early as the 1940s, Lovecraft's work had developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fiction featuring a pantheon of humanity-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. Stephen King called Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."