H. P. Lovecraft / Sonia Haft Greene's The Horror at Martin's Beach: A Detailed Summary & Literary Analysis

Sonia Haft Greene was a widowed Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had survived a childhood hounded by antisemitism, her father’s death, her mother’s immigration to New York, a violent marriage, the death of her three-month-old son, her husband’s suicide, and life as a working, single mother before she became romantically entangled with one Howard Philips Lovecraft – an unemployed, amateur sci-fi writer seven years her junior, living in his boyhood home with his two elderly aunts.

Their attachment was massively ironic: Lovecraft was an elitist, antisemitic, anti-urban, introverted, lethargic, White nationalist, and his future wife was a progressive, Jewish, New Yorker, extraverted, hustling immigrant. In short, they were an especially odd couple. They met in Boston at an amateur press convention in 1921 when Greene became interested in independent journalism. Soon after, she began printing a fanzine, which Lovecraft favorably reviewed.

They began corresponding, then meeting up, and by March 1924 they married, and Lovecraft moved into Greene’s Brooklyn flat with her daughter. Although it was immediately fraught with difficulties (primarily Lovecraft’s vocal racism, his hatred of New York, and his unwillingness to get a job, requiring Greene to be the sole breadwinner), their marriage has been the subject of endless interest and speculation.

II.

Although they never had any children of their own (notwithstanding her description of Lovecraft as “adequately excellent” at lovemaking), their relationship did render one notable legacy: “The Horror at Martin’s Beach.” Written while they were on vacation in Gloucester, Massachusetts the year before their wedding, it was inspired by the sight of a limp rope in the water suddenly going taught.

Both speculated on what could be pulling the line out to sea, and – like Percy Shelley goading his wife into trying her hand at fiction during their own vacation in Geneva – Lovecraft encouraged Greene to see what she could do with the idea. She came up with “The Invisible Monster” – a notably maternal sea monster story that seems all too poignant coming as it did from the pen of a mother who had buried her infant boy.

Enlivened with her uniquely feminine perspective, Lovecraft edited the story, reworked it, added heaps of his trademark superlatives and compounding adjectives, and the end result was published as a three-page story in Weird Tales that November. How much of it was his story and how of it was hers is still unknown, but Greene’s distinct perspective and pathos blends with Lovecraft’s macabre cosmicism into something which – despite its brevity and small scale – is decidedly haunting and unusually human.       

SUMMARY

The narrator begins by confessing: “I have never heard an even approximately adequate explanation of the horror at Martin’s Beach.” Despite the large number of witnesses, their accounts wildly conflict, and the local authorities produced only contradictions. The fashionable Wavecrest Inn also attempted to suppress publicity after Prof. Alton published his article “Are Hypnotic Powers Confined to Recognized Humanity?” Still, the narrator insists the story must be told, for he was present and knows the truth.

The background of the horror lies in the capture of an enormous marine monster. On May 17, 1922, Captain James P. Orne of Gloucester and his crew fought for “nearly forty hours” to kill the beast. The creature, fifty feet long and ten feet in diameter, was a bizarre hybrid—part fish, part something else. It had “rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet,” a hide like armor, and a single, cavernous eye. Naturalists were electrified when they declared it an infant, “which could not have been hatched more than a few days.”

Seeing opportunity, Captain Orne preserved the body and mounted it inside a ship to exhibit as a “marine museum.”

At Martin’s Beach, a wealthy resort, he anchored at the Wavecrest Inn and reaped admission fees. The scientific community confirmed that the monster was “absolutely unique—unique to a scientifically revolutionary degree.” Its organs suggested a mental development far beyond known fish, and speculation about its adult form grew feverish.

The sensation ended abruptly on July 20, when a storm tore the vessel loose, sinking it with the prize still aboard—and killing the guard who had stayed behind. Despite exhaustive searches, nothing was recovered. Orne eventually abandoned hope and returned to Martin’s Beach to settle affairs. Then, on August 8, the horror struck.

It began subtly, at twilight. Spectators on the beach, the cottage colony, and the Inn’s veranda noticed “a sort of stealthy, deliberate, menacing ripple” rolling in along the moon’s reflection. It seemed “cunning and calculating,” subsiding before reaching shore. Suddenly, there erupted “a cry of death; a scream of anguish and despair that moved pity even while it mocked it.” The lifeguards responded at once, tossing out a rope-tethered air-cushion.

But instead of rescuing anyone, the rope tightened with unnatural force. “They found that object pulling with equal or even greater force in the very opposite direction, till in a few seconds they were dragged off their feet and into the water.” Reinforcements rushed to help—more than a dozen men, including Orne himself—yet they could not gain an inch. Whispers spread: was it a whale, a submarine, or “an adult of the species of which the fifty-foot creature had been the merest infant”?

Then terror overtook wonder. The rescuers discovered they could not let go of the rope. “Every struggler was irresistibly held in some mysterious bondage to the hempen line which was slowly, hideously, and relentlessly pulling them out to sea.” The crowd on shore froze, unable to intervene. The men were dragged steadily into the water, swaying in unison like a grotesque, many-limbed organism: “in the half-light the line of swaying men resembled some sinister and gigantic centipede.”

The tide advanced inexorably, and the line of captives was drawn farther from shore. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and the storm erupted. Onlookers panicked, retreating to the Inn’s veranda, where even more guests joined in watching the doomed spectacle. The narrator describes imagining their faces: “eyes alight with all the soul-racking pain of eternally blazing infernos.”

At the storm’s climax, nature itself seemed to roar in sympathy:

“Amidst a blinding glare of descending fire the voice of heaven resounded with the blasphemies of hell, and the mingled agony of all the lost reverberated in one apocalyptic… din.” 

Rain poured in torrents, but then ceased as suddenly as it had begun. When the moonlight returned, the sea was calm—yet the line of men had vanished.

Nothing remained but fading ripples where a whirlpool had been. From that black depth, the narrator swears, came “the faint and sinister echoes of a laugh.” The implication is inescapable: the adult creature, called by the cries of its dead offspring, had risen to reclaim its kin and exact vengeance. The horror at Martin’s Beach lingers not just as a mass drowning, but as a terrifying revelation of a vast, intelligent life beneath the ocean, mocking humanity with its power and malice.

ANALYSIS

“The Horror at Martin’s Beach” is, I would argue, a sadly underappreciated specimen, considered too restrained by some (Joshi grumbles that it is “forced and [anti-climactic]” and undermined by “insufficient build-up”), but a close reading and some consideration of the co-author’s background may very well bring its easily missed depth up to the surface. An initial reading might focus on the obvious parallels to Peter Benchley’s Jaws and its many descendants in the eco-horror genre.

Indeed, both stories involve a largely-unseen, (almost supernaturally) intelligent sea monster preying upon an affluent, northeastern seaside vacation destination, during which time – at the peak of the summer holiday season – the creature finds a human counterpart in a crusty, bombastic, Yankee fisherman/adventurer whom it ultimately lures to destruction, dragging him under the waves into its vengeful custody. They both also involve the nighttime ambush of a fishing boat, resulting it the death of its occupant, a sequence where the unseen beast takes hold of a line on the shore and drags it out to sea, taking living men with it, and busy beaches of onlookers frozen in paralytic horror as they watch an unthinkable tragedy unfold. The protagonist of Jaws is even named Martin.

And yet – since I can find no evidence that Blenchley read “The Horror of Martin’s Beach” – this is purely conjectural. What may be most fascinating and compelling about this is story is less what it may or may not have influenced, and more what may have inspired its quiet character, social consciousness, and emotional heart, unique among Lovecraft’s tales. 

II.

Sonia Greene’s feminine touch – her sense of pathos, vulnerability, and humanity – is abundantly evident in this story which, had it been written solely by her husband, would undoubtedly have felt more like “The Doom that Came to Sarnath” or “The Temple,” where death is described with cold if flamboyant disengagement. Instead, we have genuinely emotional descriptions of the would-be rescuers’ lives tragically fading away as they are drowned in the vengeful mother’s grasp. The emotional panic experienced and the desperate urge to live is certainly unusual for a Lovecraft story where death is often a delicious, numbing consolation and characters’ panic almost always stems from intellectual confusion rather than emotional vulnerability.

The victims of this horror are not eager to die because they are scandalized by the suggestion of a non-human intelligence (something that sends so many of Lovecraft’s protagonists running for windows and guns to keep them from having to wrap their minds around the intellectual implications) – instead, they are helplessly and unwillingly dragged to their demise by a monolithic, impersonal force. Something which Greene, as a Ukrainian Jew in the late 19^th century, would have recalled from the savage Kiev and Odessa pogroms of the 1880s and 1919.

III.

While Lovecraft typically focuses on individual traumas – as befits the experiences of a bachelor loner – Greene may have had a keener sense of collective trauma. The story’s emphasis on the bystander effect – the humiliating shame which the onlookers experienced following their unwillingness to intervene in the slaughter – may also have roots in the way in which sympathetic Ukrainian gentiles still refused to intervene in the pogroms for fear of being swept up in the violence.

As such, “Martin’s Beach” is as much a meditation on collective trauma as it is on collective guilt. Yet another unique element to the story, one which Greene undoubtedly could relate to, is the vengeful leviathan’s motherly loss. As alluded to earlier, in 1900, at the age of seventeen, Sonia’s first-born child died when he was three months old. There is precious little recorded about this experience of hers, but the loss of a child, especially so suddenly and early in his life, must have been shattering.

The intelligent, calculated revenge – instigated by manipulating the victims’ own humanity, as if to punish them for refusing to have the same compassion for her newborn – is accomplished with subtle, side-show trickery (viz. ventriloquism and hypnotism), instead of brute force or blinding, supernatural pyrotechnics.

IV.

True to the source material – the Lovecrafts’ sighting of an inexplicably tightening rope being pulled out to sea – and executed with the same minimalist self-control as “The Music of Erich Zann,” “Martin’s Beach” focuses its power on the simple, unadorned image of a line of immobilized Good Samaritans being gently and noiselessly drawn to their watery deaths by a rope.

Its simplicity is almost beautiful, practically spiritual, calling to mind the Danse Macabre motif of the Middle Ages, where queues of unsuspecting victims from all walks of life are quietly led away – often holding hands or connected around the waists by a rope – by the figure of grinning Death. Lovecraft cannot help himself, however, from adding a Dunsanian touch at the very end – the vision of the single, monstrous eye glowing through the gloom – which is just enough to invest what would otherwise be a curiously simple tale with a suggestion of the horrible sublime.

Whether the satisfied laugh at the end is chilling or kitschy is perhaps a matter of taste, but the end result – the only “child” the Lovecrafts would be able to boast of – is a surprisingly disturbing piece of eco-horror: a maternal revenge story uniquely informed by Greene’s own personal tragedies, and a brooding meditation on collective trauma, guilt, and awe.    

You can read the story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated collection of Lovecraft’s best, early Gothic horror HERE!