Fishhead

Irvin S. Cobb's infamous Fishhead, first published in 1913, is a short novel set in the backwoods bayous of the American South, detailing Reelfoot Lake and its most infamous resident, an outcast freak called Fishhead. The missing link between Mark Twain and H.P. Lovecraft, with a surprise Jaws-like ending, Fishhead is wonderfully gruesome and will remind readers of EC comics and was a major influence on Lovecraft's later work, The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

"Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and versatile humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent contains some finely weird specimens. 'Fishhead', an early achievement, is banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake..." -H.P. Loveccraft