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This subject contains information from the "Lovecraft Circle" Myth Cycles, and while guided by HPL are not based on his work alone. This subject contains information from the Expanded Cthulhu Mythos, and not based on H.P. Lovecraft's works directly.

Joe Sargent is a character created by H. P. Lovecraft for his seminal short story The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Although a minor character, his family name has been incorporated into several other Mythos contributions.

Overview

In 1927 Joe Sargent, an Innsmouth resident, drove the only bus which ran between Arkham and Newburyport through Innsmouth. Robert Olmstead described him as:

a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed grey golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly underdeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. [He walked with a] peculiarly shambling gait and . . . his feet were inordinately immense
~ HPL: The Shadow Over Innsmouth



Although he did not know what it was at the time, Olmstead was looking at a case of the Innsmouth Look, although not one so far advanced as to be obviously identifiable as non-human. He immediately disliked Sargent, further stating

He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with them much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess . . . I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage
~ HPL: The Shadow Over Innsmouth



Appearances

Joe Sargent has been made mention of in several other Mythos entries, including the following:

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