mary as cheap mystery-movie police detective , shining the light in the suspect 's eyes-come on , mcgonigal , whichever way you want it , hard or soft-and then worse still she began to remind him uneasily of the h. p. lovecraft stories he had read as a boy , the cthulu mythos stories , where perfectly normal human beings changed into fishy , crawling things at the urgings of the elder ones .