I’m reading the works of H. P. Lovecraft in the approximate order in which they were written / published. In my order, the short story Dagon comes fourth, written when Lovecraft was about 30.
Story 1 / Alchemist was a teen story about wizards and castles. Story 2 / Johnson was about a young writer’s fantasy about meeting famous old-school authors. Story 3 / Sleep finally started to be about Lovecraft’s future area of expertise. An intelligent man faces off against a ‘slimy lower person’ who happens to become equal when a space alien takes over his mind.
Here, in story 4, Dagon, we start to get into the midst of what Lovecraft is more known for. Yes, there were hints of cosmic horror in Alchemist and 3, but in Dagon we are facing it full force.
The unnamed main character, a sailor-soldier, escapes capture and ends up alone in a small boat in the vast Pacific. He falls asleep and wakes up somehow beached on an immense black mud plain with no sight of ocean anywhere. It’s as if the very ground has come up underneath him for miles and miles. He feels utter revulsion at the black sticky mud, the fish carcasses, the cloudless sky, the silence, and the ‘sameness’ of it all.
He decides he has to try to find an edge to the ocean, so he can get back to civilization.
After days of walking, he finally finds a distant mound to get some perspective on this nasty never-ending silence and mud. He gets to the top and looks down into a deep chasm with water on the bottom. Across the way is a white monolith inscribed with crude symbols of fish, whales, octopuses, and other sea creatures. There are human-fish people with webbed hands and feet as large as whales. He finds those really nasty.
And then a fish-monster rises from the water, makes an infernal noise, and he goes completely crazy. When he finally awakes, he’s in a San Francisco hospital and is babbling. Even when he tries to talk with researchers, nobody believes him or can help him. So he gets addicted to morphine and at the end he kills himself.
I appreciate Lovecraft’s descriptive imagery here – how he involves all the senses and leans strongly into how ‘uncomfortable’ they make him feel. That being said, first, his main character is a SAILOR. It seems really bizarre that a sailor would be this icked out by octopus and fish and whales. I can see LOVECRAFT hating the smell of dead fish – he lived in Providence, after all – but a sailor?
Second, Lovecraft was notoriously anti-minority. In Lovecraft’s ideal world, everyone WOULD be the same – white, upper class male. It’s odd that everything being the same would viscerally seem so wrong to him.
And on a more personal level, as a reader, I adore sea-related things. If I was in a world full of symbols based on fish and whales and octopus I’d love it. It would be like Atlantis. If I was in a world where everything was quiet, I’d love that too! Peace! Mud? I’m really not afraid of mud.
Maybe it’s because I watch shows like Naked and Afraid, but a world where night is calm, things are quiet, there aren’t thorns, and you have food – that all seems fairly ideal to me. Yes I’d have to walk to find water, but that’s just a task. It’s not an ‘ultimate horror’ situation for me.
What are your thoughts?
Link to the Dagon story:
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/d.aspx
Video review of Dagon –
Here’s an article about an actual appearing and disappearing mud island –
Here’s my version of Dagon!