DAGON by H. P. Lovecraft

Reading Lovecraft before bed is a trip. I had such amazing dreams last night. They didn’t have anything to do with Lovecraft or his Mythos, but I will attribute my dreams to his haunting tales of unmentionable things that scurry in the dark.

“Dagon” is the suicide note left by a morphine addled survivor of The Great War. The story begins as he writes his suicide’s expiation, recounting that horrible experience that twisted his mind and has left him in his current emotional state. He wishes the reader to know that his death is not due his need for morphine or that his bottle is now empty. No! He wants the reader to know that he could not bear to live with knowing that one day that which he saw in the Pacific would rise and enslave all of the Human race.

While adrift in the Pacific, his life raft came upon a newly risen island coved in the rotting crocuses of familiar species of fish and specimens that he had never seen before. He noted the lack of scavenger birds and concluded that he stood on newly risen ocean floor. Seeking shelter, he traveled the landscape until he found a cove covered with strange hieroglyphs in the shape of all manner of sea life.

One such glyph clearly depicted a whale, but to as the human shaped creature that held it under its arm like a child carries a puppy, he had no name for it. This creature surely must be the exaggeration of an ancient sea worshiping tribe lost to the dark depths as the continents broke up and dispersed into their present formation. But as he looked on and tried to translate the drawings, the sea began to rumble and churn as a “Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome” (40) creature appeared.

The narrator’s vision of this creature drove him mad, for how could such a creature exist. He managed to escape the island and find his way to a San Francisco Hospital. After his release, he perused all scientific and mythological explanations, the closet being “the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God” (41).

Nothing eased his mind. His paranoia and mental anguish increased exponentially and brought him to his point in the story. Having finished his accounting, he jumped from the open window to his death.

A great story. Read it here: Dagon

Lovecraft, H. P., “Dagon.” The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness. New York: Del Rey, 1996, 37 – 41.