First published 1917
A man sits locked in his room, a bottle of morphine within reach, writing down what he saw before he loses his nerve. He was a prisoner of war during the First World War when his captors' supply ship drifted into strange waters. He escaped on a lifeboat and woke to find the ocean had receded, leaving him stranded on a vast black plain of mud and rotting sea life. He walked across it. He found a monolith carved with figures that were not quite human and not quite fish. Then something rose out of the water. What he saw there has followed him back to civilization, into every room he rents and every bottle he opens. The narrator of "Dagon" is not a man trying to warn anyone. He is a man trying to survive his own memory long enough to get the story down on paper. Lovecraft wrote this in the summer of 1917, one of the first serious stories of his adult career, and reportedly drew the central image directly from a dream. The dread here is physical and specific: the ooze, the smell, the size of the thing. It stays with you the same way it stayed with him.
Genres: fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, horror
Vibes: atmospheric, dread-filled, introspective, psychological, unsettling
Tropes: descent-into-madness, found-footage-style, unreliable-narrator
Setting: strange waters, black plain of mud
Period: World War I, 1917
26 pages · Paperback · CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Content warnings: addiction, mental-illness, suicidal-ideation