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Title:
Dagon
Series: Complete Cthulhu
Mythos
Editor: Howard Lovecraft
Rating:
3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Cosmic Horror
Pages:
15
Words: 2K
Publish: 1919
Back in 2015 I read The Annotated Lovecraft, which began my journey down the Cosmic Horror Path. That particular book was as much about the notes and annotations as about the stories and while a bit overwhelming (it was over 1000 pages long), it allowed me to see just what Lovecraft was about. Since then I’ve read a lot of Cthulhu inspired fiction (the Cthulhu Anthologies linked to at the end of this review) as well as discovering the King in Yellow mythos. But I had never actually systematically read the Cthulhu Mythos as written by Lovecraft himself. The Annotated had lots of pieces, but it wasn’t complete nor did it pretend to be. After burning out on Cosmic Horror (or maybe being overwhelmed by its existential despair?) a year or two ago, I took a break. During this time, I had great success with reading Warhammer 40,000 short stories (another franchise I had taken a break from) once a month and so when I decided it was time to face Great Cthulhu again, I decided to go a similar route. But this time, I wanted the foundations, the original stories and thus I sought out this Complete Cthulhu Mythos collection. I won’t be reading one of these every month like I do for the WH40K stories, but I will just be reading through in my regular cyclical fashion. Many of these will be re-reads from my time with the Annotated, but since I’ll be focusing on each story on its own, that will help me get a better grasp on the mythology as a whole. I also suspect that this first review will be the longest, since I’m using this space to explain all of this, whereas the future reviews will not have it and be the review only. So lets dive in, shall we?
A weak, drug addicted crazy man is our narrator. This is a staple for Lovecraft. Weak humans are often the narrators. Sometimes that weakness is in themselves, ie, they are of poor character and have made terrible life choices and their brains are already rotting. Other times though, the things they have seen or experienced have broken them and they are broken that way. This narrator seems to have been a combination of both, allowing Lovecraft to showcase both versions at once. A passenger on a boat taken captive by Germans, he escapes in a lifeboat and ends up on a newly arisen large island. The island has an amphitheater at its center, showcasing a giant fishman (Dagon) and the multitude of lesser fishmen who worship him. A cyclopean monster claws its way up from the depths of the island and its voice breaks the narrator sanity. He escapes and is rescued and his story dismissed as the ravings of a madman. Thus he turns to morphine, etc to give him surcease from the voice he heard and is even more broken because of it. The story ends with him hearing something coming for him and throwing himself out the window and dying. That last bit is implied though.
Implications are another staple for Lovecraft. He can’t come straight out and say something, because then it would be a concrete fact and cosmic horror is all about the unknowable forces arrayed against humanity. So in that spirit Lovecraft often will not give specific details and while it can work, it still annoys the life out of me. It is one of the reasons he is accused of having “purple prose” and to be honest, I wouldn’t disagree.
So this story introduces to the idea of a prehistory with fantastic monsters and the idea that those monsters might still be lurking out in the undiscovered depths of the sea, biding their time until they are strong enough to rise again. That’s a pretty good introduction to Cosmic Horror and to the whole Cthulhu Mythos.
★★★☆☆
From Grokipedia
The unnamed narrator, composing his account in a garret while addicted to morphine and facing imminent suicide from exhaustion of his supply and unbearable torment, explains that his dependency arose not from weakness but from an experience too horrific to endure without oblivion. During the early stages of the First World War, he served as supercargo on a packet ship in the Pacific that was captured by a German sea-raider; after five days of relatively fair treatment as a prisoner, he escaped alone in a small boat provisioned with water and supplies. Adrift with no clear sense of position beyond being south of the equator, he drifted aimlessly for days under a scorching sun, seeing neither ship nor land until despair overtook him. While asleep, a massive transformation occurred: he awoke partially sunk in a vast, slimy black mire stretching endlessly in all directions, his boat grounded nearby amid rotting fish carcasses and other decayed matter that filled the air with a putrid, sinister stillness. Concluding that an unprecedented volcanic upheaval had thrust part of the ocean floor to the surface, exposing abyssal regions hidden for eons, he waited for the mud to dry before preparing a pack and journeying westward across the desolate plain toward a distant hummock, enduring the maddening stench and oppressive silence. Reaching the base of a much taller mound after several days, he slept in its shadow but awoke from wild nightmares determined to continue by moonlight, ascending the hill and descending into a vast chasm where a massive whitish monolith gleamed on the opposite slope. Closer examination revealed the monolith as an artificial artifact bearing unknown hieroglyphs of aquatic symbols and enormous bas-reliefs depicting grotesque, semi-human fish-like beings with webbed limbs, bulging eyes, and flabby lips, shown worshipping underwater shrines and slaying whales disproportionately small beside them. As he gazed, the water at the monolith's base churned, and a gigantic, scaly, Polyphemus-like creature rose, wrapping its arms around the stone, bowing its hideous head, and emitting measured sounds that shattered the narrator's sanity. In a frenzy of singing and hysterical laughter, he scrambled back across the plain to his boat amid an ensuing storm. Regaining consciousness in a San Francisco hospital after rescue by an American ship that found his drifting boat, he found his delirious accounts of risen land dismissed and did not insist. He later consulted a prominent ethnologist about the Philistine legend of Dagon, the fish-god, but encountered only conventional skepticism. Plagued ever since by vivid nightmares of the creature—especially under gibbous and waning moons—morphine offered only fleeting relief while enslaving him further. Convinced the vision was real and fearing the rise of nameless abyssal beings to drag down humanity, he hears a massive, slippery body at his door, rushes to the window, and casts himself to his death.
All of My “Complete Cthulhu Mythos” Reviews
