This is the first story by HP Lovecraft that I ever read (and one of the earliest tales he published). Possibly it was the first adult anthology that I ever bought, with a grisly cover by Tim White (pictured left). I had never read or bought anything like it.
Yet somehow Lovecraft’s name always gave me a profound sense of recognition. Perhaps I saw it written down somewhere and consciously forgot about it, or maybe it is even due to some dysfunction in my ID or something. But for whatever reason the book which I bought in Orkney on a holiday had a strong fascination for me.
So I read it on the shore, which was thick with seaweed, bones, dead birds: a similar scene to Dagon’s setting.
And what did I make of it?
Can’t remember to be honest, but I read the anthology so must have liked it.
Now I think it is in some sense a difficult story to reread because having read The Call of Cthulhu, one might see it as better than it is. The strong imagination, the confidence to deal with titanic subjects and the narrative ambiguity are all there.
However, perhaps more subtly, it is curious that there is an entirely down to earth expression of his anti-humanist apocalyptic outlook. Set against the backdrop of WWI, the thought that giant monsters of the deep could invade land and destroy human civilisation is seen merely as logical conclusion to the ravages that humanity was inflicting upon itself.
Indeed WWI was a continuing theme in HP’s works. Both The Rats in the Walls and Reanimator refer to this conflict. Whilst Lovecraft strongly supported WWI and assimilated this conflict into his cultural Anglophilia, for someone with such a strong interest in science, and who was so profoundly racist, this must have been rather more philosophically challenging than his breastbeating poems and essays on the subject would appear. If whites, and specifically North Europeans, were capable of such madness and cruelty, then what did this say for humanity in general? Given that Lovecraft was also a Darwinist then what genes would be passed on after wholesale killing? He kept a veneer of agreeing with the pseudo-racist ideas that the 'Huns' somehow had Asiatic genes which post-dated their colonisation of England, but even by the standards of early 20th Century racism, these ideas were very foolish (the Hunic empire had fallen apart before the Saxons had conquered England). Lovecraft probably knew that (ironic as it may sound) racist attacks on Germany were a false comfort.
Lovecraft does not approach these themes in a didactic way, yet anti-humanist apocalypticism was a recurring theme in his works.
Another theme (Ancient 'fantastic' Texts with a degree of truth) is also treated in a surprisingly deft way:
A less gifted writer might have strained too hard to tie in the monster in the story to the mythical Dagon. Yet Lovecraft probably knew that to rely heavily on an existing myth would ruin the cosmicism and truly alien qualities of his creation.
