Tony's Review of Dagon

Dagon is short, stark, and unforgettable. One of Lovecraft’s earliest stories, it already carries the hallmarks of what would become his signature style: the descent into madness, the unknowable terrors of the deep past, and a narrator crumbling under the weight of cosmic revelation. It’s a tightly coiled piece of fiction—lean, dreamlike, and oppressive. As always Lovecraft is a problematic figure due to his believes during his life. I have addressed this in other reviews if you want more of my thoughts on that matter.

Told through the fevered recollection of a morphine-addicted veteran, the story is framed as a confession, or perhaps a warning. After escaping enemy capture at sea, the narrator finds himself stranded on an impossibly risen section of ocean floor. What he encounters there—an ancient monolith, etched with hieroglyphs, and the looming presence of the titular god Dagon—unmoors him from sanity. The pacing is brisk but never rushed. You feel the dry, cracked mud beneath his feet, the vast silence of the exposed seabed, and the sheer weight of ancient things best left undisturbed.

What makes Dagon work isn’t just the monster—it’s the atmosphere. Lovecraft was already playing with ideas of deep time, insignificance, and the limits of human understanding. The horror isn’t just in what the narrator sees. It’s in what it implies. That our world is fragile. That reality is a thin veil. And that beneath the waves—both literal and metaphorical—things wait.

From a craft perspective, this story is a great example of Lovecraft’s ability to blend existential dread with physical decay. It’s also a prime illustration of the unreliable narrator. You’re never sure if what he experienced was real or a morphine-fueled nightmare. And that ambiguity is part of its staying power.

It’s worth noting that Dagon also touches on the theme of war trauma. The narrator is a soldier who has already seen horrors before he washes up on that alien shore. There’s something telling in how Lovecraft connects personal devastation with cosmic dread—as if one opens the door to the other. Is Dagon real, or a projection of war-shattered nerves? Lovecraft doesn’t answer, and that silence is the story’s edge.

Dagon is a sliver of terror, but it lingers. It doesn’t try to explain its mythology or tie up loose ends. It leaves you with a sense that something vast and monstrous exists just out of sight—and that knowing too much about it is its own kind of doom. For readers of cosmic horror or anyone exploring the roots of the genre, Dagon is a foundational read. And for writers, it’s a compact study in atmosphere, ambiguity, and dread done right.