“Dagon” by H.P. Lovecraft
Finally, we’re getting into the (sea)weeds with Lovecraft’s “Dagon.” Howard Philips Lovecraft’s “Dagon” is perhaps his most concretely Lovecraftian story. It’s got everything — the grossness of the ocean, a weird obelisk, a narrator in a mental institution. The gaping chasm near the obelisk reminded me of the chasms in Vathek, and I like that this story leaves it open to the readers’ interpretation whether the protagonist really saw what he saw, or whether he was genuinely having visions.
A commentor on YouTube mention ‘thalassophobia’ — the fear of the deep sea — in relation to this tale. One thing that’s interesting is that the protagonist is exposed to deep sea horrors without actually taking a swim. The ocean bed rising to the floor is clearly paralleled within the text as being a parallel to a possible uprising of the Deep Ones onto land — the ocean bed being made ‘land’ through the volcanic upheaval already.
I think, like a good number of horror and science-fiction stories, the contrast between the monsters that could be at war with humanity and the humans that are currently at war with one another is meant to highlight the futility and pettiness of scale of human conflicts. We see this in the movie Arrival as well.
I wonder if Dagon had a direct influence on Junji Ito’s Gyo, given both feature the ocean rising to ‘the land’ rather than land sinking into the ocean, with oceanborne monstrosities colonizing the land (either within the text as in Gyo, or foreshadowed as in Dagon, especially in conversation with The Shadow over Innsmouth.) Both works offer social commentary and highlight humanity’s unpreparedness for dealing with a threat that, at the end of the day, is alien in nature, but not in source. Works featuring threats from the ocean feature threats from within: the Earth is mostly covered in water, after all. We are inhabitants of a water planet.
