Reading from Black Seas of Infinity, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, selected by Andrew Wheeler, SFBC, 2001, Garden City, NY, pages 28-32, first published in October 1923 in Weird Tales

This appears to lay out the underpinning of Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos. I was quite impressed with the relevance of this piece to our own time. I also thought the author chose the right threads to mesh into the literary insanity; including hints at his influences: archaeology, the just passed Great War, Milton, Poe, Bulwar, and biblical passages, but, most importantly, the maddening complexity of modern life and the attendant dependence on serenity-mimicking drugs.

The nameless protagonist that pens this suicide letter pleads, “why is it that I must have forgetfulness or death.”

I know very little about H. P. Lovecraft, simply picked up this anthology as required reading for an aspiring horror writer. The author must have felt himself an impotent soul, or, was simply a literary genius. If I could compare Lovecraft, based on this tale, with any modern author, it would be Andy Nowicki, author of Lost Violent Souls.

The short length of Dagon—for my taste—was spot on for such an atmospheric monologue. The protagonist is bent on suicide, drug addicted, and suffering from what we would identify as PTSD. Whether one reads it as a tale of madness-engendered visions of some ancient pre-human horror, or as madness induced by such a vision, the effect is the same. H. P. Lovecraft wrote a nasty little story of the supreme alienation experienced by an individual who has a realization that cannot be communicated to others and finds himself adrift in an oppressive world, with nothing more than fleeting drug dosages and the attendant slavery of addiction to keep suicide at bay.

I wonder what Lovecraft would think of our world, suffused in drug addiction as it is, and largely at the mercy of its brutal economics.