Dagon (1968) by Fred Chappell

Dagon (1968) by Fred Chappell: Chappell has long been a respected Southern writer with academic ties. But he's also been a periodic contributor to the vast shared universe inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Dagon is his one novel-length foray into Lovecraftiana. And boy, it is not what one expects, not hardly!

Dagon begins by looking like one of those Lovecraft homages (think Stephen King's "Jerusalem's Lot") in which a man returns to his ancestral home to discover that he has some family tie to horrifying secrets. The HPL Ur-text for this is "The Rats In the Walls." Our preacher-protagonist returns to the family farm in the American South to work on a theology text. His luminous, often sarcastic wife accompanies him.

Almost immediately, our protagonist begins to be haunted by strange dreams and visions and compulsions, all tied to the tenant family also living on the rural property. They're vaguely fishy looking. Literally. 

Someone familiar with HPL's universe will almost immediately think, "Oh oh. They've got the Innsmouth Look!" Yes. Yes they do. And this will indeed prefigure what comes, though not in any 'normal' way when it comes to stories that nod to HPL's Deep Ones.

About a third of the way through this short novel, things make a dramatic and unexpected shift into something startling and horrible. I did not see it coming. Probably, neither will you. What follows is something that still seems radical for a Cthulhu Mythos text, if a Cthulhu Mythos text this is. Certainly the eponymous Lovecraftian water god, borrowed from the Babylonians by HPL, is involved, as are mentions of Lovecraftian texts and deities. And an early HPL tale bears the same title.

What occupies Chappell in the last two-thirds of Dagon is an exploration of the aberrant psychology of someone trapped by an ancestral association with non-traditional Evil, gradually stripped of all free will and agency, gradually broken down into a sacrificial victim. But what kind of sacrifice? Telling more would be telling too much. It may not even be Objective Evil -- it may just be Subjective Evil and Objective Other.

Dagon is not for everyone. It is excruciating, depressing, and horrifying. It takes some of its inspiration from the mental transmogrifications we see in the narrator at the end of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and then goes far beyond that, beyond even the dismal mental destruction of the narrator of the aforementioned "The Rats In the Walls." 

Throughout this dark descent, we're guided by third-person narration, not the first-person narration of the above two stories. Chappell maintains a bit of narrative distance so as to allow for a more clinical observation of a mind in the midst of destruction and debasement. And when the ending comes -- well, it too is unexpected and very much both a nod to HPL and a sort of perfection of the ruthless cosmicism of some of HPL's works.

This is a brilliant, disturbing, exhausting novel. Rewarding to the extreme, but I couldn't blame anyone for throwing it into the fireplace without finishing it. This is about as dark as it gets. Highly recommended.