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“Dagon”H. P. Lovecraft(1919)
In the early part of the 20th century, there was no
clearly defined horror field, and most of what did
get published was lumped loosely as “weird fic-
tion,” which could include fantasy and science fic-
tion as well as overtly supernatural stories. Much
of H. P. LOVECRAFT’s work fell into this category,
including this short piece that could arguably be
called science fiction as well as horror. One pattern
that stories from this period used was to introduce
a more or less ordinary character into an unusual
situation that required little if any action on his or
her part. The story then is comprised of the char-
acter’s reactions to a bizarre scene or event. Love-
craft, Clark Ashton SMITH, and other writers
would describe, often by implication, a series of ex-
otic and presumably unsettling images, after which
the protagonist would frequently be driven to mad-
ness or self-destruction because of the degree of
horror experienced. By contemporary standards
this might seem an implausible overreaction, but
when these stories were first appearing in print it
was an accepted conceit that a shock of this sort
could unseat one’s sanity.
The protagonist of “Dagon” escapes after
being taken prisoner by the Germans during
World War I. He drifts aimlessly across the ocean
until he encounters a newly risen expanse of land,
an island raised from the ocean floor and exposed
to the sun for the first time in countless genera-
tions. He decides to explore, finding at first only a
lifeless landscape littered with the reeking bodies
of dead fish but eventually stumbling across an an-

cient building, a monolith, inscribed with horrific

images of a race half human and half fish. Then a

leviathanlike creature emerges from the ocean to

worship at the monument; the sight so over-

whelms him that he casts off immediately, and his

mental balance is forever disturbed. He is terrified

by visions of Dagon, the fish-god, and apprehen-

sive that hordes of hideous creatures are still alive

under the placid waters of the oceans and that

they may one day emerge to destroy the world of

humanity. This same plot is used far more elabo-

rately for another of Lovecraft’s famous stories,

“At the Mountains of Madness” (1936), which

places the alien ruins in the Antarctic. Stuart

Gordon’s film Dagon(2001) draws its title from

this story, but most of the actual plot is derived

from another of Lovecraft’s tales, “THE SHADOW

OVER INNSMOUTH” (1936).

Dahl, Roald(1916–1990)

Although Roald Dahl started writing for children

as early as 1943, with Gremlins,he was not a suc-

cess in that field until the early 1960s. During the

interim he produced a great number of adult short

stories for slick magazine markets, some of which

contained supernatural or fantastic elements, al-

though many did not. Dahl specialized in the sur-

prise ending and was noted for his ability to

produce some truly wicked characters and mete

out rough justice to his villains. Several of his fan-

tasy stories have become minor classics. The com-

poser Franz Liszt is reincarnated as a cat in