Christopher MacIntyre's video: H P Lovecraft: Dagon read by Sam Carcamo

"Dagon" is a short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in July 1917 and is one of the first stories that Lovecraft wrote as an adult. It was first published in the November 1919 edition of The Vagrant (issue ).] Dagon was later published in Weird Tales. It is considered by many to be one of Lovecraft's most forward-looking stories. After reading Lovecraft's juvenilia in 1917, W. Paul Cook, editor of the amateur press journal The Vagrant, encouraged him to resume writing fiction. That summer, Lovecraft wrote two stories: "The Tomb" and "Dagon". The story was inspired in part by a dream he had. "I dreamed that whole hideous crawl, and can yet feel the ooze sucking me down!" he later wrote. The story mentions the Piltdown Man, which had not been exposed by the scientific community as an alleged fraud and hoax at the time of writing. As to the name of the story, Lovecraft seems to be referring to the ancient Sumerian god named Dagon who is the fertility god of grains and fish, because in the story, the main character makes inquiries "....regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God." The Sumerian deity is sometimes depicted as being part fish, or simply wearing a fish. Since Lovecraft was fond of references to actual archaeological discoveries in his writings from time to time, he may have come across this ancient god. Dagon is the first of Lovecraft's stories to introduce a Cthulhu Mythos element—the sea deity Dagon itself. Worship of Dagon later appeared in Lovecraft's tale "The Shadow over Innsmouth". The creature that appears in the story is often identified with the deity Dagon, but the creature is not identified by that name in the story "Dagon", and seems to be depicted as a typical member of his species, a worshipper rather than an object of worship. It's unlikely that Lovecraft intended "Dagon" to be the name used by the deity's nonhuman worshippers, as Robert M. Price points out: "When Lovecraft wanted to convey something like the indigenous name of one of the Old Ones, he coined some unpronounceable jumble". Price suggests that readers of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" may be mistaken as to the identity of the "Dagon" worshipped by that story's Deep Ones: in contrast to the Old Ones' alien-sounding names, "the name 'Dagon' is a direct borrowing from familiar sources, and implies that [Obed] Marsh and his confederates had chosen the closest biblical analogy to the real object of worship of the deep ones, namely Great Cthulhu." Lin Carter, who thought "Dagon" an "excellent" story, remarked that it was "an interesting prefiguring of themes later to emerge in [Lovecraft's] Cthulhu stories. The volcanic upheaval that temporarily exposes long-drowned horrors above the waves, for example, reappears in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926)". Other parallels between the two stories include a horrifying tale told by a sailor rescued at sea; a gigantic, sea-dwelling monster (compared to Polyphemus in each tale); an apocalyptic vision of humanity's destruction at the hands of ancient nonhuman intelligences; and a narrator who fears he is doomed to die because of the knowledge he has gained. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz call the latter story "manifestly an exhaustive reworking of 'Dagon'". ****** *read for LibriVox by Sam Carcamo Librivox (Short Ghost and Horror Collection 041) https://librivox.org/short-ghost-and-horror-collection-041/ ****** (Music): "Day of Chaos", "Ghostpocalypse - 1 Departure", "Ghostpocalypse - 2 The Call", "Ghostpocalypse - 4 Temptress", "On the Shore", & "Echoes of Time v2" by Kevin MacLeod (www.incompetech.com) Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ****** (Art Work): Weird Tales, Volume 02, Number 03, Page 23 ("Dagon:" Illustration) by William F. Heitman (Public Domain) "Dagon" by Zuccarello (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)) "Dagon" by Dominique Signoret (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)) "Portrait of Lovecraft" by Dominique Signoret (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)) Bronze bust of H.P. Lovecraft at the Providence Athenaeum. Providence, Rhode Island by Kenneth C. Zirkel (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported) *All other artwork an photos are in the public domain ****** If you like this video subscribe to my channel. There are many more videos like this one lovingly prepared and edited by myself for your enjoyment! Check out my extensive playlist collections as well.