Dagon

Dagon is a horror short story written by H. P. Lovecraft and originally published in 1919.

The first-person narrator is a supercargo aboard a merchant ship captured by a German sea-raider during World War I. After escaping alone in a small boat, he drifts across the Pacific.

When he wakes after a long drift, his boat is stranded on a vast expanse of black mud that has risen from the ocean floor. Exploring the desolate landscape, he finds an ancient monolith and witnesses a colossal sea creature—an experience that drives him to the brink of insanity.

One of Lovecraft’s early cosmic-horror stories, Dagon combines wartime isolation, the terror of unexplored depths, and the limits of human reason. Its images of an ancient marine civilization anticipate ideas that recur in later works such as The Shadow over Innsmouth.

"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below."