Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
In 2019, Crystal Lake Publishing began a series called “Crystal Classics,” reissues of out-of-print classic horror novellas and novelettes. I bought all three initial releases … and then they sat, as so many things do, on Mount ToBeRead. I’m hoping to get to The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen and The Willows by Algernon Blackwood by the end of this very seasonal (in NJ) October, but today I finally read Dagon Rising by William Meikle.
Those familiar with Meikle’s work know that he’s a current, rather than long-out-of-print, master of the macabre. So why is he in the “Crystal Classics” series? Because within the CC line, Crystal Lake intended to have the “Vs.” line – a series of books in which a classic horror short story is challenged by a modern writer (much in the way Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom challenges, or as some would say “is in conversation with,” Lovecraft’s “The Horror At Red Hook”). So what we have in Dagon Rising is actually two short stories: a reprint of Lovecraft’s “Dagon” followed by Meikle’s titular take on the story. I love this approach, and hope that despite the issues Covid-19 has caused the small press publishing world Crystal Lake will continue both the Crystal Classics and Vs. lines.
I think this was the first time I’ve read “Dagon” since high school (a statement that is true of a lot of the Lovecraft I’ve read; unlike Poe and Stoker and King, I don’t find myself drawn back to rereading Lovecraft very often despite how much I love the “cosmic horror” genre). And I have to admit: I don’t find “Dagon” particularly memorable. It’s a decent enough first-person “man on the cusp of insanity wonders if he saw what he saw – oh wait this is Lovecraft of course he did” tale. An American POW escapes from the German ship that captured him, and while adrift along the Equator wakes to find himself in a muddy nightmare land. Eventually he escapes, and finds himself some time later safe in a San Francisco hospital questioning his own sanity. I can imagine reading this over a campfire to a group of fellow campers and relishing performing the slow deterioration of the narrator’s mind (the same reason I love reading Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” out loud). But “Dagon” isn’t particularly scary, although if performed well there is one sort of jump-scare moment. The “twist” at the end is obvious from the beginning, so there isn’t even really a sense of building tension. It just doesn’t stand out from the crowd in any way to me. I’m not sorry I read it, but I can’t find anything to overly compliment about it either. (To be fair, maybe it didn’t seem so trope-y when it was first published. Then again, it also didn’t leave an impression on me when I last read it in the early 1980s, so maybe I’m not being too harsh?)
“Dagon Rising,” on the other hand, is really, really good at both building tension and surprising the reader. Meikle doesn’t retell the original story but rather builds off of it, asking what the rescuers and doctors of the story’s nameless narrator would think in response to his ravings. Told in diary form over the course of a year by the doctor who heads up “John Doe’s” care, the story builds tension specifically by not revealing exactly what “John” may have said during his ravings, and by introducing a secondary mystery that the reader knows is connected long before the narrator does. There were at least two moments of such perfect “will the evil become apparent now or not” tension that I held my breath getting to the end of the paragraph. I will not reveal which moments or how they surprised me with their resolutions, but I’m sure anyone who has read the story will know which moments I’m talking about. The way the end of “Dagon Rising” ties the two stories together is also pitch-perfect.
I do have to say this: “Dagon Rising” may have had more of an effect on my because of when I read it. It’s October 2020, we’re roughly 9 months into a pandemic that spreads as much through human contact as is does through human lack-of-belief in it, and in which it’s not always obvious who is sick. This story encapsulates so much of the anxiety and fear associated with Covid-19, even though it was written well before this virus was on anyone’s radar.
(Also, can I just say that I love the “trade dress” cover design on the Crystal Classics books, as seen below?)
