Dagon

Book number five for 2023, continuing the “Horror May-hem” theme, with Fred Chappell’s Dagon from 1968 (although the cover shown here, ganked from Will Errickson’s Too Much Horror Fiction blog, is clearly of rather later vintage). Did not particularly like. Chappell is a “proper” author of “Southern literature”, and I was kind of intrigued as to why he chose to dive into the Cthulhu Mythos for this one. Our not really shining “hero”, Peter, inherits a farm from his grandparents and he decides to use it to work on a book he has planned about the survival of ancient religions in America. So far, so conventionally “horror”, but the place starts getting to Peter who goes off the deep end…

And then the book suddenly goes into what looks like a somewhat tenuously-connected different direction in its second half, getting more and more tedious as frankly bugger all happens until we get what I presume was meant to be a big horror climax, by which time I no longer cared. I can’t even say brevity was the book’s main virtue, cos even at 177 pages (that’s what ISFDB tells me was the page count for the first edition) it was longer than it needed to be… Having finished the book, I am no more enlightened by why Chappell bothered with the Mythos business (which just amounts to kind of meaningless name-dropping), nor indeed why he bothered with the book at all, damned if I could see much point to any of it.