Daniel Dreeme has come to the small Massachusetts town of Marlborough to pursue his medical practice; but he quickly discovers that there is more beneath the surface of this placid-seeming farming community than meets the eye. The mystery seems to center around Jeffrey Westcott, a sardonic figure who has filled his house with strange books and speaks ominously of summoning up "old gods" at some some region he terms "the place called Dagon."
And what role does his wife, the dark beauty Martha Westcott, play in this scenario? And is the saturnine preacher George Burroughs really as pious as he seems? When the Westcotts' hired man is killed in a particularly brutal fashion, Dreeme knows that he has become ineluctably enmeshed in a horror that may engulf both his body and his soul.
H. P. Lovecraft spoke highly of Herbert Gorman's The Place Called Dagon (1927) in Supernatural Horror in Literature, and for good reason: it uncannily reflects many of the themes in Lovecraft's own fiction, and yet it was written by a novelist and literary critic who had nothing to do with Lovecraft.
This novel, whose very title is Lovecraftian, has waited too long to find a new generation of readers, but is now reprinted here uncut and unabridged, with original artwork by Allen Koszowski and with contributions by Gorman expert Larry Creasy and noted Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi.
Herbert Gorman (1893-1954) was an American novelist and critic who wrote one of the earliest biographies of James Joyce. The Place Called Dagon is his only weird novel.
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This product was added to our catalog on Monday 29 March, 2010.
