Peter Leland, a young minister, inherits his grandparents' farm in the mountains of North Carolina. He and his wife decide it is the perfect place to spend the summer so Peter can finish his book on Dagon, the maimed pagan deity of fertility described in the First Book of Samuel and in Bradford's History of Plymouth Colony, and whom Peter has preached is still worshiped in American culture. But returning to the house of his ancestral Puritan roots, and the place of murky childhood memories as well, strangely affects Peter. He withdraws - from his wife, his writing - increasingly enthralled by a young woman, Mina, the daughter of a tenant farmer. In the riveting sinister action and ultimate deliverance that follow, Dagon brilliantly plays out both the tragedy of impotent human will and the moral discovery of suffering.
Author
Fred Davis Chappell retired after 40 years as an English professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997-2002. He attended Duke University. His 1968 novel Dagon, which was named the Best Foreign Book of the Year by the Academie Française, is a recasting of a Cthulhu Mythos horror story as a psychologically realistic Southern Gothic. His literary awards include the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers, the Bollingen Prize, and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
