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This early novel by Fred Chappell—awarded the Best Foreign Book of the Year Prize by the Academie Française and listed among the 100 best horror novels—remains one of the author’s most widely read works. Praised as being “of a very high order [and] precise, dry elegance” (New York Times Book Review), it is a spellbinding work of psychological and supernatural darkness.
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.
Poet and novelist Fred Chappell is a native of western North Carolina and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Among his many published works and honors are The Inkling, I Am One of You Forever, Family Gathering, the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Cup, the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
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