Apart from juvenilia, this tale (with the exception of “The Tomb”), was the first story Lovecraft wrote. And yet, in the fullness of its vision, it reads like something H.P. might have composed a decade later, on the verge of his most intense explorations.
Written in 1917, it is a tale contemporary with the Great War, and tells of a captured merchant seaman who escapes from a German man-of-war in a small boat equipped with provisions. In mid-ocean, he falls into an uneasy sleep and wakes only to find his ship beached on an obscure island and surrounded by a noxious foul-smelling ooze, which he is then forced to crawl through. Later, while exploring a crater formed by an ancient volcanic disturbance, he discovers antediluvian sculptures and bas reliefs that hint at an unsettling history. And it is then, out of the darkness, that something horrible arrives.
It is a story that came to him in dreams (“I dreamed,” he wrote to an amateur writer and friend, “that whole hideous crawl, and can yet feel the ooze sucking me down!"), and its images of volcanic islands and fish-headed creatures foreshadow both “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” stories that would not be written for ten or twelve years.
No wonder the Muses are proclaimed to be the daughters of Memory! Could it be that creativity is merely the process of perfectly realizing the force of one single youthful dream? Is it true that, if in dream, a muse touches a poet, he carries the dream-mark for the rest of his life?
I, however, choose to look at the facts another way, a way not entirely comforting: Suppose a middling writer toiled painstakingly, toiled throughout his brief life, to create a few dark gods, and suppose that, a few years before Death took him, he succeeded. Could these dark new gods he created reach back into the past? Could they have visited him in his long dead dreams?