The most famous Lovecraft fail in this respect is probably in the second last paragraph of The Rats in The Walls, which has its narrator go gibberingly mad during the act of writing. While the beginning and middle acts of stories that employ the possibly insane unreliable narrator trope greatly benefit from the limited perspective given to a reader, there are very few scenarios in which the ending can properly land with a terrifying beat (though there are some fantastic examples of this being written around: House of Leaves solves this with footnotes The House on The Borderland frames an unreliable narrative inside of yet another Dracula is a compilation of separate accounts). For Lovecraft, this is an oft cited problem by critics and fans alike.

Written in the first person, so as to keep the reader guessing at the veracity of the narrator’s profoundly surreal claims, Dagon sacrifices its shot at an effective ending with its final lines. And while it doesn’t leave one with chills or impending nightmares, thanks largely to its campy purple ending, there is a kernel at the heart of Dagon that functions as true, distilled cosmic horror. It’s a fantastic piece of strange fiction, blending history and popular science with hallucinatory nightmare imagery. Part confession, part suicide note, the short story details a nameless narrator's traumatic experience in the Pacific ocean during the first world war.

Lovecraft in 1917 and first published two years later by The Vagrant, is often credited the first of the Providence author’s Cthulhu Mythos building blocks.

Cthulhu dagon