The Place Called Dagon

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Doctor Dreeme's first summons in Marlborough comes in the dead of night, when a hired boy named Miles leads him through mist and rain to the isolated Westcott farm, where Jeffrey Westcott is said to have shot himself. But the house proves even stranger than the rumor: a fortress of books, locked doors, hidden paths, and uneasy silences, inhabited by the severe, mocking Westcott and his vivid, unsettling wife, Martha. As Dreeme tends a bullet wound in Westcott's leg, he is drawn into a household of intelligence, cruelty, and secretive tension, where every remark feels like a test and every glance suggests buried conflict. Back in the reticent New England town of Marlborough, Dreeme finds the mystery widening. Wagner, the Westcotts' hired man, is found brutally murdered near a bridge, clutching a scrap of paper marked only by a goat's head. Yet the local authorities, farmers, and townspeople meet the killing with evasiveness and hostility, as if the valley itself were conspiring to hide the truth. Haunted by the town's silence, Dreeme begins to doubt his own place there, even as the landscape seems to whisper warnings and the mystery deepens into something almost supernatural.