In doing some background work for a longer writing project, I’ve been going over examples drawn both from my own experience and in my reading of instances where people have fallen short of a basic level of competence in their supposed fields of expertise. Whether we’re talking about contractors or bankers, members of the medical establishment or waiters, I think we’ve all had occasion, occasions that are increasing in frequency, to be frightened at the realization that the people we are dealing with don’t actually know what they’re doing or what they’re talking about.

I recently found an example of this in a place I wasn’t expecting it, while reading a cultural study of the work of H. P. Lovecraft. In the Mountains of Madness: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H. P. Lovecraft was published in 2016. It’s not really an academic book, though I think the best work of this sort now takes place outside of the academy now, and the author, W. Scott Poole, is a professor of history with a Ph.D. In any event, I thought I’d supplement my reading of it with some of Lovecraft’s fiction, which I haven’t revisited in years.

I’ve been enjoying In the Mountains of Madness, but reading it alongside Lovecraft’s stories I’ve found my confidence shaken in Poole as a trustworthy authority. While acknowledging that he’s writing “as a historian,” he plays pretty fast and loose with the literary evidence. A case in point is the very first Lovecraft story that he bores into, the early “Dagon.” Here’s how he begins talking about it:

The story’s absurdly unlucky protagonist escapes from the German U-boat that sank his merchant ship only to find himself a castaway on an island that’s no island at all.

We’re off to a bad start. The narrator’s ship isn’t sunk by a U-boat but by what is later described as a “German man-of-war.” Which makes sense, because how was he to escape from a submarine in a small boat? That’s quite a mistake, but while I’d also object to the narrator being a “castaway” (he escapes from the German ship) and the island as “no island at all” (then what is it?), even more significant errors were to come.

The story’s climactic moment comes when the narrator witnesses a sea beast slide out of the water and embrace a strange carved monolith. Or, as Poole describes it: “Falling into a troubled sleep, he [the narrator] wakes to a terrible sound, another upheaval from the shadowy sea that brings forth a slippery, slurping, sucking monstrosity that slithers its way to land and crawls over the monolith, almost seeming to sloppily absorb it in a cacophony of rubber menace.”

This is all wrong. In the first place, the narrator doesn’t awaken to this sight, he’s standing looking at the monolith when the monster comes out of the water. No terrible sound awakens him because he’s not asleep. Then it’s not clear why the monster itself is characterized in such a way. In the story it’s said to “dart” on the land, not slither. It’s also not clearly described here, and words like slippery, slurping, and sucking don’t appear. We’re only told that it has “gigantic scaly arms.” So it’s like a fish (Milton famously described the fallen idol Dagon as “upward man, and downward fish”), but perhaps only in terms of its flesh. We’re definitely not talking about a tentacle beast.

Finally, there’s the story’s ending. The narrator, rescued and now living as a morphine addict in California, has prepared us for it by saying in the opening paragraph that he’s going to throw himself from his window to the street below as soon as he’s finished. At the end he hears “a noise at the door” that startles him, and the sound of a body “lumbering against it.” Determined that “It shall not find me” he turns to “The window! The window!” And there the story breaks off.

What happens seems clear. But in Poole’s account it all kicks off when the narrator “hears something at the window.” Then he talks of “some Thing from out of the sea showing up on his window casement.” As with the escape from the U-boat, it’s hard to see how Poole even arrived at such a reading. Why would the monster be on his window casement? I don’t even know what it means to be “on” a window casement. And it’s made clear the monster, or a monster, is at his door.

“Dagon” is a short story, only five pages long in the edition I was reading it in. To find this number of errors in a thumbnail analysis of its meaning was more than a little surprising. I’ve still found In the Mountains of Madness to be a good read, and I’m sticking with it. But I can’t shake the feeling that standards are slipping.