Anyone who knows me… probably knows that I am and never have been one for much Literature. I could talk about how I just don’t find most books that exciting, or how (I admit) I’ve never read a piece of literature outside of the school curriculum. That is, until this Summer, when I came across, somewhat by chance, the obscure and not widely popular works of American Horror and Weird Fiction author H. P. Lovecraft. With monsters the size of mountains, and fears as unknown and horrific as never limited to any specific genre of horror, it’s no mystery I was dragged into this frightful pit of squirming darkness and twisting shadows of the great cosmos. My readings were first confined to the Wikipedia Summaries of his stories, for fear of their length, but I overcame this quickly, and delved into Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness. This piece has been stamped “perfect Lovecraft”, and I have to agree. With indescribable terrors, ancient races, colossal cities, and dreadful flights of madness and despair from unforgiving places, At the Mountains of Madness is indeed a true example of Lovecraftian Horror, and a fresh glimpse of the malignant monstrosities that dwell beyond the twinkling stars of the unknown infinity.
At The Mountains of Madness is told in the first-person narrative (Lovecraft’s preferred style of storytelling) of one William Dyer, a geologist and member of an Antarctic expedition team. The story begins with Dyer reflecting back on the team’s expedition, and explaining that he must tell of the horrors he and his team experienced to deter a planned and publicized follow-up expedition to Antarctica. Shortly after arrival in the dead landscape of ice and shrill winds, the team’s biologist Professor Lake takes a significant party of men across the mountains. Over the radio he reports of the discovery of a cave during a drilling for minerals, and the finding of grotesque fossils of highly evolved beings. After the failed dissection of one of the specimens in the biting weather, Lake informs Dyer’s group that they’ll send their aircraft across the mountains to escort them to the site of the fossils that will “mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics”. When the morning comes, there are no aircraft hovering over the ‘mountains of madness’, and the radio is dead. The team takes all they have in the planes over to the site of Lake’s silence. The camp is completely destroyed, and its occupants are all dead. The perfect fossil specimens Lake found are gone, and the others are buried under peculiar mounds of snow, shaped like perfect stars. The team is mute with terror, trying to place the blame on the intense winds, but it can’t be the wind that has left a dissected man on the operating table. From unimaginable evils, to non-Euclidean shaped cities, to the history of a race descendant from the stars, Dyer applies no censorship to his avid ravings of what he found At the Mountains of Madness.
Lovecraft, in my opinion, is able to both work the genre of horror and create his own sub-genres. Between the already existing flavors of horror, no one can really be compared to Lovecraft’s “Cosmicism”, or “the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind” (Wikipedia). In the realm of monsters, Lovecraft reigns supreme. A good attribute to this supremacy is the fact that a good deal of Lovecraft’s ‘creatures from the stars’ are never revealed. I’m glad this novella included one of said monsters. Lovecraft famously spoke that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Frequently featured on the murals of the ‘Old Ones’ in a great colossal city Dyer finds, is a being just past the city and across the mountain range, in which the ‘Old Ones’ fear, and fear to such an extent that they leave its description hidden from all text. So now you’re thinking “So… what is it?” I’ll tell you right now: Lovecraft doesn’t say. The writer cannot even attempt to create a monster that the reader of the story will specifically fear, so he lets the reader dip into his or her own darkest corners of creative genius. Lovecraft doesn’t just ‘drop’ a random ‘creature of the unknown’ into a story just for the sake of it, though. He constructs a build-up for the monster throughout the story, so at the end, the reader has climbed this tower of hints and bits of forbidden knowledge, and they’ll have to be careful not to fall off. Lovecraft does this excellently in At the Mountains of Madness. Dyer, upon reading from the murals of the ancient beings, finds further information of the creature from the westward mountains unintentionally terrifying the ‘Elder Things’ or ‘Old Ones’. On the murals, Dyer sees “a scene in which the Old Ones were shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object - never allowed to appear in the design - found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those horrible westward mountains.” This leaves the reader asking, “If whatever the creature washed down from the mountains was enough to terrify the villagers and make it into their history, what could the creature be?” Hmm… food for thought.
In this story, Lovecraft really makes you fear the icy mountains and fields in the Antarctic. I think that he does this effectively at first through the eyes of Dyer. When Dyer, aboard the Arkham, approaches the “cryptic world of frozen death”, his vision begins to play tricks on him. He imagines the tall mountains as spires of stone from a great empire, looming monstrously over them. He also hears the wind as having “cadences [that] sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping”. Lovecraft also brings this ‘piping’ back into text as the Old Ones’ form of speech. By creating a mist of doubt of what is real, but not making it too foggy as in Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time (Where the narrator does not know whether what he sees is a dream or not), Lovecraft keeps the reader under the impression that things are distorted, but not unreal, in this “dead corner of the Earth”. Lovecraft twists the environment using another clever mechanic: the light. Creating a story set in the Antarctic, Lovecraft had the option of setting the story in Summer, where there is only a few hours of darkness a day, and Winter, where there are only a few hours of sunlight a day. Darkness being a close friend to the horror genre, an almost constant darkness would seem to be the obvious choice. But Lovecraft isn’t known for taking the ‘obvious routes’. So it came to be that William Dyer comes to the Antarctic in the Summer, with an excess of bright hours to keep the horrors of the night away. The fact that the story takes place in daylight creates a kind of (excuse my vocabulary) ‘trippy’ atmosphere. In fact, it’s the sunlight that creates the twisted hallucinations of grandiose structures in which the team of explorers share equally. Would the story be better, be creepier, if the team had come in darkness? Maybe, we’ll never know, but I don’t think it was the darkness that made me squint and shiver as if I really was losing myself in the cold wasteland of the shining sun.
Lovecraft’s style of writing is not that which I would expect to like. His stories have been called ‘wordy’ and the like, and I’ll admit a good deal of the time they can be hard to swallow. However, I wouldn’t dub them ‘wordy’. ‘Wordy’ would imply he uses too many words to describe something, or display an emotion, or… etc. I believe Lovecraft uses the perfect amount of words/paragraphs (which he often does) to ‘describe’. His language, however, can sometimes (but not often) walk the border of ‘high-flown’. I’ll often find myself looking up words in which upon finding their meanings a big ‘oooooh’ is let out. I find no problem with this though, for the few words I don’t specifically recognize are only usually used once, and their meanings are easily inferred.
The plot of the story is carefully set up to build suspense, and then release and pull back the nerves of our feeble brain with horror after horror after horror. How can you not love that? The summary above was only one horror Dyer’s men discover, with the deeper monstrosities set later and growing near the end of the book. As is common in Lovecraft works, the horror is still lurking when the book is closed, and the ravings of Dyer finished. The only thing the narrator and reader can hope for is that no one will discover what they have, and that secrets, dark, dark secrets, will stay just that.
As I’ve described earlier, Lovecraft uses great word choice to create mood, imagery, and the like in At the Mountains of Madness. However, as great as his descriptions are, I found multiple ‘copies’ of some of them in later parts of the stories, which I found to be a little repetitive. For example, when Lake’s team taps into the voluminous cave, Lovecraft identifies the “deposit of shells and bones” as “chok[ing] the passage”. I could really just imagine the cave as a lung of some being, having its breathing “choked” by the immense amount of bony remains, and so I think this description is sound. However, Lovecraft repeats it several times. When in the lower levels of the ancient city he finds, Dyer (Lovecraft) describes how the ice “chokes” the houses or the buildings are “choked”. Again, a fine description, but repeated and reused. I don’t mind this too much, but in describing different houses he uses “Ice-choked” multiple times. This does not degrade or in any way ‘kill’ the story, but is worth mentioning as a point of weakness in the structure (or, perhaps ‘design’) of the tale.
That takes us to the ending. I just wish my dear readers to which I address this review would have all read the book, so I may rave about how I loved the ending so. But alas, no. I may only say this: Lovecraft, I believe, uses repetition very forcefully in the right places, and the unknown creature lurking just pass the mountains is so ‘awesome’ in the way it waits (or, Lovecraft makes it wait) until the end when the reader really sees its power on the mind. Oh, and, as a side note, I love how Lovecraft uses the ‘Subway Train’ description. But I must hush now… I shall end with this: “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” (Read the book).
Ever wonder what lies in Earth’s deadest, darkest corners? What waits secretly and survives fitfully in the coldest worldly abysses in the shadows that fester the rocks of our material plane? Such wondering can and has led to insanity. Books may only share in text what horrors lurk where none dare search, and others have found them more maddening with their evil black markings of a shaking pen than any vision or dream, but you may find the answers that you are looking for, the escape from the world of the ignorant, At the Mountains of Madness.
At The Mountains of Madness is told in the first-person narrative (Lovecraft’s preferred style of storytelling) of one William Dyer, a geologist and member of an Antarctic expedition team. The story begins with Dyer reflecting back on the team’s expedition, and explaining that he must tell of the horrors he and his team experienced to deter a planned and publicized follow-up expedition to Antarctica. Shortly after arrival in the dead landscape of ice and shrill winds, the team’s biologist Professor Lake takes a significant party of men across the mountains. Over the radio he reports of the discovery of a cave during a drilling for minerals, and the finding of grotesque fossils of highly evolved beings. After the failed dissection of one of the specimens in the biting weather, Lake informs Dyer’s group that they’ll send their aircraft across the mountains to escort them to the site of the fossils that will “mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics”. When the morning comes, there are no aircraft hovering over the ‘mountains of madness’, and the radio is dead. The team takes all they have in the planes over to the site of Lake’s silence. The camp is completely destroyed, and its occupants are all dead. The perfect fossil specimens Lake found are gone, and the others are buried under peculiar mounds of snow, shaped like perfect stars. The team is mute with terror, trying to place the blame on the intense winds, but it can’t be the wind that has left a dissected man on the operating table. From unimaginable evils, to non-Euclidean shaped cities, to the history of a race descendant from the stars, Dyer applies no censorship to his avid ravings of what he found At the Mountains of Madness.
Lovecraft, in my opinion, is able to both work the genre of horror and create his own sub-genres. Between the already existing flavors of horror, no one can really be compared to Lovecraft’s “Cosmicism”, or “the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind” (Wikipedia). In the realm of monsters, Lovecraft reigns supreme. A good attribute to this supremacy is the fact that a good deal of Lovecraft’s ‘creatures from the stars’ are never revealed. I’m glad this novella included one of said monsters. Lovecraft famously spoke that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Frequently featured on the murals of the ‘Old Ones’ in a great colossal city Dyer finds, is a being just past the city and across the mountain range, in which the ‘Old Ones’ fear, and fear to such an extent that they leave its description hidden from all text. So now you’re thinking “So… what is it?” I’ll tell you right now: Lovecraft doesn’t say. The writer cannot even attempt to create a monster that the reader of the story will specifically fear, so he lets the reader dip into his or her own darkest corners of creative genius. Lovecraft doesn’t just ‘drop’ a random ‘creature of the unknown’ into a story just for the sake of it, though. He constructs a build-up for the monster throughout the story, so at the end, the reader has climbed this tower of hints and bits of forbidden knowledge, and they’ll have to be careful not to fall off. Lovecraft does this excellently in At the Mountains of Madness. Dyer, upon reading from the murals of the ancient beings, finds further information of the creature from the westward mountains unintentionally terrifying the ‘Elder Things’ or ‘Old Ones’. On the murals, Dyer sees “a scene in which the Old Ones were shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object - never allowed to appear in the design - found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those horrible westward mountains.” This leaves the reader asking, “If whatever the creature washed down from the mountains was enough to terrify the villagers and make it into their history, what could the creature be?” Hmm… food for thought.
In this story, Lovecraft really makes you fear the icy mountains and fields in the Antarctic. I think that he does this effectively at first through the eyes of Dyer. When Dyer, aboard the Arkham, approaches the “cryptic world of frozen death”, his vision begins to play tricks on him. He imagines the tall mountains as spires of stone from a great empire, looming monstrously over them. He also hears the wind as having “cadences [that] sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping”. Lovecraft also brings this ‘piping’ back into text as the Old Ones’ form of speech. By creating a mist of doubt of what is real, but not making it too foggy as in Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time (Where the narrator does not know whether what he sees is a dream or not), Lovecraft keeps the reader under the impression that things are distorted, but not unreal, in this “dead corner of the Earth”. Lovecraft twists the environment using another clever mechanic: the light. Creating a story set in the Antarctic, Lovecraft had the option of setting the story in Summer, where there is only a few hours of darkness a day, and Winter, where there are only a few hours of sunlight a day. Darkness being a close friend to the horror genre, an almost constant darkness would seem to be the obvious choice. But Lovecraft isn’t known for taking the ‘obvious routes’. So it came to be that William Dyer comes to the Antarctic in the Summer, with an excess of bright hours to keep the horrors of the night away. The fact that the story takes place in daylight creates a kind of (excuse my vocabulary) ‘trippy’ atmosphere. In fact, it’s the sunlight that creates the twisted hallucinations of grandiose structures in which the team of explorers share equally. Would the story be better, be creepier, if the team had come in darkness? Maybe, we’ll never know, but I don’t think it was the darkness that made me squint and shiver as if I really was losing myself in the cold wasteland of the shining sun.
Lovecraft’s style of writing is not that which I would expect to like. His stories have been called ‘wordy’ and the like, and I’ll admit a good deal of the time they can be hard to swallow. However, I wouldn’t dub them ‘wordy’. ‘Wordy’ would imply he uses too many words to describe something, or display an emotion, or… etc. I believe Lovecraft uses the perfect amount of words/paragraphs (which he often does) to ‘describe’. His language, however, can sometimes (but not often) walk the border of ‘high-flown’. I’ll often find myself looking up words in which upon finding their meanings a big ‘oooooh’ is let out. I find no problem with this though, for the few words I don’t specifically recognize are only usually used once, and their meanings are easily inferred.
The plot of the story is carefully set up to build suspense, and then release and pull back the nerves of our feeble brain with horror after horror after horror. How can you not love that? The summary above was only one horror Dyer’s men discover, with the deeper monstrosities set later and growing near the end of the book. As is common in Lovecraft works, the horror is still lurking when the book is closed, and the ravings of Dyer finished. The only thing the narrator and reader can hope for is that no one will discover what they have, and that secrets, dark, dark secrets, will stay just that.
As I’ve described earlier, Lovecraft uses great word choice to create mood, imagery, and the like in At the Mountains of Madness. However, as great as his descriptions are, I found multiple ‘copies’ of some of them in later parts of the stories, which I found to be a little repetitive. For example, when Lake’s team taps into the voluminous cave, Lovecraft identifies the “deposit of shells and bones” as “chok[ing] the passage”. I could really just imagine the cave as a lung of some being, having its breathing “choked” by the immense amount of bony remains, and so I think this description is sound. However, Lovecraft repeats it several times. When in the lower levels of the ancient city he finds, Dyer (Lovecraft) describes how the ice “chokes” the houses or the buildings are “choked”. Again, a fine description, but repeated and reused. I don’t mind this too much, but in describing different houses he uses “Ice-choked” multiple times. This does not degrade or in any way ‘kill’ the story, but is worth mentioning as a point of weakness in the structure (or, perhaps ‘design’) of the tale.
That takes us to the ending. I just wish my dear readers to which I address this review would have all read the book, so I may rave about how I loved the ending so. But alas, no. I may only say this: Lovecraft, I believe, uses repetition very forcefully in the right places, and the unknown creature lurking just pass the mountains is so ‘awesome’ in the way it waits (or, Lovecraft makes it wait) until the end when the reader really sees its power on the mind. Oh, and, as a side note, I love how Lovecraft uses the ‘Subway Train’ description. But I must hush now… I shall end with this: “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” (Read the book).
Ever wonder what lies in Earth’s deadest, darkest corners? What waits secretly and survives fitfully in the coldest worldly abysses in the shadows that fester the rocks of our material plane? Such wondering can and has led to insanity. Books may only share in text what horrors lurk where none dare search, and others have found them more maddening with their evil black markings of a shaking pen than any vision or dream, but you may find the answers that you are looking for, the escape from the world of the ignorant, At the Mountains of Madness.
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