At the Mountains of Madness

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At the Mountains of Madness is a novella by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and originally serialized in the February, March and April 1936 issues Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections since Lovecraft's death.

The story is considered by Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi to represent the decisive "demythology" of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Contents

[edit] Inspiration

Lovecraft had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration. "Lovecraft had been fascinated with the Antarctic continent since he was at least 12 years old, when he had written several small treatises on early Antarctic explorers," biographer S. T. Joshi wrote.[1] At about the age of 9, inspired by W. Clark Russell's 1887 book The Frozen Pirate, Lovecraft had written "several yarns" set in Antartica.[2]

By the 1920s, Joshi notes, Antarctica was "one of the last unexplored regions of the earth, where large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet. Contemporary maps of the continent show a number of provocative blanks, and Lovecraft could exercise his imagination in filling them in...with little fear of immediate contradiction."[3]

The first expedition of Richard Evelyn Byrd took place in 1928-1930, the period just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters, remarking at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past".[4]

Lin Carter has suggested that one inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's own hypersensitivity to cold, as evidenced by an incident where the writer "collapsed in the street and was carried unconscious into a drug store" because the temperature dropped from 60 degrees to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees to -1 degree Celsius). "The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried over into his writing," Carter wrote, "and the pages of Madness convey the blighting, blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way that even Poe could not suggest."[5]

Lovecraft's most obvious literary source for At the Mountains of Madness is Edgar Allan Poe's lone novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, whose concluding section is set in Antarctica. Lovecraft twice cites Poe's "disturbing and enigmatical" story in his text, and explicitly borrows the mysterious phrase "Tekeli-li" from Poe's work. In a letter to August Derleth, Lovecraft wrote that he was trying to achieve with his ending an effect similar to what Poe accomplished in Pym.[6]

Another proposed inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness is Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core (1914), a novel that posits a highly intelligent reptilian race, the Mahar, living in a hollow earth. "Consider the similarity of Burroughs' Mahar to Lovecraft's Old Ones, both of whom are presented sympathetically despite their ill-treatment of man," writes critic William Fulwiler. "[B]oth are winged, web-footed, dominant races; both are scientific scholarly races with a talent for genetics, engineering, and architecture; and both races use men as cattle." Both stories, Fulwiler points out, involve radical new drilling techniques; in both stories, humans are vivisected by nonhuman scientists. Burroughs' Mahar even employ a species of servants known as Sagoths, possibly the source of Lovecraft's shoggoths.[7]

Other possible sources include A. Merritt's "The People of the Pit", whose description of an underground city in the Yukon bears some resemblance to that of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and Katharine Metcalf Roof's "A Million Years After", a story about dinosaurs hatching from eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 edition Weird Tales. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft declared the story to be a "rotten", "cheap", and "puerile" version of an idea he had come up with years earlier, and Joshi suggests it may have provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from the dim reaches of earth's history."[8]

The long scope of history recounted in the story may have been inspired by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Some details of the story may have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901 novel of Arctic exploration, The Purple Cloud, which was republished in 1930.[9]

Lovecraft's own "The Nameless City" (1921), which also deals with the exploration of an ancient underground city apparently abandoned by its nonhuman builders, is a clear precedent for At the Mountains of Madness. In both stories, the explorers use the nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species.[10]

[edit] Synopsis

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The story is written in first-person perspective by Professor William Dyer, a geologist from Miskatonic University. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that it will deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition to Antarctica, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, lead by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalayas. The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient half-vegetable, half-animal life-forms, completely unknown to science after digging deep into an underground cave. Six of the specimens seem to be badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. The extremely early date in the geological strata of these "fossils" is problematic because of their highly evolved features. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, they are dubbed the "Elder Things". When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. They find that the camp has been devastated, and the men and dogs slaughtered, with the body of one of their friends and one dog missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, each containing one of the damaged specimens.

Prof. Dyer and a student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains and set down to investigate a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones utterly alien to any human architecture. Exploring one of the cones, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals. The elder things first came to earth shortly after the moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "shoggoths", things created to perform any task, assume any form and reflect any thought. Danforth and Dyer realize that the eight "Elder Things" were alive when they found a sledge from the camp which to their horror contained the bodies of the missing dog and man, evidently kept as scientific specimens.

They find evidence of dead "Elder Things" and are chased back to their plane by a ululating horror that could only have been a "shoggoth". As they fly away Danforth looks back and sees something (what he sees is not described) that causes him to lose most of his sanity. Professor Dyer concludes that the "Elder Things" and their civilization were destroyed by the "shoggoths" they created, and begs the planners of the proposed Antarctic expediton to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this earth.

[edit] Characters

[edit] William Dyer

(ca. 1875–?)

The narrator of At the Mountains of Madness, he is a professor of geology at Miskatonic University and a leader of the disastrous Pabodie Expedition to Antarctica in 1930–31. He reappears in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time", where he accompanies an expedition to Australia's Great Sandy Desert where he is said to be "appalled at the measureless age of the fragments" of a primordial civilization found there.

In At the Mountains of Madness, he has no first name, only being called "William Dyer" in "The Shadow Out of Time".


[edit] Danforth

Graduate student at Miskatonic University. As part of the Pabodie Expedition, he accompanied Dyer on a survey flight over the "Plateau of Leng" and went mad from something he saw. He is described as "a great reader of bizarre material", and makes allusions to Edgar Allan Poe and the Necronomicon.

According to Fritz Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars", he later recovered after being treated with experimental drugs developed by Professor Morgan, though he never recalled the horror he saw on the plateau. Afterwards, he became a professor of psychology at the university.

[edit] Frank H. Pabodie

A member of Miskatonic's engineering department, Professor Pabodie invented a drill for the expedition that was "unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity...to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness." He also added "fuel-warming and quick-starting devices" to the expedition's four aircraft.[11]

Lovecraft wrote of the name "Pabodie", "I chose it as a name typical of good old New England stock, yet not sufficiently common to sound conventional or hackneyed." It's an alternative spelling of "Peabody", a name Lovecraft was familiar with through the Peabody Museum in Salem.[12]

[edit] Professor Lake

Lake is a professor of biology at Miskatonic University. It is he who first discovers the Mountains of Madness as a result of his "strange and dogged insistence on a westward--or rather, northwestward--prospecting trip" based on his discovery of strange fossils. He also discovers the ancient extraterrestrial specimens that he dubs Elder Things based on their resemblance to "certain monsters of primal myth" found in the Necronomicon. He reports that his findings in Antarctica confirm his belief "that earth has seen whole cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells," and predicts that this "[w]ill mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics." When the Elder Things turn out to be living creatures rather than fossils, they butcher Lake and the rest of his sub-expedition.

[edit] Professor Atwood

A member of the Miskatonic University physics department, and also a meteorologist. He is part of the Lake sub-expedition and is also butchered by the Elder Things.

[edit] Significance

According to S. T. Joshi, who included this novella as the central story in the first volume of his Annotated Lovecraft series, Mountains reveals Lovecraft's true feelings on the so-called Cthulhu Mythos that subsequent writers attributed to him, and "demythologizes" much of his earlier work.

Many of Lovecraft's stories involve features that appear to be supernatural, such as monsters and the occult. However, Mountains appears to explain the origins of such elements—from occult symbols to "gods" such as Cthulhu—in rational terms. Mountains explains many elements of the "Cthulhu Mythos" in terms of early alien civilizations that took root on Earth long before humans appeared.

The story has also inadvertedly popularized the concept of ancient astronauts, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology".[13]

[edit] Connections to other Lovecraft stories

At the Mountains of Madness has numerous connections to other Lovecraft stories. A few include:

[edit] Trivia

  • The book Mountains of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey in Antarctica (2001), by John Long, is an account of a real-life expedition to Antarctica that searched for fossils near the location in the story, but fortunately without the disasters that befell Lovecraft's scientists.
  • Chaosium developed a game book for their Call of Cthulhu RPG, called 'Beyond the Mountains of Madness', essentially a follow-up to the original story.
  • Late in the story, one of the characters recites a series of subway stops to calm himself; all of the stops still exist today on the Red Line subway in Boston (though some have changed names).
  • Some believe that Lovecraft references the "cursed" Gedney family with the character of the same name.
  • The giant penguins that feature in the ruins of the Elder Thing's city were inspired by the prehistoric species Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] Books

  • Lovecraft, Howard P. [1936] (2005). “At the Mountains of Madness”, At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. New York, NY: The Modern Library. ISBN 0-8129-7441-7 (paperback).
  • Pearsall, Anthony B. (2005). The Lovecraft Lexicon, 1st ed., Tempe, AZ: New Falcon. ISBN 1-56184-129-3.

[edit] Web sites

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ S. T. Joshi, The Annotated Lovecraft, p. 175.
  2. ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 132.
  3. ^ Joshi, p. 18.
  4. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. 3, p. 144; cited in Joshi, p. 183; see also Joshi, p. 186.
  5. ^ Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, p. 84. Joshi regards this suggestion as "facile"--Annotated Lovecraft, pp. 17-18.
  6. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, letter to August Derleth, May 16, 1931; cited in Joshi, pp. 329-330.
  7. ^ William Fulwiler, "E.R.B. and H.P.L.", Black Forbidden Things, p. 64.
  8. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. III, p. 186; Joshi, p. 175.
  9. ^ Joshi and Schultz, pp. 10-11.
  10. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, "The Nameless City", Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 104-105; cited in Joshi, pp. 264-265.
  11. ^ Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 4.
  12. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. V, p. 228; Joshi, p. 181.
  13. ^ Jason Colavito, The Cthulhu Comparison
  14. ^ Anthony Pearsall, The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 326.
  15. ^ Ibid, p. 146.

[edit] External links

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