At the Mountains of Madness is a science fiction-horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931. Rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length,[1] it was originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.
The story details the events of a disastrous expedition to Antarctica in September 1930, and what is found there by a group of explorers led by the narrator, Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University. Throughout the story, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring another group of explorers who wish to return to the continent. These events include the discovery of an ancient civilization older than the human race, and realization of Earth's past told through various sculptures and murals.
The story was inspired by Lovecraft's interest in Antarctic exploration; the continent was still not fully explored in the 1930s. Lovecraft explicitly draws from Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and he may have used other stories for inspiration. Many story elements, such as the formless "shoggoth", recur in other Lovecraft works. The story has been adapted and used for graphic novels, video games, and musical works.
Plot
The story is narrated in a first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor at Arkham's Miskatonic University, aiming to prevent an important and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. Throughout the course of his explanation, Dyer relates how he led a group of scholars from Miskatonic University on a previous expedition to Antarctica, during which they discovered ancient ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas.
A small advance group, led by Professor Lake, discovers the remains of fourteen prehistoric life-forms previously unknown to science, and also unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens have been badly damaged, while another eight have been preserved in pristine condition. The specimens' stratum places them far too early on the geologic time scale for the features of the specimens to have evolved. Some fossils of Cambrian age show signs of the use of tools to carve a specimen for food.
When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party, Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth investigate. Lake's camp is devastated, with the majority of men and dogs slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and one of the dogs are absent. Near the expedition's campsite, they find six star-shaped snow mounds with one specimen under each. They also discover that the better preserved life-forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on both an unnamed man and a dog. The missing man Gedney is suspected of having gone utterly insane and having killed and mutilated all the others.
A generic Elder Thing specimen (illustration by Tom Ardans)
The two men fly an aeroplane across the "mountains", soon revealed to be the outer walls of a vast, abandoned stone city, alien to any human architecture. For their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, the builders of this lost civilization are dubbed the "Elder Things." By exploring these fantastic structures, the men learn through hieroglyphic murals that the Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon took form, and built their cities with the help of "shoggoths"—biological entities created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. There is a hint that all Earthly life evolved from cellular material left over from the creation of the shoggoths.
As more buildings are explored, the explorers learn about the Elder Things' conflict with both the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-Go, who arrived on Earth shortly afterwards. The images also reflect a degradation of their civilization, once the shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied in maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive. The murals also allude to an unnamed evil lurking within an even larger mountain range located beyond the city. This mountain range rose in one night and certain phenomena and incidents deterred the Elder Things from exploring it. When Antarctica became uninhabitable, even for the Elder Things, they soon migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.
Dyer and Danforth eventually realize that the Elder Things missing from the advance party's camp had somehow returned to life and, after slaughtering the explorers, have returned to their city. Dyer and Danforth also discover traces of the Elder Things' earlier exploration, as well as sleds containing the corpses of both Gedney and his missing dog. They are ultimately drawn towards the entrance of a tunnel, into the subterranean region depicted in the murals. Here, they find evidence of various Elder Things killed in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering placidly, apparently used as livestock. They are then confronted by a black, bubbling mass, which they identify as a shoggoth, and escape. Aboard the plane, high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something which causes him to go insane, implied to be the unnamed evil itself.
Dyer concludes the Elder Things are survivors of a bygone era, who slaughtered Lake's group only in self-defense or scientific curiosity. Their civilization was eventually destroyed by the shoggoths, which now prey on the enormous penguins. He warns the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from the site. Danforth continues to experience manic episodes, whispering of "bizarre conceptions" which Dyer attributes to his being one of the few to have completely read through Miskatonic's copy of the Necronomicon.
Connections to other Lovecraft stories
At the Mountains of Madness has numerous connections to other Lovecraft stories. A few include:
The star-headed Elder Things also appear in "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1933), when the main character, Walter Gilman, visits a city of theirs in one of his dreams, and "The Shadow Out of Time", in which an Elder Thing is kept as a fellow prisoner.
Dyer is mentioned in "The Shadow Out of Time" as accompanying Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee's expedition to Australia's Great Sandy Desert.
The expedition is sponsored by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, combining two major names in Lovecraft's fiction: Derby and Pickman.[2] Richard Upton Pickman is the main character in Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model", while Edward Pickman Derby is the protagonist of his "The Thing on the Doorstep", and also one of his literary alter-egos.[3]
The Elder Things record the coming of Cthulhu to Earth and the sinking of R'lyeh, events referred to in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928).
The Elder Things' city is identified with the Plateau of Leng first mentioned in Lovecraft's "Celephaïs" (1920).
Dyer mentions "Kadath in the Cold Waste" while referring to a massive mountain range which even the Elder Things "shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil."
At the very end of the story, Danforth links the horror beyond the forbidden mountain range to Yog-Sothoth and "The Colour Out of Space".
The Mi-Go are the focus of "The Whisperer in Darkness". Several times throughout, Dyer also makes reference to Albert Wilmarth, the main character of "The Whisperer in Darkness".
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," the biographer S. T. Joshi wrote.[4] At about the age of 9, inspired by W. Clark Russell's 1887 book The Frozen Pirate, Lovecraft had written "several yarns" set in Antarctica.[5]
By the 1920s, Antarctica was "one of the last unexplored regions of the Earth in which 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."[6] However, Lovecraft was basically accurate in presenting the geographic knowledge of Antarctica as it was known at the time, and he referred to continental drift, a theory which was then not widely accepted.
The first expedition of Richard E. Byrd took place between 1928 and 1930, just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters and remarked at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past."[7] In fact, Miskatonic University's expedition was modelled after that of Byrd.[8]
In Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu MythosLin Carter suggests that one inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's own hypersensitivity to cold, as evidenced by an incident in which 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."[9] S. T. Joshi called the theory "facile."[10]
Joshi further cites Lovecraft's most obvious literary source for At the Mountains of Madness as Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, whose concluding section is set in Antarctica. Lovecraft twice cites Poe's "disturbing and enigmatic" story in his text and explicitly borrows the mysterious cry Tekeli-li or Takkeli 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.[11]
Another proposed inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness is Edgar Rice Burroughs's 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," wrote the 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 Shoggoth.[12]
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.[13] In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft declared Metcalf Roof's story to be a "rotten," "cheap," and "puerile" version of an idea he had years earlier, and his dissatisfaction may have provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from the dim reaches of Earth's history."[14]
An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggest that 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 also have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901 Arctic exploration novel The Purple Cloud, which was republished in 1930.[17]
The title is derived from a line in Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany's short story "The Hashish Man": "And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness...".[18]
Lovecraft's own "The Nameless City" (1921), which also deals with the exploration of an ancient underground city that is apparently abandoned by its nonhuman builders, sets a precedent for At the Mountains of Madness. In both stories, the explorers use the nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species.[19] Lovecraft had also used that device in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1927)
As for details of the Antarctic setting, the author's description of some of the scenery is in part inspired by the Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich and the illustrations of Gustave Doré, both of whom are referenced by the story's narrator multiple times.
The novella was serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues, and Lovecraft received $315 (equivalent to $6,916in 2023)—the most he had ever received for a story.[21] The story, however, was harshly edited, with alterations to spellings, punctuation, and paragraphing, and the end of the story had several lengthy passages omitted.[20] Lovecraft was outraged and called Tremaine "that god-damn'd dung of a hyaena[sic]".[20] Lovecraft's own hand-corrected copies of Astounding Stories formed the basis for the first Arkham House edition, but this still contained over a thousand errors, and a fully restored text was not published until 1985.[20]
Reception
The novella was received negatively during Lovecraft's lifetime; Lovecraft stated that its hostile reception had done "more than anything to end my effective fictional career."[22]Theodore Sturgeon described the novella as "perfect Lovecraft" and "a good deal more lucid than much of the master's work", as well as "first-water, true-blue science fiction."[23] The story popularized ancient astronaut theories, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology".[24] Edward Guimont has argued that At the Mountains of Madness, despite its terrestrial setting, helped influence later hard science fiction depictions of planetary expeditions and the Big Dumb Object trope, particularly those of Arthur C. Clarke, whose 1940 parody "At the Mountains of Murkiness" was one of his first works of fiction.[15][25]
On July 28, 2010, director Guillermo del Toro announced that he would direct a film adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Universal Pictures, with James Cameron producing. Cameron suggested casting Tom Cruise in the lead role and releasing the film in 3-D.[30] On October 28, 2010, del Toro said that the adaptation probably would not happen at all. He stated, "It doesn't look like I can do it. It's very difficult for the studios to take the step of doing a period-set, R-rated, tentpole movie with a tough ending and no love story. Lovecraft has a readership as big as any best-seller, but it's tough to quantify because his works are in the public domain."[31] Cameron and del Toro put forward the idea to Universal, who greenlit it.[32] In 2012, del Toro posted that, due to the resemblance in premise with the Ridley Scott film Prometheus, the project would probably face a "long pause—if not demise".[33][34]
Unofficial sequels and other inspired works
David A. McIntee noted similarities between the first half of the 1979 science fiction horror film Alien, particularly in early versions of the script, to At the Mountains of Madness, "not in storyline, but in dread-building mystery", and calls the finished film "the best Lovecraftian movie ever made, without being a Lovecraft adaptation", due to its similarities in tone and atmosphere to Lovecraft's works.[35] In 2009, Alien writer Dan O'Bannon said the film was "strongly influenced, tone-wise, by Lovecraft, and one of the things it proved is that you can't adapt Lovecraft effectively without an extremely strong visual style ... What you need is a cinematic equivalent of Lovecraft's prose."[36] The 2004 Alien sequel, Alien vs. Predator borrows its plot liberally from At the Mountains of Madness.[37]
The 1995 Prisoner of Ice video game by Infogrames Multimedia is loosely based on At The Mountains of Madness, particularly the introduction where it involves a group of people discovering two mysterious cargo crates in Antarctica that contain Lovecraftian creatures called "the Prisoners."[38][39][40]
Chaosium Games released a campaign book titled Beyond the Mountains of Madness for their Call of Cthulhu role-playing game in 1999. This book details the Starkweather-Moore expedition return to the ice to discover the truth about the Miskatonic Expedition. The book incorporates many of the aspects of the original Lovecraft story, including references to the Poe story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Nicholas Roerich, Danforth and Dyer. This book won the Origins Award for "Best Role-Playing Adventure" in 2000.[41]
Charles Stross' 2000 novelette "A Colder War" is a direct sequel to Lovecraft's story. Set in the 1980s, it presents an alternate history of the Cold War where the threat of mutual annihilation is not nuclear, but occult, the US and USSR being locked in an arms race based on technologies found by subsequent expeditions to the alien city.
Edge of Nowhere, a 2016 video game developed by Insomniac Games, is set in 1952, 20 years after the expedition, and involves Victor Howard (Robin Atkin Downes) as he ventures into the site to locate his fiancée, who was on an expedition down a similar path.
The Cthulhu Mythos is a mythopoeia and a shared fictional universe, originating in the works of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The term was coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent and protégé of Lovecraft, to identify the settings, tropes, and lore that were employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. The name "Cthulhu" derives from the central creature in Lovecraft's seminal short story "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928.
Arkham is a fictional city situated in Massachusetts, United States. An integral part of the Lovecraft Country setting created by H. P. Lovecraft, Arkham is featured in many of his stories and those of other Cthulhu Mythos writers.
"The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928.
Azathoth is a deity in the Cthulhu Mythos and Dream Cycle stories of writer H. P. Lovecraft and other authors. He is the ruler of the Lovecraftian Gods and may be seen as a symbol for primordial chaos, being among the most powerful entities in the Cthulhu Mythos.
Fungi from Yuggoth is a sequence of 36 sonnets by cosmic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Most of the sonnets were written between 27 December 1929 – 4 January 1930; thereafter individual sonnets appeared in Weird Tales and other genre magazines. The sequence was published complete in Beyond the Wall of Sleep and The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft. Ballantine Books’ mass paperback edition, Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems included other poetic works.
A shoggoth is a fictional monster in the Cthulhu Mythos. The beings were mentioned in passing in H. P. Lovecraft's sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth (1929–30), and later mentioned in other works, before being described in detail in his novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931).
The Elder Things are fictional extraterrestrials in the Cthulhu Mythos. The beings first appeared in H. P. Lovecraft's novella, At the Mountains of Madness, and later appeared, although not named, in the short story "The Dreams in the Witch-House" (1933). Additional references to the Elder Things appear in Lovecraft's short story "The Shadow Out of Time" (1936).
Randolph Carter is a recurring fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft. The character first appears in "The Statement of Randolph Carter", a short story Lovecraft wrote in 1919 based on one of his dreams. An American magazine called The Vagrant published the story in May 1920. Carter appears in seven stories written or co-written by Lovecraft, and has since appeared in stories by other authors.
"The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written between 5–9 November 1935 and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales. It was the last written of the author's known works, and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The epigraph to the story is the second stanza of Lovecraft's 1917 poem "Nemesis".
"Pickman's Model" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in September 1926 and first published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales.
Lovecraft Country is a term coined for the New England setting used by H. P. Lovecraft in many of his weird fiction stories, which combines real and fictitious locations. This setting has been elaborated on by other writers working in the Cthulhu Mythos. The phrase was not in use during Lovecraft's own lifetime; it was coined by Keith Herber for the Lovecraftian role-playing game Call of Cthulhu.
Lovecraftian horror, also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror, is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock. It is named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries, which are now associated with Lovecraftian horror as a subgenre. The cosmic themes of Lovecraftian horror can also be found in other media, notably horror films, horror games, and comics.
The Shadow Out of Time is a novella by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. The story describes time and space travel by mind transfer. The premise is that a person in a given place and time can switch bodies with someone who is elsewhere or elsewhen. Other writers have re-used this concept in later works, such as drinking tea from Red Forest leaves in the television series 12 Monkeys and long-range communication stones in the Stargate SG-1 television series. As with other Lovecraftian works, this story features otherworldy alien beings that are not simply variations on humans or other familiar terrestrial animals.
The Whisperer in Darkness is a 26,000-word novella by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written February–September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. Similar to The Colour Out of Space (1927), it is a blend of horror and science fiction. Although it makes numerous references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the story is not a central part of the mythos, but reflects a shift in Lovecraft's writing at this time towards science fiction. The story also introduces the Mi-Go, an extraterrestrial race of fungoid creatures.
"A Colder War" is an alternate history novelette by Charles Stross written c. 1997 and originally published in 2000. The story fuses the Cold War and the Cthulhu Mythos.
"The Thing on the Doorstep" is a horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, part of the Cthulhu Mythos universe. It was written in August 1933 and first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales.
"The Dreams in the Witch House" is a horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, part of the Cthulhu Mythos cycle. It was written in January/February 1932 and first published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales.
Joseph S. Pulver Sr. was an author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror fiction, noir fiction / hardboiled, and dark fantasy genres. He lived in Germany, and died from COPD and other issues in a German hospital on April 24, 2020.
This is a list of fictional creatures from the Cthulhu mythos of American writer H. P. Lovecraft and his collaborators.
References
↑ Joshi, S. T. (2001). A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time. Liverpool University Press. p.302. ISBN0-85323-946-0.
↑ Anthony Pearsall, The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 326.
↑ Anthony Pearsall, The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 146.
↑ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. III, p. 186; Joshi, p. 175.
1 2 Guimont, Edward (August 2019), ""At the Mountains of Mars: Viewing the Red Planet through a Lovecraftian Lens", Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 3: Papers from Necronomicon Providence 2017, New York: Hippocampus Press, pp.52–69
↑ Guimont, Edward (August 2020). "An Arctic Mystery: The Lovecraftian North Pole". Lovecraft Annual (14): 138–165. ISSN1935-6102. JSTOR26939814.
↑ H. P. Lovecraft, "The Nameless City", Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 104-105; cited in Joshi, pp. 264-265.
1 2 3 4 5 6 Joshi, S. T.; Schultz, David E. (2001). An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press. p.12. ISBN0313315787.
↑ Bleiler, E. F. (1999). "H. P. Lovecraft". In Bleiler, Richard (ed.). Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Charles Scribner's Sons. p.479. ISBN0684805936.
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