Book Review: At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft

 

At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft

184 pages, Mass Market Paperback

 January 1, 1981, First published 1936

There are many places to start with this author and this piece of work. Let me start with my personal connection to Lovecraft. Like many Science Fiction and horror kids I read and loved all the Lovecraft stories including this one in my teen years. Terry Carr the long-time Science Fiction editor was famous for saying “The Golden Age of science fiction is 12 or 13 years old.”  But he apparently was quoting a fan, Peter Scott Graham. I loved reading Lovecraft then thinking he was the craziest insane prose stylist and sure he was. I am not sure I like Lovecraft as much as I did then but I do think his work is important.

This reading of At The Mountains of Madness was for a podcast series I am doing on 1930s Science Fiction was the first time I had really sat down and read a whole Lovecraft piece in many years. I had read plenty of Lovecraftian anthologies and collections of other authors writing in his cosmic horror style. I had not read Howie directly in some time.

It is funny reading it this time I was much more connected to its SF roots than horror and certainly it is a cross-genre piece that touches on both. I tend to think more about when and how things were written these days. As best I can tell this novella, I consider it a short novel was written in February/March 1931. At the same time, Bela Legosi’s Dracula premiered and Hitler was still being dismissed as a buffoon by the German media two years before taking power. A long time ago.

At this time Lovecraft was already a regular on the pages of Weird Tales, he was in regular contact with other authors in the magazine, and as you could imagine WT subscribers were excited every time a new story of his showed up. Despite their popularity editor Farnsworth Wright had no problem turning down writers like Robert E. Howard, CL Moore or Lovecraft. Eventually losing Moore and others to the higher-paying Astounding. The length of a hundred pages that eventually got broken up into three pieces was the reason Wright turned it down.

It was Astounding magazine (two years before John W. Campbell’s reign) that ended up paying Lovecraft the most he had ever been paid. The cover story in Feb. 1936 resulted in $315 dollars a huge amount for the day. Editor F. Orlin Tremaine was editing seven titles for Street & Smith, and his edits were not exactly to Lovecraft’s liking. It was his hand-corrected copy that result in the editions we have read since 1985.  
 
We should all know at this point that Lovecraft held some really terrible, awful racist views. It bleeds into some of the stories, thankfully that is not the case in this novella. It actually is fitting to me that it was rejected by WT, as I actually think it fits more sense in a Science Fiction magazine. While the science is terribly out of date almost 90 years later, it is a science-based story about an Antarctic expedition. Science as wack-a-do as it is fills much of the early pages. For the time science was pretty modern. Also, the story talks about vast amounts of times and epochs, and eras in scientific ways that seem impressive to me now looking back so far.

It is a Lovecraft story so we need a narrator who really doesn’t want to tell you this shit. “I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the Antarctic…”

It is so crazy I can’t describe it, so evil it is beyond words blah blah…OK, Lovecraft starts with this formulaic eye-rolling start if you have read it every time he tells a story it gets old.  What  is good about Mountains is Lovecraft doesn’t rely on that crutch as much as normal. We get Saggoths, Mi-gos and all that – but this time we get descriptions, especially of the old frozen dead city beyond the insanely tall mountains, weird writings and old-ones even sing at the end.
 
This is the story of a Miskatonic University research team who was sent to study a part of the earth that at the time was very much still a frontier. For that reason, the story works in that era. I personally hope any film attempted would stay period, but that is beside the point. There is plenty of details about the operation of the expedition mixed with healthy doses of Lovecraft’s cosmic fears and dread. The team works closer and closer to the dead realms and at that point space and time become meaningless as the walls of sanity come crashing down.

It was interesting to me that the narrator seemed to believe that the outside world  was following reports of their progress sent back by radio.  "Popular imagination” followed their progress. Those elements seemed to fade back at the story went on. We get frozen hell landscapes, buried cities, and impossibly tall mountains…of madness.

Look I am a Philip K Dick and John Brunner guy so I can easily forget how formal and purple some of the prose is. The fact that the story says “to sally forth” and it was used without irony made me laugh, but that is a feature not a bug. The construction of sentences is anything but natural but still I marvel at things like…   

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”

Or

“It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”

This is certainly a style that is not for everyone. When I tweeted out that I was re-reading this novella two classic SF readers I chat with online complained about how boring it was. This style will challenge the modern reader but it is not just flowery cosmic horror window dressing. Some of these elements of insane prose introduce fascinating SF elements that could easily get over looked. I personally like how he blends all these elements of cosmic unknown and just enough science to ground the horror. “It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space and ultradimensionality.” Without the mention of Space-time 26 years, after Einstein named it or the concepts of dimensions, this would lack some of the power it has.

The unknowable void is scary sure, but it is also something that can feel like fantasy, creeping in with scientific terms and grounding is so important. I mean black holes are scientifically proven things of cosmic horror but my goodness this was written so long ago. Props Howie.

Now if it was all high-class cosmic goodness I might have been bored like some others but there is some serious pulpy silliness in all the right ways. “During the Jurassic age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new invasion from outer space – this time half-fugous, half crustacean creatures – creatures undoubtedly the same figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north., and remembered in the Himalayas as Mi-go, or abominable Snow Men.”

This stuff is wacky-fun too. Important as a piece of the time,  the longest and one of Lovecraft’s most important works. No matter what you think of him as a person, his writing is important and you cannot tell the history of the pulps, horror or Science Fiction without it. Even if some of it comes off as boring to the modern eye At the Mountains of Madness is canon for a reason. It is important. It should be read.