Among the countless works of cosmic dread, few have inspired such awe as H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Even the visionary Guillermo del Toro has long sought to breathe its frozen terrors into living image. Yet I confess that this tale once left my own soul unmoved, its desolate immensities seeming only cold and remote.
It was not until I encountered Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams that I began to sense the secret pulse beneath Lovecraft’s ice-bound nightmare. Lopez writes of the polar realms with reverence and melancholy, of their pale immensities and hidden wonders, of how their silence has lured humankind toward both revelation and ruin. Through his meditations I glimpsed what Lovecraft must have felt: the trembling majesty of a world untouched by time, where the very light seems older than memory.
In that boundless whiteness, Lovecraft’s imagination found its truest stage. The Antarctic became to him not merely a continent but a threshold, the last portal between man’s fragile reason and the vast gulfs of cosmic antiquity. There, beneath the cold constellations, he peopled the endless ice with the spawn of elder aeons, for it was in such loneliness that his myth of Cthulhu’s kind could breathe, timeless and undying beneath the shroud of eternal snow.
Told by Professor William Dyer of the accursed Miskatonic University, At the Mountains of Madness stands as a dire confession and warning, a chronicle of things best left buried beneath the world’s white and merciless extremity. His words are not of adventure, but of revelation, revelation so abominable that reason itself recoils. In the uncharted Antarctic wastes, where the winds shriek like the cries of ancient spirits and the sun gleams upon deathless ice, Dyer’s doomed expedition sought knowledge that man was never meant to claim. Beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalayas there lay the relics of an age before the birth of mankind, and in that frozen desolation slept truths too monstrous for mortal comprehension.
Under Professor Lake, an advance party exhumed fourteen forms from the eternal ice, creatures of neither plant nor beast, yet possessed of both natures. Their star-shaped visages and ridged bodies bespoke aeons unrecorded, and a mind alien to all the Earth. Even the oldest Cambrian fossils bore upon them the marks of deliberate craft, as though some elder intellect had toyed with the shaping of life itself. When silence fell upon Lake’s camp, Dyer and his student Danforth ventured forth and found horror incarnate. Men and dogs lay mangled and strewn across the snow; two were missing, and six mounds of ice covered what once were the specimens. The rest had fled, leaving behind obscene traces of dissection, as though vivisection had been performed by a hand not human.
Ascending beyond the forbidden peaks, Dyer and Danforth looked upon a city that mocked all architecture of man, a nightmare skyline of black stone and impossible angles, born of mathematics unknown to reason. In those ancient halls they deciphered the saga of the Elder Things, who fell from the heavens before the dawn of life. From their formless arts they birthed the shoggoths, slaves of living protoplasm, shapeless yet obedient, until rebellion rose and empire fell. Upon the walls were carved their wars against the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-Go, and mention of a still deeper horror lurking beyond a mightier range, a Thing even they dared not name.
In the city’s cryptic depths, the explorers beheld pallid, eyeless penguins and the corpses of the Elder race, slain by their own creations. There, amid the black tunnels, they met the shoggoth itself, a vast, heaving, faceless slime that shrieked in voices not of this world. In terror they fled, escaping skyward into the cold air, but Danforth, turning once more to gaze upon the mountains, beheld a sight that shattered his reason forever.
Thus Dyer speaks his final plea: that mankind restrain its arrogance and curiosity, and never again disturb the haunted stillness of that polar tomb. For beneath the ancient ice lie powers and memories older than the Earth, brooding in silence, and dreaming still.
In the conception of At the Mountains of Madness, there stirred within Howard Phillips Lovecraft the ancient pulse of an obsession long possessed of his soul. From the dim corridors of his youth he had peered southward, toward that haunted and eternal whiteness men call the Antarctic, imagining within its untraveled immensities the remnants of civilizations predating all terrestrial memory. As the biographer S. T. Joshi has written, even in boyhood Lovecraft composed curious treatises upon those early polar voyagers, and, fired by W. Clark Russell’s The Frozen Pirate, he spun strange tales of icy desolation and frozen doom.
By the 1920s, that continent remained the last unmapped corner of the Earth, vast regions still untouched by human tread. To Lovecraft’s fevered mind these blank spaces on the charts were not voids, but veils, thin partitions concealing truths older than life itself. In them his imagination was free to erect the monstrous geometries of alien empires buried beneath the glacial crust. Though his tale preceded modern science in its acceptance of continental drift, he captured with uncanny precision the geography and mystery that then defined the polar unknown.
The ill-starred Miskatonic University expedition that ventured into those latitudes was shaped in the likeness of Richard E. Byrd’s heroic enterprise of 1928 to 1930, whose reports of fossilized tropic life Lovecraft seized upon as evidence of a deep and awful antiquity. Lin Carter, one of his later interpreters, would write that Lovecraft’s own mortal aversion to cold lent the story its almost physical chill, the oppressive dread of sub-zero air that gnaws through bone and reason alike.
Yet behind the factual scaffold rose the shadow of earlier dreamers. From Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym he drew the echoing cry “Tekeli-li” and that ineffable sense of cosmic approach, the terror of an end too vast to name. From Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core came the vision of lost races, winged and scientific, who ruled man as chattel and experimented upon his flesh. The subterranean abyss of A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit,” the grotesque resurrection of ancient life in Katharine Metcalf Roof’s “A Million Years After,” and the cold fates of explorers lost to the void—these too fed his terrible imagination.
Beneath all, perhaps, lay the philosophy of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West Lovecraft absorbed like scripture, seeing in it the destined decay of all civilizations, human or otherwise. He reached also toward M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud and his own early nightmares, “The Nameless City” and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, wherein art itself serves as the hieroglyph of forgotten epochs. The story’s title he drew from the opium dream of Lord Dunsany, that whisper of “the ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness.”
And when at last he wrote, his vision of that deathly plateau was clothed in the spectral hues of Nicholas Roerich’s painted snows and the cathedral immensities of Gustave Doré’s engravings. Thus the Antarctic became, in Lovecraft’s trembling hand, not a place upon the map, but a mirror of the abyss, where the frozen winds of eternity blow across the ruins of creation, and the soul of man quails before the cosmic cold.
As I set forth this day to attend my grandson’s Little League game, I prepare to join the throng of parents and kin who cheer the young players with cries of “Swing batter, batter,” while consuming hot dogs laden with mustard and relish. Yet, unlike my companions in this innocent ritual, I know that beneath the benign autumn sun, my skin will creep with remembrance of Lovecraft’s tale, “The Festival.”
In that dread story, an unnamed traveler comes at Yuletide to Kingsport, the ancient seaport of his forebears. He beholds crooked alleys, sagging houses, and the church that looms untouched by centuries. A mute elder, gloved and bland of countenance, guides him through ancestral halls where the Necronomicon lies among worm-eaten tomes. At the appointed hour, he joins a silent multitude of cowled figures, descending beneath the church to a subterranean shore where green flames belch and an amorphous flutist pipes to the abyss. There, winged horrors—neither beast nor man—bear the worshipers into gulfs unguessed. The traveler recoils, for his guide reveals proof of kinship and a face not human. In terror, he flings himself into the oily waters.
He awakens in a hospital, told he had walked from a cliff into the sea. Yet when he later reads in Arkham the blasphemous words of the Necronomicon, he finds them echoing all he has seen, speaking of corruption that spawns monstrous life and of things that walk when they were made to crawl.
Critics have marked the tale’s import. Lin Carter names it the first of Lovecraft’s works to root itself in witch-haunted Kingsport and the earliest to yield a lengthy citation from the dread Necronomicon. S. T. Joshi recalls that “The Unnamable” first introduced Arkham. Yet, he concedes that “The Festival” binds itself more deeply to the Mythos.
I can’t explain why, but I wish there were a Kobo Clara available in Apple MessagePad 2000 green.
Today I set forth toward Scream Diego, a gathering whose very title stirs both curiosity and unease. I have walked the crowded corridors of Comic-Con, where merchants ply their wares and masked devotees pose in the guise of heroes, sorcerers, and voyagers among the stars. Yet never before have I entered a conclave devoted wholly to horror. What spectacles might await me there? Surely stalls of merchandise, yet perhaps other rites as well. Will revelers dip for apples as if in some rustic game? Will tales be spoken around a campfire fashioned for artifice alone? Might there be attendees garbed in the likeness of Poe, or perhaps even Ligotti? Dear reader, your conjecture is as good as mine.
As I prepare myself for this descent into the unknown, I turn to a tale of H. P. Lovecraft’s devising, “The Unnamable.” In this story, Randolph Carter and his companion Joel Manton linger in a graveyard beside a ruined house upon Arkham’s Meadow Hill. Carter recounts whispers of an entity beyond the compass of mortal senses, a terror unfit for any earthly name. Their discourse is shattered when the abomination itself emerges, rending flesh and mind alike. They awake within St. Mary’s hospital, marked with wounds like horns and bruises like hooves. Manton, once unbelieving, can speak only of slime and vapor, of eyes and blemishes, of a thousand shifting forms. At last he names it in trembling tones, calling it what it had ever been: the unnamable.
“The Rats in the Walls” has ever been my most cherished of Lovecraft’s dread imaginings, though it may seem strange that I, enamored as I am of cosmic horror and gulfs beyond time, should favor a tale rooted in ancestral horror and subterranean decay. Permit me, then, to recount.
In the shadow-haunted days of my youth in South Bend, Indiana, I haunted the venerable Griffon Bookstore. On the shelves I first beheld The Best of H. P. Lovecraft, its’ cover beautifully painted by Michael Whelan. Though I had never yet pierced the veil of his prose, his presence already festered everywhere, upon the mouldering pages of Swamp Thing, within the role-playing game of The Call of Cthulhu. With wages earned in grease and weariness as a busboy, I at last secured the tome.
Late that night, I opened its pages and descended with Delapore into Exham Priory, where phantom rats whispered behind worm-eaten walls. As I read, my own chamber betrayed the same uncanny stirrings, as if unseen vermin crept through the plaster about me. Shuddering, I cast the book aside unfinished. Months later, in Boston, the volume re-emerged from my boxes, and once more I dared the tale. Again came the sound of gnawing in the walls, yet this time I steeled my nerves and endured to the final abomination.
What I beheld therein chills me still: the last De la Poer, haunted by phantom scurryings of rodents, uncovering the monstrous history of his line: a subterranean city of human cattle, bred and devoured until madness claimed both kin and heir. His frenzy, his cannibal feast upon poor Norrys, his gibbering in tongues dead and unholy, all culminating in confinement and delusion, while the gnawing persisted beyond reason.
Author, editor and critic, Lin Carter has deemed it among Lovecraft’s finest; Lovecratian scholar S. T. Joshi hails its perfection of form and dread. I take comfort in such recognition, though I doubt they knew the terror of reading while the same spectral scratching echoed through their very walls. For me, the tale will ever remain not merely literature, but lived experience, a nightmarish communion with the vermin of eternity.
Reading articles saved to Instapaper on my Kobo is a delight.
This day finds me seated beside the diamond where my grandson partakes in the innocent rites of Little League, the young voices rising in cheerful chorus as the coach exhorts his charges through their drills for Sunday’s game. It should be an idyll of sunlight and laughter, yet to me it is tinged with nameless disquiet, for my eyes have been buried in the dread chronicle of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear.”
Therein, an unnamed hunter of abominations braves Tempest Mountain, where thunder and slaughter had erased a village. Companions vanish into the maw of a haunted mansion, shadows gibber against the lightning, and a journalist ally meets a doom too hideous for words. The revelations are ghastly. The Martense line, shunned and insular, had sunk into grotesque degeneration, birthing the cannibal wretches that stalk the hills. Though the mansion is leveled by fire and thunder, the hunter’s mind is blasted by the certainty that such foulness festers unseen in the world beyond.
Author, editor and critic Lin Carter once remarked that while this tale strives at solemn terror, it lacks the macabre exuberance of “Herbert West.” I concur; yet on this bright field of youth, its shadow fell across me like a storm-cloud, darkening an otherwise wholesome day with whispers of things best left unspoken. Bravo, indeed.
When I was but a youth, I steeped myself daily in the grotesque imaginings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, reading a tale each October evening as the dying light lengthened across Boston’s crooked streets. With half-closed eyes, I could all but believe the mists and crumbling stones about me were those same accursed vistas of New England that his pen evoked with dreadful authority. Last year, I revived that eldritch ritual. Though I now dwell in the sun-bleached expanse of Southern California, where October knows nothing of frost-bitten wind or the spectral rustle of autumn leaves, the chill of Lovecraft’s prose still seeped into my bones, as if borne on some unhallowed wind from beyond the gulfs of space.
Yet I miscalculated, for the man’s corpus of weird tales is far vaster than a single mortal month. Thus, I continue now, with “The Hound,” a blasphemous chronicle first loosed upon the world in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. In it, two solitary ghouls of men fashion a charnel museum from desecrated graves, until at last they unearth in Holland a skeleton clutching a jade amulet of dreadful provenance. This relic, linked to the unhallowed Necronomicon, summons the baying of an unearthly hound whose pursuit knows neither distance nor sanctuary. Blood and madness follow, St. John torn asunder, thieves annihilated, the narrator himself driven to seek the release of death from horrors no sane man may endure.
Within this tale lies the first dread naming of the Necronomicon, that profane tome whispered of in forbidden circles. Lovecraft had hinted before at its accursed author, Abdul Alhazred, in “The Nameless City,” yet here the blighted book itself first takes form in his mythos, a scripture of cosmic despair that would bind together his works, and the works of those kindred spirits who likewise dared to peer into gulfs best left untraveled.
Not the most potent of Lovecraft’s dread imaginings, yet possessed of sufficient eldritch savor to quicken anew my October rite of unholy reading.
