Book Review

At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror

by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Lovecraft was a unique author writing at a unique time. At the Mountains of Madness was written as a key story in the Cthulhu Mythos since it gives a detailed history of the Shoggoth. It is unique, also, for being a story about Antarctic exploration, a subject that had captured the interests of Lovecraft in his day. While being on of Lovecraft’s longest works, At the Mountains of Madness is good but certainly not his best.

     H.P. Lovecraft was a scholar of science and this shows in this novelette. The story begins with two ships of archaeologists and geologists sailing from Massachusetts to the South Pole. The detailed description of their voyage is vivid, sometimes bleak and forbidding and at other times fantastic and full of wonder. It is a description of the sublime in nature almost worthy of the Romantic poets but then again, it is probably also somewhat ordinary when compared to other writings about the southernmost regions.

     When the ships reach firm land, two groups of explorers set out. One team, led by a scientist named Lake, discovers a gloomy mountain range with caves and cubical structures lining the peaks. The harsh wind blowing through the caves make eerie, flute-like music that permeates the surrounding landscape. In the foothills, they discover an underground cavern with several dead creatures comprised of barrel-shaped bodies and having heads like starfish. The creatures get transported back to camp to be studied, then Lake’s communications abruptly stop.

Every mystery story needs a hook and this is where that element comes into play. The narrator and a pilot go out to the camp, only to find that it has been destroyed, all the men and dogs at the camp were mutilated, and the creatures were taken away. One man named Gedney and one dog can not be located, so the team of two fly out to the mountains to search for them. On the other side of the range they find a strange, abandoned city, partially covered in glacial ice. They begin to explore in search of the missing man and find roomfulls of statues that tell the history of the Shoggoth, one of the many races of pre-human creatures that populate the world of Lovecraft’s invented mythology. The bodies discovered by Lake were those of some dead Shoggoth.

     The narrative alternates between dry, sometimes scientific description and story telling. Some readers of Lovecraft complain about this but it actually works well as a writing technique. The descriptiveness is long and can be boring to the point of insanity but when the action starts it takes off like a rocket. Without revealing too much, it can be said that the narrator and his partner find a tower with a spiral ramp at its base that leads them down into an underground abyss.

     One thing that can be said about At the Mountains of Madness is that it is a story of inversions. The Shoggoth appear to be an inverted form of humanity; their physical form and habitats are different but their social and psychological forms are very much human. The mountains represent a threshold that, when passed in an airplane, takes the explorers almost literally into another world that subverts everything that scientists know about civilization and the human race. The mountains also work as a motif of inversion since, ordinarily thought of as solid, geological protuberances, these are hollow and full of tunnels where most of the significant events of the story take place. This structural theme is more apparent in the contrast between what exists above ground and what takes place in the caves and under the surface of the glacier. During their explorations of the city, the narrator learns why the Shoggoth died out as a race, preparing him for the event that happens at the end. This tory depicts a world turned inside out, one where the sun never sets and the most populous creatures are giant albino penguins. It is a world that should never have been revealed to people.

     At the Mountains of Madness is at times slow; if Lovecraft used this dragging, redundant technique to make the more exciting parts rush by a little more rapidly, he overplayed that stylistic device but only slightly. Another criticism of this novelette is that the narrator and other characters are two-dimensional; they only exist for the purpose of telling the story and, since it is a horror narrative, there needs to be someone to be scared. They could be any arbitary people though since they are devoid of any feelings other than interest and fear. Then again, Lovecraft was a pulp writer and one with a deep interest in science which is less about the scientists and more about the knowledge they obtain; he was never really known for drawing complex or well-rounded characters.

     What the story does get right is the sense of anxiety. It has the ordinary amount of tension one might feel when wanting to learn the solution to a mystery and the intrigue involved in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, even with the idea in mind that the price of learning it might be insanity or death. The sense of fear is appropriately felt when the explorers go down into the abyss under the tower, not knowing when or if it will end; the feeling of being sunk into a void of never-ending blackness is profound and one that speaks outside of routine genre literature-type horror. Combined with the acquired knowledge of the Shoggoth, a race that came into existence and went extinct without people even knowing about it, makes us think that maybe we are little more than just another biological species that will someday die out and be forgotten; beyond us there may be nothing but a void, a vacuum of nothingness that has no purpose and no meaning. Lovecraft’s monsters may be symbols of anxiety but they signify a human anxiety that runs deeper than a threat to our physical safety or mental stability; they exemplify our fear that we are nothing.

     While it certainly has its flaws, this story is a key piece in the cycle of the Cthulhu Mythos. This is largely because it gives such a complete description of the Shoggoth. When compared to other stories in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, it illuminates dark corners that might not have been revealed otherwise. It is slow at times but fun to read at the end as well. Being one of his only novelettes, you may wonder if he could have gone on to be a good novelist had he lived longer. 

Lovecraft, H.P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror. Beagle Books Inc., New York: 1971.