THE READING RHEUM: AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (1931/1936)

 

This is my third reading of Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, though it's my first time checking out Leslie Klinger's annotated version. Klinger also specifies that the text was taken from HPL's manuscript, whereas my earlier readings were probably based on the altered text from the ASTOUNDING publication. However, none of the corrections or annotations changed my view of MOUNTAINS: that it's an extremely important example of Mythos world-building, but that as a story MOUNTAINS feels rather inert.             

 In earlier reviews I've commented on the extraordinary power HPL could convey through his meticulous descriptions of landscapes, most often those of his native New England. He definitely moved out of his comfort zone to describe the barren wastelands of the Antarctic terrain, and since I'm sure he never traveled to either that continent or to any comparable terrain, he must have depended heavily upon travel writers' descriptions. Many of his descriptions of Antarctica rate among his best. However, despite this level of excellence, these frozen wastes have the disadvantage that they host no human tribes or settlements. This was ideal for painting a picture of all the various extraterrestrial beings that once inhabited Earth. But Antarctica doesn't carry the same associations in human culture, so HPL wasn't able to play to that particular strength in this story.               

 It occurred to me that structurally MOUNTAINS is not that different from 1920's STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER. In that short story, two dilettantes, making "terrible researches into the unknown," descend into a forbidding sepulcher, with the result that one man disappears and the other lives to tell the tale. In MOUNTAINS, a whole scientific research team ventures into the antipodean wastes and stumbles across a labyrinthine city. They find preserved alien corpses that are originally called "Elder Things," which is what I will continue to call them. (HPL most frequently calls them "the Old Ones," but I deem that confusing given his use elsewhere of "Great Old Ones" for another species of foreign entity.) Despite the other researchers in the party, only two humans survive the expedition's encounter with the horrors left behind by the Elder Things, and one of the two goes insane. Aside from the narrator Dyer, at least two named characters have strong familiarity with the rudiments of the Mythos, which made it a lot easier for HPL to lay out his large-scale worldbuilding project.                                             

I think my somewhat negative reaction to MOUNTAINS stems from HPL's approach to the Elder Things. These aliens are not godlike entities like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, but a race of scientific investigators not totally like the modern-day humans examining their remains. HPL's "Outer Ones," the stars of THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS, were also simply ETs with advanced science. However, in WHISPERER the aliens are still very mysterious in terms of their aims and motives. Dyer and others are able to decipher much of the far-removed history of the Elder Things, and the result is that the Things lose any semblance of mystery. One of the last horrors Dyer witnesses is a "shoggoth," a leftover slave-entity once mastered by the deceased Things, and many readers have liked this particular menace. But for me the effect of telling me pretty much everything about the vanished scientists and their living tools dispersed any potential for what HPL himself called "cosmic horror." So, while I appreciate the author having laid out a grand scheme of various creatures whose powers dwarf those of pitiful humans, MOUNTAINS didn't resonate with me.                                                 

  It is interesting that the Elder Things have two major prehistorical encounters with other inhabitants of the Mythos. One of those groups are WHISPERER's Outer Ones, who I tend to call "the Fungi from Yuggoth," again because "Outer Ones" sounds too much like "Great Old Ones." I absolutely refuse to call them "Mi-Go" as Klinger does, just because Dyer idly uses that Tibetan word to allege that the Fungi were once mistaken from Tibet's "abominable snowmen." Sorry, HPL, no way do I believe that any human ever saw your crab-like creatures, whether winged or wingless, and imagined them to resemble the hairy men of the Himalayas. The other major opponents of the Things are "the spawn of Cthulhu," whom the Things manage to drive out of Antarctica. All this condensed history is very useful for fans of the Mythos, but since these encounters are only being written about long after they occurred, they only register in my system as "null-crossovers." I suppose if a big-screen movie version of MOUNTAINS had come to pass, such a film would have had to show these cosmic wars on screen, and THOSE would have counted as crossovers, as they became part of the ongoing narrative. A point that concerns only me, to be sure.