At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft

First appeared in F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding (now Analog). Reprinted by August Derleth, David G. Hartwell, Robert M. Price, John Gregory Betancourt, Colin Azariah-Kribbs. The following reading lists recommend the novel: Anatomy of Wonder, The 5-Parsec Shelf, Fantasy: The 100 Best Books. Read online.

Summary

The narrator, Dr. William Dyer of a geology professor at Miskatonic University, treks with several men and dogs to the Antarctic. They discover a stone with unusual striations and see strange mirages. They uncover the bodies of the Old Ones and try to dissect. When the narrator and Danforth investigate what happened to one camp, their own camp is destroyed.

Commentary

They discover a mountain range catacombed with tunnels and cave carvings. They read the history of the Precambrian aliens who lived there. They had their own animals brought during a time when Earth was thought only to have unicellular life. The Old Ones fought the Cthulhu lost--some moving undersea--and later won. The narrator and Danforth encounter giant albino penguins and other strange monstrosities. A greater evil lies just beyond. Danforth may have witnessed it.

The narrator and Danforth's goal is to steer away a new expedition headed down here--not to mention saying that humans are nothing in the cosmos.

Michael Chabon writes of At the Mountains of Madness as “One of the greatest short novels in American literature, and a key text in my own understanding of what that literature can do.”

When editors like David Hartwell, trying to capture the foundations of the horror field, reprint a short novel this long, it's got to be good. The chief rewards for those who admire sense of wonder come as the explorers enter the labyrinth of caves and examine the cave paintings around chapter six.  It gives some of the best description of Lovecraft's cosmology.

Reading his work, one appreciates a few literary attributes: brooding atmosphere and imagination. Lovecraft slammed Henry James's works of horror because of their lack of horrific atmosphere. James, though, was a master of character--something that Lovecraft runs low on. What do we know about our protagonist? How is his life shaped, transformed by events and other characters? Well, he's horrified, just as his companion Danforth and most of Lovecraft's characters.

What about plot? The shape is fairly simple. One encounters the strange; horrifying strangenesses pile up until the universe irrevocably horrifies the narrator. One reads Lovecraft for the same reason that readers read Olaf Stapledon: The writers are good at a few narrative traits--good enough that readers overlook flaws.

In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of the novel, China Miéville writes, "Genre writers, it is often claimed are uninterested in characterization, theme, or nuance, and instead vulgarly subordinate everything to the exigences of plot. This, of course, is nonsense. In fact many writers don't do plot either."

Miéville's point, besides humor, is that the genre has something unique outside of plot and character. In this field, writers like Lovecraft and Stapledon reap a bountiful harvest.

Miéville also claims that Lovecraft was on the cutting edge of science, pointing out his mentions of continental drift. Unfortunately, as S. T. Joshi points out in his annotations, continental drift had no proof at the time. Moreover, Lovecraft also mentioned ether, a hypothetical medium that light supposedly propagated through. The Michelson–Morley experiment decades earlier had proved this hypothesis false. Besides, Lovecraft's real point was to lower our estimation of human science and to suggest that universe contained more than puny humans can know.

And that's okay. Humans do sometimes overestimate their understanding of the universe. Moreover, Lovecraft's mind grasped onto the unusual, the stranger fictions--reality be damned. In fact, he treated his own, Edgar Allan Poe's and Clark Ashton Smith's fictional works as true within the fiction.

This is one of Lovecraft's cleaner works, told in a semi-academic style. Still, though many Lovecraft narrators are educated, they fail at words as soon as they confront the horrifying ineffable. Nonetheless, the writing is dotted with "things" difficult to see or experience. Note all the very different monsters illustrators created based on this novel (it may be, however, that the illustrators did not read the text in question).

Lovecraft often employs archaic spellings and words--not to mention neologisms--meant perhaps to create a dark, brooding atmosphere of the unknown. It not only makes for tough slogging, but also makes one wonder.

Miéville notes that "Lovecraft has... the transmogrifying vision of hysterical nihilism, from which his racism is inextricable."

Isn't Lovecraft's penchant of strange words, spellings like a foreign language, used to conjure horror--not unlike the speech of a foreigner? Now that I've stated the conjecture, someone will latch on to it as truth without further evidence, but it is a possibility worth considering.

Even when his writing seems concrete, we may still not know what he means. For example, what does a "tempest-scarred plateau" look like?

I analyzed this text for adverbs (actually, the "-ly" ending) versus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and versus Ernest Hemingway's (roughly a contemporary of Lovecraft) "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". I chose the comparisons since Hemingway is roughly a contemporary of Lovecraft and Shelley is about a hundred years older than Lovecraft and writes in a similar genre as Lovecraft. Also, Lovecraft tries to write in an antiquary style, so it'd be interesting to see how closely he resembles the thing he imitates.

In terms of percentages, Lovecraft doubled Shelley's output and quadrupled Hemingway's (who also used his within quotes). I searched for the vague noun "things," and Lovecraft doubled Hemingway's output (also found in dialogue) and had fifteen times as many as Shelley. To an extent, this is what Lovecraft intended. The unknown and foreign are terrible (variants of "vague" appears twenty times in the text):

1. "The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset."
2. "[S]omething about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances in both Danforth and me."
3. "[T]here was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework."
4. "[T]he revived memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general sensitiveness and with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to me - which has been the immediate source of Danforth’s present breakdown."
5. "Something about this whole place, with its polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previously encountered." 
6. "For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene’s unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls."

Brian Aldiss parodies the style as swollen by adjectivitis in "The Adjectives of Erich Zann, A Horror Story":

"I was aware of fear welling up inside me in a cascade of adjectives."

Lovecraft's style has its defenders. Nick Mamatas, whose eloquent defense is worth reading, is buried somewhere in his blog. I cannot find the article at present. Indeed, Lovecraft does have his poetic moments, but usually when his prose solidifies in the concrete.

My only point, though, is that Lovecraft's prose strives to create a literary past that never existed. His prose reads nothing like Shelley's. His protagonists, too, were his contemporaries. So why were their writing and speech patterns antiquated? True that even into 19th century, some folks cultivated a King James speech pattern, especially when it came to piety and churches that used the King James Bible as their text, possibly even into the twentieth century. But Lovecraft does not follow King James. Who his antiquary literary antecedents are, remains unclear. Perhaps creating a literary past that never existed is his point. But for readers who prefer a smoother style or character or plot, it might make for challenging reading. If possible, one has to park one's notions of narrative at the book cover's front door.

"Poor Little Warrior!" by Brian W. Aldiss

First appeared in Anthony Boucher’s F&SF. Reprinted a dozen and a half times, including a few major anthologies, by Anthony Boucher, Ronald R. Wickers, Brian W. Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, Damon Knight, Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander & Patricia S. Warrick, Edward L. Ferman, Robert Silverberg, David Jablonski, Charles G. Waugh, Jenny-Lynn Waugh, Anne Devereaux Jordan, Isaac Asimov, Jack M. Dann, Gardner R. Dozois, and Peter Haining.

Summary:

Claude leaps back from the hum-drum future of 2181 AD to the Jurassic to hunt down a dinosaur. Claude goes for size rather than sport. It's not as exciting as he'd hoped... that is, until he kills Brontosaur and he gets everything he'd hoped for, just not in the way he'd hoped for it.

Discussion:

This is one several exclamation-point stories of Aldiss's. They seem over-the-top until you read them and understand the tone they're intended to be read.

There's an edgy experimentation going on, too--a little informal scatology and sexual reproduction. The switch between third and second person point of view. This may be meant to swing a finger on its readers (human, presumably). Weak creatures pretending to be strong with their guns: Prey upon nature, upset its balance at your own risk.

If one changes the ecology of a system, the system would need to adjust itself. Would the parasites leap off immediately? Maybe if there's a renewal process the ends upon death. Would the parasites leap on Claude? Maybe. Ticks, for instance, will go for any skin, but would parasites trade a thick for a thin one? It would depend on what they're thirsting for.

The prose here is richer than earlier efforts, the imagery more vivid, the irony thick as La Brea Pits' tar, but it isn't quite as thought provoking, perhaps inversely related to the images that impress. The ironic set-up executed at the finale, however, is well done.

"The Failed Men" or "Ahead" by Brian W. Aldiss

First appeared in John Carnell's Science Fantasy. Reprinted by Damien Broderick.

Summary:

Recruited from the twenty-fifth century by time-machine inventors further down the timeline, the protagonist is to help the last of humanity pick itself up and keep going. Instead, they are burying themselves, seemingly to stop existing, although what is happening and why remains a question he cannot comprehend.

Discussion:

Time stories often deal with paradoxes, either to revel in them or say they cannot exist. This falls into the latter camp. 

But it's less a story about time than generations, layering four generations of humanity, observing one another, growing impatient with each other:

1. Present-day readers, reading and interpreting
2. Completely flummoxed 25th-century aid workers--closest in time to us and our understanding
3. Later time-machine inventors--still puzzled if less so
4. The dregs of humanity who seem to have knowledge of doom that we cannot understand.

Of course, if a 25th-century man cannot comprehend, how much less you and I?

But it is not a tale of nonsense. Rather, it asks how evolutionary language barriers impede comprehension the other, anticipating the generational conflict of the next decade: the 1960s. It assumes a progress of intellectual advance from one to the other, so that the less knowledgeable ancestors are paradoxically called "the Children." 

The future labels "strubeck" as the cause of failure and, later, we learn that the past generation are strubeck, so the seeds of future failure are sown in the past, which likely bears much truth--not to say that one does not have responsibility for one's self. The effects of the past ripple into the future.

Now that Aldiss is on the other end of the generations, it'd interesting to hear what he thought of the tale. It's not a classic, but definitely thought provoking.

"Outside" by Brian Aldiss

First appeared in John Carnell's New Worlds. Reprinted by Edmund Crispin, G. D. Doherty, V. S. Muravyev, and Ellen Datlow.

Summary:

Four men and two women live in a habitat which feeds them, allows them to play piano, and live day-to-day amid various domestic duties and pastimes. Harley, after years of doing the same things, feels an unease that he suspects his companions may not share. One night, when the command to sleep presses his brain, he decides to stay awake.

Discussion:

Harley discovers a whole world outside his habitat. An inexplicable sad rage comes over him at this injustice as he encounters a man in a suit and several uniformed men. The suited man explains that this war with the Nititians required them to isolate the Nititian spies from prying state secrets out of agents. Instead, the Nititians... play card games and the piano and clean the habitat? This leads to Earthlings learning Nititian secrets to defeat the menace.

In a proper Philip K. Dick fashion, we learn our protagonist is one of the enemy, soon to be eliminated. Perhaps this POV might trouble some readers, but any future POV, even if manipulated, cannot reach back into the past for us to read it. SF challenges standard narrative notions in a way that few question.

The story secretly allies us with our enemy in order to feel for a guy who lives pretty much as we do. We work, socialize, eat and sleep. Suddenly, we learn more or too much about our reality and we must die. How fair is that? Are we/Harley truly spies without our knowledge? or victims of this Cold War? Perhaps an evil switch is tucked deep inside us. Or else we are just victims steam-rolled by our society.

The reference to Calvin may refer to John Calvin, a theologian who believed people were pre-destined to be believers or not. Therefore, Harley's anger is that of an unbeliever who has not realized evil against others, find himself pre-destined for death in this "afterlife."

The writing style here is reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence's. Character emotions are labeled, but not in any way that might detract from the story. Even early in his career, the characterization is quickly painted in one-sentence strokes:

"Calvin, the handsome, broad man who looked as if he could command a dozen talents and never actually used one." 

As thought-provoking a tale it is, it stretches credulity that you can learn much about an enemy watching it play cards and clean house. For four years. Maybe. Still worth reading.