 First page of the manuscript | |
| Author | H. P. Lovecraft |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Howard V. Brown |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction,Cosmic horror |
| Published | February–April 1936 (Astounding Stories) |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (periodical) |
At the Mountains of Madness is ascience-fiction andcosmic horrornovella by the American authorH. P. Lovecraft, written in February–March 1931 and published in 1936. Rejected that year byWeird Tales editorFarnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length,[1] it was originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues ofAstounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.
The story details the events of a disastrous expedition toAntarctica in September 1930, and what is found there by a group of explorers led by the narrator, Dr. William Dyer ofMiskatonic University. Throughout the story, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring another group of explorers who wish to return to the continent. These events include the discovery of an ancient civilization older than the human race, and realization of Earth's past told through various sculptures and murals.
The story was inspired by Lovecraft's interest in Antarctic exploration; the continent was still not fully explored in the 1930s. Lovecraft explicitly draws from Edgar Allan Poe's novelThe Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and he may have used other stories for inspiration. Many story elements, such as the formless "shoggoth", recur in other Lovecraft works. The story has been adapted and used for graphic novels, video games, and musical works.
The story is narrated in a first-person perspective by thegeologist William Dyer, a professor atMiskatonic University inArkham,Massachusetts, aiming to prevent an important and much-publicized scientific expedition toAntarctica. Throughout the course of his explanation, Dyer relates how he led a group of scholars from the university on a previous expedition to Antarctica, during which they discovered ancient ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than theHimalayas.
A small advance group, led by Professor Lake, discovers the remains of fourteenprehistoric lifeforms previously unknown to science, and also unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens have been badly damaged, while another eight have been preserved in pristine condition. The specimens'stratum places them far too early on thegeologic time scale for the features of the specimens to have evolved. Some fossils ofCambrian age show signs of the use of tools to carve a specimen for food.
When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party, Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth investigate. Lake's camp is devastated, with the majority of men and dogs slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and one of the dogs are absent. Near the expedition's campsite, they find six star-shaped snow mounds with one specimen under each. They also discover that the better-preserved lifeforms have vanished, and that some form ofdissection experiment has been done on both an unnamed man and a dog. Gedney is suspected of having gone insane and killed and mutilated the others.
Dyer and Danforth fly anaeroplane across the "mountains", soon revealed to be the outer walls of a vast, abandoned stone city, alien to any humanarchitecture. For their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in theNecronomicon, the builders of this lost civilization are dubbed the "Elder Things." By exploring these fantastic structures, the explorers learn throughhieroglyphic murals that the Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after theMoon took form and built their cities with the help of "shoggoths"—biological entities created to perform any task, assume any form and reflect any thought. There is a hint that all Earthly life evolved from cellular material left over from the creation of the shoggoths.
As more buildings are explored, the explorers learn about the Elder Things' conflict with both theStar-spawn of Cthulhu and theMi-Go, who arrived on Earth shortly afterwards. The images also reflect a degradation of their civilization once the shoggoths gained independence. As more resources are applied in maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive. The murals also allude to an unnamed evil lurking within an even larger mountain range located beyond the city. This mountain range rose in one night and certain phenomena and incidents deterred the Elder Things from exploring it. When Antarctica became uninhabitable, even for the Elder Things, they soon migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.
Dyer and Danforth eventually realize that the Elder Things missing from the advance party's camp had somehow returned to life and, after killing the party, have returned to their city. They also discover traces of the Elder Things' earlier exploration, as well as sleds containing the corpses of both Gedney and his missing dog. Both are ultimately drawn towards the entrance of a tunnel, into the subterranean region depicted in the murals. Here, they find evidence of various Elder Things killed in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tallpenguins wandering placidly, apparently used as livestock. They are then confronted by a black, bubbling mass, which they identify as a shoggoth, and escape. Aboard the plane, high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something which causes him to go insane, implied to be the unnamed evil itself.
Dyer concludes the Elder Things are survivors of a bygone era, who slaughtered Lake's group only inself-defense or scientific curiosity. Their civilization was eventually destroyed by the shoggoths, which now prey on the enormous penguins. He warns the planners of the proposed expedition to stay away from the site. Danforth continues to experience manic episodes, whispering of "bizarre conceptions" which Dyer attributes to his being one of the few to have completely read through Miskatonic's copy of theNecronomicon.
At the Mountains of Madness has numerous connections to other Lovecraft stories. A few include:
Lovecraft had a lifelong interest inAntarctic exploration. "Lovecraft had been fascinated with the Antarctic continent since he was at least 12 years old, when he had written several small treatises on early Antarctic explorers," the biographerS. T. Joshi wrote.[4][full citation needed] At about the age of 9, inspired byW. Clark Russell's 1887 bookThe Frozen Pirate, Lovecraft had written "several yarns" set in Antarctica.[5]
By the 1920s, Antarctica was "one of the lastunexplored regions of the Earth in which large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet. Contemporary maps of the continent show a number of provocative blanks, and Lovecraft could exercise his imagination in filling them in... with little fear of immediate contradiction."[6] However, Lovecraft was basically accurate in presenting the geographic knowledge of Antarctica as it was known at the time, and he referred tocontinental drift, a theory which was then not widely accepted.
The first expedition ofRichard E. Byrd took place between 1928 and 1930, just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters and remarked at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past."[7][8][incomplete short citation] In fact, Miskatonic University's expedition was modelled after that of Byrd.[9]
InLovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu MythosLin Carter suggests that one inspiration forAt the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's own hypersensitivity to cold, as evidenced by an incident in which the writer "collapsed in the street and was carried unconscious into a drug store" because the temperature dropped from 60 degrees to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees to -1 degree Celsius). "The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried over into his writing," Carter wrote, "and the pages ofMadness convey the blighting, blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way that even Poe could not suggest."[10][11][12][incomplete short citation]
Joshi further cites Lovecraft's most obvious literary source forAt the Mountains of Madness asEdgar Allan Poe's only novel,The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, whose concluding section is set in Antarctica. Lovecraft twice cites Poe's "disturbing and enigmatic" story in his text and explicitly borrows the mysterious cryTekeli-li orTakkeli from Poe's work. In a letter toAugust Derleth, Lovecraft wrote that he was trying to achieve with his ending an effect similar to what Poe accomplished inPym.[13][incomplete short citation]
Another proposed inspiration forAt the Mountains of Madness isEdgar Rice Burroughs'sAt the Earth's Core (1914), a novel that posits a highly intelligent reptilian race, the Mahar, living in ahollow Earth. "Consider the similarity of Burroughs' Mahar to Lovecraft's Old Ones, both of whom are presented sympathetically despite their ill-treatment of man," wrote the critic William Fulwiler. "[B]oth are winged, web-footed, dominant races; both are scientific scholarly races with a talent for genetics, engineering, and architecture; and both races use men as cattle." Both stories, Fulwiler points out, involve radical new drilling techniques. In both stories, humans are vivisected by nonhuman scientists. Burroughs' Mahar even employ a species of servants known as Sagoths, possibly the source of Lovecraft's Shoggoth.[14][incomplete short citation]
Other possible sources includeA. Merritt's "The People of the Pit," whose description of an underground city in the Yukon bears some resemblance to that of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and Katharine Metcalf Roof's "A Million Years After," a story aboutdinosaurs hatching from eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 edition ofWeird Tales.[15] In a letter toFrank Belknap Long, Lovecraft declared Metcalf Roof's story to be a "rotten," "cheap," and "puerile" version of an idea he had years earlier, and his dissatisfaction may have provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from the dim reaches of Earth's history."[16][17][incomplete short citation]
Edward Guimont has argued thatAt the Mountains of Madness was inspired by contemporary discourse aroundlife on Mars, includingMars-set fictional works and the claims ofMartian canals made byPercival Lowell (whom Lovecraft met in 1907).[18] Guimont has also proposed other influences, including contemporary theories about the decline of theNorse Greenlanders and claims of survival ofwoolly mammoths in Alaska and particularly plot details being inspired by the 1930 discovery of the remains ofAndrée's Arctic balloon expedition.[19]
An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that the long scope of history recounted in the story may have been inspired byOswald Spengler'sThe Decline of the West. Some details of the story may also have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901Arctic exploration novelThe Purple Cloud, which was republished in 1930.[20]
The title is derived from a line inLord Dunsany's short story "The Hashish Man": "And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness...".[21]
Lovecraft's own "The Nameless City" (1921), which also deals with the exploration of an ancient underground city that is apparently abandoned by its nonhuman builders, sets a precedent forAt the Mountains of Madness. In both stories, the explorers use the nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species.[22][incomplete short citation] Lovecraft had also used that device in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1927)
As for details of the Antarctic setting, the author's description of some of the scenery is in part inspired by the Asian paintings ofNicholas Roerich and the illustrations ofGustave Doré, both of whom are referenced by the story's narrator multiple times.[original research?]
Lovecraft submitted the story toWeird Tales, but it was rejected by the editorFarnsworth Wright in July 1931. Lovecraft took the rejection badly and put the story to one side. It was eventually submitted by Lovecraft's literary agentJulius Schwartz in 1935 toF. Orlin Tremaine, the editor ofAstounding Stories.[23]
The novella was serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues, and Lovecraft received $315 (equivalent to $7,138 in 2024)—the most he had ever received for a story.[24] The story, however, was harshly edited, with alterations to spellings, punctuation, and paragraphing, and the end of the story had several lengthy passages omitted. Lovecraft was outraged and called Tremaine "that god-damn'd dung of a hyaena [sic]". Lovecraft's own hand-corrected copies ofAstounding Stories formed the basis for the firstArkham House edition, but this still contained over a thousand errors, and a fully restored text was not published until 1985.[23]
The novella was received negatively during Lovecraft's lifetime; Lovecraft stated that its hostile reception had done "more than anything to end [his] effective fictional career."[25]Theodore Sturgeon described the novella as "perfect Lovecraft" and "a good deal more lucid than much of the master's work", as well as "first-water, true-blue science fiction."[26] The story popularizedancient astronaut theories, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology".[27][page needed] Edward Guimont has argued thatAt the Mountains of Madness, despite its terrestrial setting, helped influence laterhard science fiction depictions of planetary expeditions and theBig Dumb Object trope, particularly those ofArthur C. Clarke, whose 1940 parody "At the Mountains of Murkiness" was one of his first works of fiction.[18][28]
At the Mountains of Madness public domain audiobook atLibriVox
