At the Mountains of Madness
At the Mountains of Madness is a
novella by
horror writer
H. P. Lovecraft. It was originally serialized in
Astounding Stories in
1936, and has been reproduced in numerous collections since Lovecraft's death.
The story is considered by Lovecraft scholar
S. T. Joshi to represent the decisive "demythology" of the
Cthulhu Mythos.
The story is written in first-person perspective by Professor William Dyer, a
geologist from
Miskatonic University. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that it will deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous Miskatonic expedition to
Antarctica, a party of Dyer's colleagues discover a range of mountains taller than the
Himalayas, where are found the remains of fourteen ancient half-vegetable, half-animal life-forms, completely unknown to science. Six of the specimens seem to be badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. The extremely early date in the
geological strata of these "fossils" is problematic because of their highly evolved features. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the
Necronomicon, they are dubbed the "
Elder Things". When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. They find that the camp has been devastated, all the men and dogs slaughtered (both figuratively and literally), with the body of one of their friends and one dog missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, each containing one of the damaged specimens.
Prof. Dyer and a student named Danforth fly an aeroplane over the mountains and set down to investigate a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones utterly alien to any human architecture.Exploring one of the cones, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals. The elder things first came to earth shortly after the moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "shuggoths", things created to perform any task, assume any form and reflect any thought. Danforth and Dyer realize that the eight elder things are alive when they find a sledge from the camp which to their horror contains the bodies of the missing dog and man, evidently kept as scientific specimens.
They find evidence of dead "Elder Things" and are chased back to their plane by something that can only be a "shuggoth". As they fly away Danforth looks back and loses most of his sanity. Professor Dyer concludes that the "Elder Things" and their civilization were destroyed by the "shuggoths" they created, and begs the planners of the proposed Antarctic expediton to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this earth.
Dyer, William
(ca. 1875–?)
Professor of
geology at
Miskatonic University and leader of the disastrous Pabodie Expedition to
Antarctica in
1930–
31. He reappears in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time", where he accompanies an expedition to
Australia's
Great Sandy Desert to search for the ruins of a
primordial civilization.
Danforth
(?–ca. 1988)
Graduate student at
Miskatonic University. As part of the Pabodie Expedition, he accompanied Dyer on a survey flight over the "
Plateau of Leng" and went mad from something he saw. He is described as "a great reader of bizarre material", and makes allusions to
Edgar Allan Poe and the
Necronomicon.
According to
Fritz Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars", he later recovered after being treated with experimental drugs developed by
Professor Morgan, though he never recalled the horror he saw on the plateau. Afterwards, he became a professor of
psychology at the university.
Frank H. Pabodie
A member of Miskatonic's
engineering department, Professor Pabodie invented a drill for the expedition that was "unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity...to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness." He also added "fuel-warming and quick-starting devices" to the expedition's four aircraft.
[Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 4.]Professor Lake
Professor Atwood
A member of the Miskatonic University
physics department, and also a meteorologist. He is part of the Lake sub-expedition and is one of those butchered by the Elder Things.
According to S. T. Joshi, who included this novella as the central story in the first volume of his Annotated Lovecraft series,
Mountains reveals Lovecraft's true feelings on the so-called Cthulhu Mythos that subsequent writers attributed to him, and "demythologizes" much of his earlier work.
Many of Lovecraft's stories involve features that appear to be supernatural, such as monsters and the occult. However,
Mountains appears to explain the origins of such elements—from occult symbols to "gods" such as
Cthulhu—in rational terms.
Mountains explains many elements of the "Cthulhu Mythos" in terms of early alien civilizations that took root on Earth long before humans appeared.
The story has also inadvertedly popularized the concept of
ancient astronauts, as well as
Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology".
[Jason Colavito, The Cthulhu Comparison]At the Mountains of Madness has numerous connections to other Lovecraft stories. A few include:
*The formless
shoggoths, mentioned in "The Thing on the Doorstep" (
1937), are shown to have originated as slaves of the
Elder Things, as is the Shoggoth mentioned by Zadok Allen in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."
* "The pit of the shuggoths" is mentioned in "The Haunter of the Dark".
* The expedition is sponsored by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, a reference to two major names in Lovecraft's fiction: Derby and Pickman.
[Anthony Pearsall, The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 326.] Edward Pickman Derby is the protagonist of Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" and is also one of his literary alter-egos.
[Ibid, p. 146.]* The Elder Things record the coming of
Cthulhu to Earth and the sinking of
R'lyeh which ties into the events narrated in "
The Call of Cthulhu" (
1928).
*Identification of the Elder Things' city with the Plateau of
Leng, mentioned in innumerable tales.
*Many members of the expedition have read
Miskatonic University's copy of the
Necronomicon, an event that seals their doom.
* Director
John Carpenter's Lovecraftian tribute movie
In the Mouth of Madness (
1995) bases its title on this story, although the plot is unrelated.
* The book
Mountains of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey in Antarctica (
2001), by John Long, is an account of a real-life expedition to Antarctica that searched for fossils near the location in the story, but fortunately without the disasters that befell Lovecraft's scientists.
* Late in the story, one of the characters recites a series of subway stops to calm himself; all of the stops still exist today on the
Red Line subway in
Boston (though some have changed names).
* This story was rejected by
Weird Tales editor
Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length. The story eventually appeared four years later in
Astounding Stories.
*
Ancient astronauts*
Cthulhu Mythos biographies*
Elder ThingsBooks
*
Web sites
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Footnotes
