Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/articles/sun9310.zip/BOO2

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Book Review
Copyright (c) 1993, Robert McKay
All rights reserved



                                  BOOK REVIEW
                *At the Mountains of Madness* by H.P. Lovecraft
                           Reviewed by Robert McKay

    I have been informed that a reviewer should not be too much a fan of the
work he reviews.  I disagree with that dictum, partly because I find it much
easier to speak on the merits and demerits of something that I care enough
about to read and reread, picking it apart as well as becoming familiar with
the story.  *At the Mountains of Madness*, a short novel by horror writer
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, is one such book.
    H.P. Lovecraft died in 1937 - a long time ago.  His name is not well-known
today among horror fans, which is a great pity.  Without taking anything away
from the abilities of modern writers, I contend that Lovecraft is simply the
best writer of horror ever born.  Stephen King acknowledges his debt to
Lovecraft, and has even written Lovecraftian horror - the short story
"Jerusalem's Lot" having found it's way into a collection of Lovecraftian
tales published by Arkham House, a concern founded to preserve Lovecraft's
work.
    Lovecraft's forte was horror from beyond the stars - even from beyond this
dimension.  In an age before the theories of n-dimensional reality and
multiple universes were available for use as a catalyst, he postulated
dimensions unknown and unknowable to us, populated by beings whose mere
existence was so awful that knowledge of it could blast human sanity.  These
beings had once lived on this planet, in pre-human and even in early human
times, and had only departed when banished by force.  They constantly wait and
scheme, seeking ways to re-establish their dominion over the world and in the
process occasionally breaking through to our time and space, with horrible
results.
    *At the Mountains of Madness* is tangentially connected with this
framework.  While it does not deal directly with the Great Old Ones of
Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, it does connect with that Mythos.  Such names as
"shoggoth," "Plateau of Leng," and "Kadath in the Cold Waste" provide links to
the black literature invented by Lovecraft and his friends of the Lovecraft
Circle - the dreaded *Necronomicon*, the *Unausprechlichen Kulten* of Von
Juntz, the *Liber Ivonis* or *Book of Eibon*, and the *De Vermis Mysteriis* -
the *Mysteries of the Worm* that King brought into his story mentioned above.
    *At the Mountains of Madness* is the tale of an expedition sent by
Miskatonic University - a recurring institution in Lovecraft's fiction - to
the Antarctic continent.  At the time of the story's composition, much less
was known of that glaciated desert than today, and vast tracts of its
landscape were literally uncharted.
     The expedition proceeds normally enough, until a startling fossil
collection is found in the dried bed of an underground river.  Not all the
relics in the pile are actually fossilized; some of the organic remains are
merely deep-frozen.  These creatures, unlike any others in life or the fossil
record, resemble a cross between starfish, bats, and some form of vegetable
life - and are still living, after untold millennia in the cold.
    One creature is dissected by the team, none of whose members suspect the
real nature of their find.  In the night the remaining creatures reawaken,
bury the dissected individual in an outrè mound of snow, and disappear with a
sled and some of the team's equipment.
    This is the beginning of the horror.  Following the trail, the team comes
to a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas, broken by passes guarded by
square stone shapes disturbingly like artificial constructions.  The wind
pipes crazily through the passes, but one of the expeditions planes flies
through one of the lower passes and finds - a city half buried in the glacier.
    The two men on board the plane naturally land and explore.  Gaining
entrance to one of the ruined buildings, they follow passages down below the
ice and eventually under the surface of the frozen ground.  In these
artificial tunnels, they decipher glyphs telling the story of a race that flew
on its wings through space, establishing itself on the earth eons before life
arose from the primordial sea.  Over the millennia the half animal, half
vegetable race degenerated, finally being vanquished in a war with creatures
of their own making - amorphous blobs called shoggoths.
    Further exploration leads the two men deeper into the tunnels, where they
find the remains of the escaped, formerly frozen star creatures.  The bodies
are torn apart, and covered with a viscous slime.  Before long, the men are
chased back to the surface by an unseen creature pushing a swirling vapor
before it - just before reaching daylight they look back and see that what is
chasing them is a shoggoth, its bulk filling the tunnel like a subway train.
The flight back over the mountains is filled with terror.  The reaction to
what has been seen in the past hours is bad enough, those experiences are not
the end.  The narrator of the story is flying the plane, and is thus unable to
look back.  The passenger, however, does look, and is sent into hysterical
screaming by what he sees.  The novel ends with Lovecraft giving us the only
tidbits of information that could be gained from the screamer after he
recovered from his fit.  Amidst disjointed bits of apparent nonsense, there is
one sound that is terribly understandable - it is the same piping call of the
shoggoth that chased them from the tunnels.
    Lovecraft's mastery as a story teller is evident in the gripping way he
manages to make this plot, outwardly banal, actually horrifying.  Lovecraft
had a genius for making the fictional seem real; many readers, including
myself, have been fooled into thinking that the fictional *Necronomicon* is
real.  This story, though patently impossible, reads like the factual report
of one who actually experience the events, and becomes nearly as believable.
    By our modern standards, of course, Lovecraft's writing is dated.  The
style of the early twentieth century was not that of the late twentieth
century.  Though he was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft was a
confirmed Anglophile, and his British spellings can be distracting to American
readers.  Moreover, he depended heavily on imagery and descriptive writing,
almost being poetic in some of his prose, and modern readers accustomed to
blood and brains providing the horror may not be as enthralled with his
unnameable gods and lurking monstrosities.  He was not strong on dialogue, and
his characters are often merely vehicles for saying what Lovecraft wishes to
communicate.  Nevertheless, Lovecraft's writing is worth learning to
appreciate; as much as Poe, he shaped American horror writing, and the current
lack of interest in his work is unfortunate.  This book, since it does not
delve deeply into the intricacies of the Cthulhu Mythos, and avoids the poorer
writing of Lovecraft's earlier years, is a fine introduction to the work of
this master of the craft.
    *At the Mountains of Madness* is available in the Del Rey soft cover
publication *At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror*, or the
Arkham House hard cover *At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels*.  The
Del Rey book should be available through any good-sized bookstore; probably
the easiest way to obtain the Arkham House edition is by writing directly for
the current catalog to Arkham House Publishers, Inc., PO Box 546, Sauk City,
WI 53583.