At the Mountains of Madness (1931)

This very long H.P. Lovecraft story, arguably his masterpiece, bears interest for a number of reasons. The sweeping vision it presents counts as horror, if only because it's creepy and gets squishy, but Theodore Sturgeon reportedly called it "first-water, true-blue science fiction." It works perhaps best as an impressive example of the "lost world" story, like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, the King Kong movie, or Wakanda. It was written when it was possible to entertain features like an undiscovered mountain range in the Antarctic whose peaks (plural) put "Everest out of the running." It was rejected for publication for five years as too long (indignities of the overlooked genius). Last but not least, it's nearly perfect Lovecraft, grinding away at its premises until they are well fixed in the brain and provide context for adventure, confrontation, and characters losing their minds due to excessive boggling. Strains of Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and the usual sinister documentation are heard as well. Lovecraft kept up with the science of his day (not to mention the pulp fiction), so his descriptions of this strange land in the Antarctic are informed by a sense of the Earth's history in terms of geology and a scope that breaches epochs. What he describes his small party of two encountering is hundreds of thousands and millions of years old, even as much as a billion, and he knows enough about the theories of planetary development to make it credible enough to fool a rube like me. He's all over plate tectonics, for example. The preservation of the architecture and structure of his massive dead city is another matter but apparently the dry and cold conditions in this Antarctic accommodate that. So, uh, OK, I'll buy that. Never mind the high winds. It's not perfectly preserved. In general, as so often, it's just better to agree to believe. So we get Lovecraft's usual infinitely detailed description done up in scientific drag and dipped in a sauce of art history pseudo-erudition—the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich is name-checked repeatedly in this one—and it's good as always to enter with a modicum of patience. Give him an inch and he will blow your mind a mile, but it's not always an easy inch. The plot, even such as it is, tends toward the busy and a little beside the point, also as usual, with various Antarctic expeditions and two or three alien races and/or supernatural forces, plus some giant friendly penguins. The Cyclopean horrors that drive men mad happen in a big rush at the end, almost too fast. "Too fast" is a strange thing to say about Lovecraft. I estimate At the Mountains of Madness as 85% scene-setting and description and 15% plot execution, which is all right when you remember that the 85% part is what he's best at doing. He always kept a foot planted in the Sherlock Holmes style of first-person investigation too, which brings some odd comfort of familiarity to his tales. I do admire his ability to imagine. At the Mountains of Madness is heady stuff, one of his best, and not a bad place to start on him. If you're really ambitious, read it with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, its spiritual cousin.

H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America)

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