“The Other Side of the Mountain” (1963)

This long story by the French writer Michel Bernanos is pretty good, another quality yarn turned up by editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer in The Weird anthology. It is taken as a novel by many, maybe because of its ambitious scope. It starts as a wild and harrowing seagoing adventure and then turns into more classic weird in the second half. It reminded me some of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” both for the size of its vision and for its original take on lost world stories. There’s a lot of stuff in this story I’ve never seen or heard of before. It’s one of those where the greatest temptation is to tell people to just go read it. Things like the trees worshipping the mountain before dawn, in an unexplained eerie light, or the feel of a mouth and lips made of sand at the bottom of a river, are there to be discovered in the full pleasures of their contexts. The sea tale has almost nothing to do with the lost world we end up in, but it’s a rip-roaring way into the bigger story and I wouldn’t be without it. You get mutiny, madness, cannibalism, and more. The central relationship in this story is between an 18-year-old youth tricked into the voyage and the much older ship’s cook, a familiar setup for adventuring, protector/mentor and protege, grounding these strange events into a welcome human frame as things go along. Make no mistake, this story amounts to approximately weirdness squared. Yet it moves quickly and nimbly. It never lingers overlong on anything, perhaps because it knows well how many surprises it has around so many corners. Another touchpoint with the long Lovecraft are the strange statues found everywhere on the island (or continent, whatever it is), reminiscent of the intricate carvings in Lovecraft’s place. This is definitely world-building stuff, but the style of language is never ponderous, the way Lovecraft and much fantasy can be. This story tends to strip out a lot that’s ultimately unnecessary—we never learn anything about how the youth was tricked onto the voyage, other than that it happened that way—and keeps the narrative nicely propelled. Description necessarily gets dense on the island, but even there, generally, we’re only told what we need to know to keep the story moving in its intended direction, as per the title. I admit I struggle in some cases with the VanderMeers’ tastes, but they do have a real nose for the good ones.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.