“The Horror of the Heights” (1913)

I liked this silly story by Arthur Conan Doyle for a few reasons. It reminded me in good ways of H.P. Lovecraft, specifically “At the Mountains of Madness” (from 1936). Still need to get to Lovecraft’s book of criticism—I wonder what if anything he made of Doyle. Lovecraft doesn’t necessarily seem like he would appreciate Sherlock Holmes and maybe never looked past Doyle’s most famous work. After a random dud or two, this is the second Doyle story I read in a row that was pretty good. I expected more stuff like this from him—simple, engrossing fantasy adventure stories. Here it’s all about the state of flight technology circa 1913, and the idea is that there are jungles of a type above the cloud level, with creatures living there we can’t see from the ground. Even on clear days it all just blends into the blue sky. There’s a strained frame about a found notebook with a few missing pages and (gasp) bloodstains, but basically this is a first-person story told by the pilot. He’s attempting to get above 30,000 feet and that alone requires some telling. Doyle sounds knowledgeable about flying and the technology, at least to me who knows very little about it, so it’s believable enough. After some tribulations this pilot gets all the way to 40,000 feet and that’s where the real action is: giant floating translucent jellyfish creatures and a purple snake-like monster that attacks and forces him to land, which is the last we hear of him. The frame narrator speculates that our pilot fueled up and returned forthwith for further study, where he met his unknown demise. Also, maybe not so obviously, he took some time to write up this 5,000-word account. This story might be too busy on the margins—Doyle makes the heart of it more the climb to 40,000 feet. But the detail is interesting even before we get way up there and encounter the creatures. It probably qualifies as some kind of “weird” story. I quite like these creatures up there. They verge on the tall penguins in “Mountains of Madness” and they are nice story decoration. In both stories it’s apparent they are more or less earthly life-forms still unknown. Now we know there are no jellyfish creatures in the sky, no mountain range to rival the Himalayas in Antarctica. But there might have been when these stories were written. Now I think it’s more Mars where we focus our maybe-just-maybe imaginations (even as we are learning it is impossibly cold and toxic). Or spaceships and deep generational space travel. We should try thinking about surviving climate change. This story probably has to be accounted quaint by most contemporary readers, and so it is. But it’s also charming and this rising to the occasion (no pun intended) to face down the challenge, even if the result is death, is probably the best part of it. It’s plucky, and in an unaffected way.

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