At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

My reaction to H.P. Lovecraft's “At the Mountains of Madness” is surprising: I liked it.

There are reasons why I shouldn't have liked it. It violates the basic rule of modern writing: show, don't tell. The story is a long information dump as the narrator is able to decipher the prehistory of humanity and repeated invasion of the world by various alien races, including the Old Ones and their slave entities, the shogoths.

Nonetheless, I think I liked the story because it was a call back to the “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” i.e., the 1930s, which were also long on exposition and big ideas. In my youth, I had read a volume of such writing collected by Isaac Asimov, for whom this period was his Golden Age. So, this was something familiar.

The story involves a scientific expedition from Miskatonic University to Antarctica. The expedition intends to test a new kind of drilling rig in order to explore the geological history. A portion of the expedition leaves the narrator at one camp to discover the highest mountains in the world in the center of the continent, strange mummified corpses, and indications of ancient city on mountain tops. The narrator arrives at the camp to find strange happenings and then travels to the lost city to learn about the eldritch pre-history of the world.

There is a lot to criticize here. if you expect a fast-paced action-adventure story. This story is not fast-paced in the slightest. A lot of time is spent getting the expedition to the adventure. A lot of time is spent on dwelling on the scenery and the details of the drilling rig. Then, when the adventure begins, Lovecraft has his narrator spend pages narrating the history of the Old Ones in minute details from statues left behind by them. Frankly, the amount of detail that this character extracts from the statuary is unbelievable. For example, we learn that a fungi/crab creature from Pluto threatened the Old Ones' control of the Earth, which is learned from statuary without a helpful pamphlet or audio-commentary.

What sells the story, though, is the scope of the story, involving deep time and space invaders, which necessitates and excuses the info-dump.

Another departure from modern story-telling is that the narrator really doesn't matter. This story is novella length and we learn that he is a professor of geology who organized the expedition. We don't learn much else about him. Lovecraft doesn't spend a lot of time investing him with quirks or a backstory to make us care for him. But we kind of do care for him and his fellow explorer because they are humans in a strange - weird - situation and we somehow can imagine ourselves in that situation.

So, again, I liked it, although it is dated, but that's part of the charm.