Howard Phillips Lovecraft is, like S&M, Morris Dancing and Death Metal, not for everybody. As a writer he was not successful in life, he suffered personal tragedies, had some wacky and downright offensive beliefs and a writing style that as a 1950s Sci Fi magazine editor summarised "… at his best could build a mood of horror unsurpassed; at his worst, he was laughable.”
All true and yet he links 19th and 20th century horror like no other, he is the bridge between Edger Allen Poe and Stephen King, his imitators and devotees are many and famous and he has some of the best story titles in literature.
1931’s At The Mountains Of Madness being a perfect example.
A couple of interesting things about Lovecraft’s writing. He loves the first person. He wants you, the reader, to be in the narrator’s head, to know what he is thinking and more importantly seeing and feeling. Also Lovecraft hates dialogue, maybe he thought he was no good at writing it but the lack of it is an interesting and definite feature of his writing.
What he did love was science. He was a keen amateur astronomer and you can see the interest in the detailed descriptions of scientific and engineering procedures in this story. That cool descriptive style provides a valuable contrast to the fevered prose he uses as he ratchets up the dread when the unimaginable is encountered. The key word is dread. Lovecraft likes the slow and steady build from unease to discomfort and finally to dread.
Of course when he hits his stride and the plot is just right, the sheer force of his imagination and the conviction in the delivery is irresistible.
And in At The Mountains Of Madness he has the story just right.
The story tells of a disastrous, scientific expedition to Antarctica. The narrator, one of the two survivors, details a series of nightmare events in the hope of stopping a return expedition.
What happened to the expedition is prime Lovecraft. The discovery of a vast ancient city built by barely imaginable aliens from eons past, their rivalry with other cosmic visitors, hideous creatures still living deep under the earth, and brooding over it all, the hint of a neighbouring, larger, infinite horror beyond human comprehension.
His favourite themes are here. The complete insignificance of mankind in an uncaring and hostile universe, his love of science, his atheism, alleged dislike of the cold and his concerns around racial and cultural purity.
And Lovecraft’s unique prose style of course. Who else could, after listing his narrator’s protests that what he was seeing was indescribable then come up with a sentence like the following?
“We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of pallid abyss-vapour.”
Of course there is plenty more of that stuff and after a while it starts to wrap you up like some kind of monster mucous. It becomes less silly, and like any writing in this genre when it is effective, you want to believe. The accompanying short story in the book I have, The Shadow Over Innsmouth explores in more detail Lovecraft’s beliefs regarding miscegenation and the importance of place, in this case the New England region of the USA, in horror writing. The short story is where Lovecraft is at his best. I think the word limit helps curb his worse writing instincts.
Still polarising, still influencing, H.P. Lovecraft and his dark creations remain fascinating and unsettling. Love or hate him, you won’t forget Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness.
Scott Hoffman (Collingwood Chapter)
