At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft

language: English
country: USA
year: 1931
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 1.5.23-5.5.23

by way of review, three interconnected thoughts on At the Mountains of Madness and some elements of horror and adventure fiction:

thinking about my reading of “The Terrible Old Man”[*], there’s something about the way the Old Ones are, on the one hand, extraterrestrial beings who colonized the earth and, on the other hand, are later attacked by other extraterrestrial would-be colonists, in the course of which wars they discover that they’re no longer capable of interstellar travel: their bodies have, it seems, adapted too completely to life on Earth. they are, like the Terrible Old Man, terrible but nonetheless integrated into their environment such that despite the horror of them they serve as defenders of the (purity of the) Earth which they created. they protect Earth from the “Great Old Ones” (i.e., Cthulhu and its relatives and descendants) and from the Mi-Go. something about the ways (relatively) familiar horror is leveraged against unfamiliar horror, where in spite of the horror of the Old Ones’ history and the violence they committed against his colleagues Dyer nonetheless clearly comes to admire and sympathize with them — perhaps because of my next point.

as a smaller observation, there’s also something about the way the Old Ones’ society reproduces American history: they arrive in terra nullius and immediately establish a slave society whose integrity is threatened and ultimately destroyed by slave revolts (culminating in a war to suppress the slaves). ultimately the Old Ones’ sophisticated and very culktured civilization is replaced by the Shoggoths’ cannibalistic subsistence existence. the narration of the Old Ones’ history mainly reveals, then, Lovecraft’s own American racial anxieties, both about Black people specifically and about the “danger” posed by immigration.

more generally, I’m sure other people have written extensively about this, but the “lost world” genre to which the novel belongs is so transparently rooted in colonialism and scientific racism: the question novels like At the Mountain of Madness (even including, I think, novels like Of One Blood where the valence of the question is reversed) pose is, what if terra nullius had actually been terra alicuius — someone’s land — the whole time? what if the “primitive” people who (of course) never truly owned the land they simply happened to live on were on the same level of development as us, or even beyond us, or at least had all the trappings of “civilization”? what if our claims to the land we’ve colonized weren’t secure? the horror of this genre rests, essentially, in the ways this encounter and the act of colonization or exploration would make the colonizer guilty of something — and so, in order to neutralize the implications of this guilt (or shame), the Other must be represented as sinister, threatening, or outright evil so that the colonizer can still be the sympathetic protagonist in the face of the horrifying reality underlying the ideologies of colonialism and imperialism.

also the prose is really only good for the first, like, third, because after that, as I noted the other day, he starts repeating himself constantly and the descriptions stop landing the way he wanted them to.

also, the way Lovecraft characters are like, “I only got a momentary glimpse of the page; here’s a three-paragraph verbatim quotation from it” is always very silly, but this story is the silliest because Dyer reconstructs the whole history of the Old Ones based exclusively on some bas-reliefs, up to and including a pretty detailed understanding of the creation of the Shoggoths by genetic engineering and how they controlled them through hypnosis. lmao. okay, Howard.

moods: dark, mysterious, wacky (not intentionally)

Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” is an interesting kind of inversion of his usual racism and xenophobia, in that it positions the Terrible Old Man [sic] as an insider or native of Kingsport, and thus as belonging to “the charmed circle of New England life and traditions“, despite his association with the ~exotic~ and foreign world (“a captain of East India clipper ships”, “idols in some obscure Eastern temple“) and ultimately with the inhuman (“Mr. Czanek had never before noticed the colour of that man’s eyes; now he saw that they were yellow”).

instead of transferring his xenophobia onto the cosmic alien Other, here the Other is three all-too-human robbers: “Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva” who “were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions“ and so don’t understand the Terrible Old Man’s place in the community — and, of course, these three people marked with obvious immigrant surnames (and all from the racially dubious and Catholic fringes) are both thieves and, implicitly, either past or would-be murderers.

the Terrible Old Man is terrible, he lives in a “sinister house”, he has yellow eyes that mark him as not (entirely) human or at least as touched by cosmic horror — but ultimately his position in the narrative is as the defender of the racial and social integrity of Kingsport and by extension of New England and the white, “Anglo-Saxon” US at large, eliminating the obviously (inherently) criminal “heterogeneous alien stock” that threatens that integrity.

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At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft