Rashmi bookmarks “At the Mountains of Madness”

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”. ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by H. P. Lovecraft is the narrative of Professor William Dyer, based on his discovery of a horrific secret on an expedition to Antarctica.

Let me start today’s blog with my last thought on this story: a brilliant idea that was quite ruined by a repeated insistence of labelling as ‘horror’ something I can only term ‘fascinating’.

I have always been fascinated by thoughts of where and how it all started, what was going on before the Big Bang, what is beyond the edge of Space, if in fact it does ever end … It was awesome reading about the discovery of ancient life forms - creatures that had features of plants and animals, man and fish - yet at an advanced stage of development impossible for the ancient era to which they belonged. From those curious fossils, the expedition goes on to discover the abandoned stone city, and finally uncovers the secret of the history of the ‘Elder Things’. Elders and Shoggoths, Cthulhu and Mi-go, and blind six-foot-tall penguins. And finally, Danforth’s unexplained insanity.

This was a fascinating tale that was pure science fiction. Yet at every step of the way, sometimes with exasperating persistence, the author felt compelled to ominously proclaim things like, “I could not help feeling that they were evil things - mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world”.

It wasn’t like anything ‘horrific’ happened - it was just the fact that aliens existed, that came to be called the “monstrous chapter of pre-human life”. (Could it perhaps be a reflection of the times that this was considered horror - ?) Topped off by a very long and dull history lesson towards the end, this story turned out to be quite a disappointment.