At the Mountains of Madness is a science-fiction and cosmic horror novella by the American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in February–March 1931 and published in three installments in 1936. Rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length, it was originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.
The story details the events of a disastrous expedition to Antarctica in September 1930, and what is found there by a group of explorers led by the narrator, Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University. Throughout the story, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring another group of explorers who wish to return to the continent. These events include the discovery of an ancient civilization older than the human race, and realization of Earth's past told through various sculptures and murals.
The story was inspired by Lovecraft's interest in Antarctic exploration; the continent was still not fully explored in the 1930s. Lovecraft explicitly draws from Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and he may have used other stories for inspiration. Many story elements, such as the formless "shoggoth", recur in other Lovecraft works. The story has been adapted and used for graphic novels, video games, and musical works.
Plot The story is narrated in a first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, aiming to prevent an important and much-publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. Throughout the course of his explanation, Dyer relates how he led a group of scholars from the university on a previous expedition to Antarctica, during which they discovered ancient ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas.
A small advance group, led by Professor Lake, discovers the remains of fourteen prehistoric lifeforms previously unknown to science, and also unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens have been badly damaged, while another eight have been preserved in pristine condition. The specimens' stratum places them far too early on the geologic time scale for the features of the specimens to have evolved. Some fossils of Cambrian age show signs of the use of tools to carve a specimen for food.
When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party, Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth investigate. Lake's camp is devastated, with the majority of men and dogs slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and one of the dogs are absent. Near the expedition's campsite, they find six star-shaped snow mounds with one specimen under each. They also discover that the better-preserved lifeforms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on both an unnamed man and a dog. Gedney is suspected of having gone insane and killed and mutilated the others.
Dyer and Danforth fly an aeroplane across the "mountains", soon revealed to be the outer walls of a vast, abandoned stone city, alien to any human architecture. For their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, the builders of this lost civilization are dubbed the "Elder Things." By exploring these fantastic structures, the explorers learn through hieroglyphic murals that the Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon took form and built their cities with the help of "shoggoths"—biological entities created to perform any task, assume any form and reflect any thought. There is a hint that all Earthly life evolved from cellular material left over from the creation of the shoggoths.
As more buildings are explored, the explorers learn about the Elder Things' conflict with both the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-Go, who arrived on Earth shortly afterwards. The images also reflect a degradation of their civilization once the shoggoths gained independence. As more resources are applied in maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive. The murals also allude to an unnamed evil lurking within an even larger mountain range located beyond the city. This mountain range rose in one night and certain phenomena and incidents deterred the Elder Things from exploring it. When Antarctica became uninhabitable, even for the Elder Things, they soon migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.
Dyer and Danforth eventually realize that the Elder Things missing from the advance party's camp had somehow returned to life and, after killing the party, have returned to their city. They also discover traces of the Elder Things' earlier exploration, as well as sleds containing the corpses of both Gedney and his missing dog. Both are ultimately drawn towards the entrance of a tunnel, into the subterranean region depicted in the murals. Here, they find evidence of various Elder Things killed in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering placidly, apparently used as livestock. They are then confronted by a black, bubbling mass, which they identify as a shoggoth, and escape. Aboard the plane, high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something which causes him to go insane, implied to be the unnamed evil itself.
Dyer concludes the Elder Things are survivors of a bygone era, who slaughtered Lake's group only in self-defense or scientific curiosity. Their civilization was eventually destroyed by the shoggoths, which now prey on the enormous penguins. He warns the planners of the proposed expedition to stay away from the site. Danforth continues to experience manic episodes, whispering of "bizarre conceptions" which Dyer attributes to his being one of the few to have completely read through Miskatonic's copy of the Necronomicon.
Connections to other Lovecraft stories At the Mountains of Madness has numerous connections to other Lovecraft stories. A few include: The formless Shoggoths later appeared in "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931), "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933), and "The Haunter of the Dark" (1935) The star-headed Elder Things also appear in "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1933), when the main character, Walter Gilman, visits a city of theirs in one of his dreams, and "The Shadow Out of Time", in which an Elder Thing is kept as a fellow prisoner. Dyer is mentioned in "The Shadow Out of Time" as accompanying Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee's expedition to Australia's Great Sandy Desert. The expedition is sponsored by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, combining two major names in Lovecraft's fiction: Derby and Pickman. Richard Upton Pickman is the main character in Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model", while Edward Pickman Derby is the protagonist of his "The Thing on the Doorstep", and also one of his literary alter-egos. The Elder Things record the coming of Cthulhu to Earth and the sinking of R'lyeh, events referred to in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928). The Elder Things' city is identified with the Plateau of Leng first mentioned in Lovecraft's "Celephaïs" (1920). Some members of the expedition have read Miskatonic University's copy of the Necronomicon. Dyer mentions "Kadath in the Cold Waste" while referring to a massive mountain range which even the Elder Things "shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil." At the very end of the story, Danforth links the horror beyond the forbidden mountain range to Yog-Sothoth and "The Colour Out of Space". The Mi-Go are the focus of "The Whisperer in Darkness". Several times throughout, Dyer also makes reference to Albert Wilmarth, the main character of "The Whisperer in Darkness".
Inspiration
Lovecraft had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration. "Lovecraft had been fascinated with the Antarctic continent since he was at least 12 years old, when he had written several small treatises on early Antarctic explorers," the biographer S. T. Joshi wrote. At about the age of 9, inspired by W. Clark Russell's 1887 book The Frozen Pirate, Lovecraft had written "several yarns" set in Antarctica.Joshi and Schultz, p. 132.
By the 1920s, Antarctica was "one of the last unexplored regions of the Earth in which large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet. Contemporary maps of the continent show a number of provocative blanks, and Lovecraft could exercise his imagination in filling them in... with little fear of immediate contradiction."Joshi, p. 18. However, Lovecraft was basically accurate in presenting the geographic knowledge of Antarctica as it was known at the time, and he referred to continental drift, a theory which was then not widely accepted.
The first expedition of Richard E. Byrd took place between 1928 and 1930, just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters and remarked at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past." cited in Joshi, p. 183; see also Joshi, p. 186. In fact, Miskatonic University's expedition was modelled after that of Byrd.
In Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos Lin Carter suggests that one inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's own hypersensitivity to cold, as evidenced by an incident in which the writer "collapsed in the street and was carried unconscious into a drug store" because the temperature dropped from 60 degrees to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees to -1 degree Celsius). "The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried over into his writing," Carter wrote, "and the pages of Madness convey the blighting, blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way that even Poe could not suggest."S. T. Joshi called the theory "facile."Annotated Lovecraft, pp. 17–18.
Joshi further cites Lovecraft's most obvious literary source for At the Mountains of Madness as Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, whose concluding section is set in Antarctica. Lovecraft twice cites Poe's "disturbing and enigmatic" story in his text and explicitly borrows the mysterious cry Tekeli-li or Takkeli from Poe's work. In a letter to August Derleth, Lovecraft wrote that he was trying to achieve with his ending an effect similar to what Poe accomplished in Pym.H. P. Lovecraft, letter to August Derleth, May 16, 1931; cited in Joshi, pp. 329–330.
Another proposed inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness is Edgar Rice Burroughs's At the Earth's Core (1914), a novel that posits a highly intelligent reptilian race, the Mahar, living in a hollow Earth. "Consider the similarity of Burroughs' Mahar to Lovecraft's Old Ones, both of whom are presented sympathetically despite their ill-treatment of man," wrote the critic William Fulwiler. "[B]oth are winged, web-footed, dominant races; both are scientific scholarly races with a talent for genetics, engineering, and architecture; and both races use men as cattle." Both stories, Fulwiler points out, involve radical new drilling techniques. In both stories, humans are vivisected by nonhuman scientists. Burroughs' Mahar even employ a species of servants known as Sagoths, possibly the source of Lovecraft's Shoggoth.William Fulwiler, "E.R.B. and H.P.L.", Black Forbidden Things, p. 64.