At The Mountains of Madness

I think I picked my scary Christmas story poorly this year.  Or last year.  You know what I mean.  Following on from the success of 2014’s In A Glass Darkly, I was really looking forward to the horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness.  But it’s nowhere near as spooky.  I’ve been saving it since about June, so I’m actually really disappointed.

I think the problem is, in part, the setting of the story.  I was after the old dark house variety of fear, but what Lovecraft provides is more a kin to The Thing.  The setting is the wilds of Antarctica, the fear comes not from beasts spotted out of the corner of one’s eye, but fully realised monsters that stand and kill in the light.  It’s not what I was after, especially over the hottest Christmas time that I can remember.  There’s also the problem that not much happens in the tale.  The novella follows the story of William Dyer, a geologist, who after receiving fantastic reports and then radio silence from a satellite group of the Antarctic team sets off to find out what has happened.  What follows is pretty much just a description of corpses and a history of the Old Ones which is far too detailed to be a believable reading of cave hieroglyphics. 

The level of detail in regards to the Old Ones is one of my main issues with the book.  It broke the suspension of my disbelief very quickly.  Rather than a standalone story, At The Mountains of Madness seems designed to fit in with the canon of Lovecraft’s other work; none of which I have read.  We were expected to know about the Old Ones, to be aware of what the Necronomicon contained and I just wasn’t.  On top of this, their entire history is chronicled in detail, as is the history of the Shoggoths, an enslaved shape-changing race that ultimately rose up and killed them.  It’s hard to be scared of things that are explained so plainly and the book would have benefitted massively from fewer details.

At The Mountains of Madness is Lovecraft’s only book on The List and until this point, I was unsure as to why.  He is, with a doubt, a hugely influential author; the book itself has spawned numerous unofficial sequels and attempts to get the thing made into a film.  And the Necronomicon is a term that has slipped into, if not mainstream, certainly the pop culture of horror as has Cthulhu (both words, it is worth noting are recognised by Microsoft’s spell check).  I think that, like Edgar Allen Poe, for me Lovecraft is one of those authors who is important because of the culture that he inspired and for that reason I’m glad that some of his work is on The List.  I’m just grateful that it’s only one little book.

Next up is Evelyn Waugh’s last entry on The List; A Handful of Dust.