Cosmic Horror: At the Mountains of Madness

H.P. Lovecraft is not frightening because he shocks or surprises. He won't disgust or horrify you. At least, not at first. Most of his stories are written in the first person, giving you a comfortable assurance that the narrator will make it out alright. What makes his works so compelling is that they're so dry. It's like reading a science journal, and for that reason, completely terrifying. At the Mountains of Madness is one of his longer stories, and also the best.

To understand how Lovecraft operates, let's take a look at some recent genre-defining horror: The Blair Witch Project. The film abandons the conventions of how films are constructed and approaches the audience at a level of deep believability. We've been watching home videos ever since our aunt recorded our third birthday party, and their trademark mistakes have become part of what we see as real. A shaky camera, bad lighting, unheard dialogue, green night vision; all part of something real and actual. When the Blair Witch Project tells the tale of lost college students using these techniques, the audience is already on their side. Seeing the images presented like that made it that much easier to connect with what’s happening. If you didn't buy into it, the film was a mess of confusing images and ugly shots, but if it hooked you, there was nothing to separate the horrors of the film with your own back woods. No wonder every horror film for the past ten years has duplicated the effect.

Lovecraft knew just as much about his readers and what would hoodwink them. Take this bit from the novel's buildup: "Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source survived from over six hundred million years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size." This is how Lovecraft introduces a monster, with minute technical and scientific detail. Their ancient lair is given similar treatment: "There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath." Everything is measured and codified, in the language of the archeologist. You don't see this kind of language in other horror novels, you read it in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and The American Naturalist. Each detailed description grounds the story in the realm of believability. Perhaps you are reading the dispatch of an actual arctic expedition. Perhaps those vegetables under the ice rest there even now. Perhaps the cyclopean vistas really lurk just beyond that unpassable range. Why not?

The clincher for Lovecraft's technique comes to light in the final sections, when our explorers come face to face with the living horrors. Here, all attempts to describe the monsters are flung aside, leaving the reader with descriptions like "unholy", "shapeless" and "indescribable." Characters that once brought the entirety of scientific vocabulary to bear in their observations are left speechless by the final horror. The creatures must be terrible indeed for description to escape such grounded men.

They may not keep you up with the light on, but Lovecraft's stories retain their queer realism. Years from now, when you can laugh at the zombies and vampires of modern cinema, you may recall the fated expedition of September the second, 1930 and the odd things they found.

Read Lovecraft (literally, all of Lovecraft), at Google Books or Project Gutenberg. If you don't have time for a novella, "The Call of Cthulhu" or "The Colour Out of Space" are two of his more compelling short stories, but you’d be pretty safe with any of them.

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