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=                    At_the_Mountains_of_Madness                     =
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                            Introduction
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'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 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
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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
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'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
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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.

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."
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.  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."

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'.

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.

Other possible sources include A. Merritt's "The People of the Pit,"
whose description of an underground city in the Yukon bears some
resemblance to that of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and Katharine Metcalf
Roof's "A Million Years After," a story about dinosaurs hatching from
eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 edition
'Weird Tales'. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft declared
Metcalf Roof's story to be a "rotten," "cheap," and "puerile" version
of an idea he had years earlier, and his dissatisfaction may have
provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from
the dim reaches of Earth's history."

Edward Guimont has argued that 'At the Mountains of Madness' was
inspired by contemporary discourse around life on Mars, including
Mars-set fictional works and the claims of Martian canals made by
Percival Lowell (whom Lovecraft met in 1907). Guimont has also
proposed other influences, including contemporary theories about the
decline of the Norse Greenlanders and claims of survival of woolly
mammoths in Alaska and particularly plot details being inspired by the
1930 discovery of the remains of Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition.

'An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia' suggest that the long scope of
history recounted in the story may have been inspired by Oswald
Spengler's 'The Decline of the West'. Some details of the story may
also have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901 Arctic exploration novel
'The Purple Cloud', which was republished in 1930.

The title is derived from a line in Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of
Dunsany's short story "The Hashish Man": "And we came at last to those
ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness...".

Lovecraft's own "The Nameless City" (1921), which also deals with the
exploration of an ancient underground city that is apparently
abandoned by its nonhuman builders, sets a precedent for 'At the
Mountains of Madness'. In both stories, the explorers use the
nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species. Lovecraft
had also used that device in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"
(1927)

As for details of the Antarctic setting, the author's description of
some of the scenery is in part inspired by the Asian paintings of
Nicholas Roerich and the illustrations of Gustave Doré, both of whom
are referenced by the story's narrator multiple times.


                            Publication
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Lovecraft submitted the story to 'Weird Tales', but it was rejected by
the editor Farnsworth Wright in July 1931. Lovecraft took the
rejection badly and put the story to one side. It was eventually
submitted by Lovecraft's literary agent Julius Schwartz in 1935 to F.
Orlin Tremaine, the editor of 'Astounding Stories'.

The novella was serialized in the February, March, and April 1936
issues, and Lovecraft received $315 (315)--the most he had ever
received for a story. The story, however, was harshly edited, with
alterations to spellings, punctuation, and paragraphing, and the end
of the story had several lengthy passages omitted. Lovecraft was
outraged and called Tremaine "that god-damn'd dung of a ". Lovecraft's
own hand-corrected copies of 'Astounding Stories' formed the basis for
the first Arkham House edition, but this still contained over a
thousand errors, and a fully restored text was not published until
1985.


                             Reception
======================================================================
The novella was received negatively during Lovecraft's lifetime;
Lovecraft stated that its hostile reception had done "more than
anything to end my effective fictional career. Theodore Sturgeon
described the novella as "perfect Lovecraft" and "a good deal more
lucid than much of the master's work", as well as "first-water,
true-blue science fiction." The story popularized ancient astronaut
theories, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut
mythology". Edward Guimont has argued that 'At the Mountains of
Madness', despite its terrestrial setting, helped influence later hard
science fiction depictions of planetary expeditions and the Big Dumb
Object trope, particularly those of Arthur C. Clarke, whose 1940
parody "At the Mountains of Murkiness" was one of his first works of
fiction.


                            Adaptations
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* 'At the Mountains of Madness' was adapted into a graphic novel
created by I. N. J. Culbard and published in 2010 by SelfMadeHero as
part of their Eye Classics line (). The book was named 'The Observer'
Graphic Novel of the Month.
* Japanese artist Gou Tanabe created a two-volume graphic novel with
the same name, translated into English by Dark Horse Manga  in 2019.
* 'The Mountains of Madness' is an audiovisual musical adaptation of
the works of H. P. Lovecraft by Tiger Lillies, Danielle de Picciotto
and Alexander Hacke.
* On July 28, 2010, director Guillermo del Toro announced that he
would direct a film adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains
of Madness' for Universal Pictures, with James Cameron producing.
Cameron suggested casting Tom Cruise in the lead role and releasing
the film in 3-D. On October 28, 2010, del Toro said that the
adaptation probably would not happen at all. He stated, "It doesn't
look like I can do it. It's very difficult for the studios to take the
step of doing a period-set, R-rated, tentpole movie with a tough
ending and no love story. Lovecraft has a readership as big as any
best-seller, but it's tough to quantify because his works are in the
public domain." Cameron and del Toro put forward the idea to
Universal, who greenlit it. In 2012, del Toro posted that, due to the
resemblance in premise with the Ridley Scott film 'Prometheus', the
project would probably face a "long pause--if not demise." However, in
2021 del Toro announced that he was again revisiting the concept and
revising the script for an animation approach, saying, "... it would
be ideal to do 'Mountains of Madness' as stop-motion."


            Unofficial sequels and other inspired works
======================================================================
* David A. McIntee noted similarities between the first half of the
1979 science fiction horror film 'Alien', particularly in early
versions of the script, to 'At the Mountains of Madness', "not in
storyline, but in dread-building mystery", and calls the finished film
"the best Lovecraftian movie ever made, without being a Lovecraft
adaptation", due to its similarities in tone and atmosphere to
Lovecraft's works. In 2009, 'Alien' writer Dan O'Bannon said the film
was "strongly influenced, tone-wise, by Lovecraft, and one of the
things it proved is that you can't adapt Lovecraft effectively without
an extremely strong visual style ... What you need is a cinematic
equivalent of Lovecraft's prose." The 2004 'Alien' sequel, 'Alien vs.
Predator' borrows its plot liberally from 'At the Mountains of
Madness'.
* The 1995 'Prisoner of Ice' video game by Infogrames Multimedia is
loosely based on 'At The Mountains of Madness,' particularly the
introduction where it involves a group of people discovering two
mysterious cargo crates in Antarctica that contain Lovecraftian
creatures called "the Prisoners."
* Chaosium Games released a campaign book titled 'Beyond the Mountains
of Madness' for their 'Call of Cthulhu' role-playing game in 1999.
This book details the Starkweather-Moore expedition return to the ice
to discover the truth about the Miskatonic Expedition. The book
incorporates many of the aspects of the original Lovecraft story,
including references to the Poe story, 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym of Nantucket', Nicholas Roerich, Danforth and Dyer. This book won
the Origins Award for "Best Role-Playing Adventure" in 2000.
*'Call of Cthulhu: Beyond the Mountains of Madness' was a cancelled
video game adaptation by Headfirst Productions. It was announced in
2002 as a planned sequel to then-upcoming 'Call of Cthulhu: Dark
Corners of the Earth' (a long-delayed video game based on Lovecraft's
'The Shadow over Innsmouth', eventually released in 2006).
* Charles Stross' 2000 novelette "A Colder War" is a direct sequel to
Lovecraft's story. Set in the 1980s, it presents an alternate history
of the Cold War where the threat of mutual annihilation is not
nuclear, but occult, the US and USSR being locked in an arms race
based on technologies found by subsequent expeditions to the alien
city.
* 'Edge of Nowhere', a 2016 video game developed by Insomniac Games,
is set in 1952, 20 years after the expedition, and involves Victor
Howard (Robin Atkin Downes) as he ventures into the site to locate his
fiancée, who was on an expedition down a similar path.


                              See also
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* 'In the Mouth of Madness' - a horror film directed by John
Carpenter, influenced by Lovecraft
* 'Who Goes There?' - a 1938 science fiction-horror novella by John W.
Campbell, also Antarctica-based


                           External links
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*
*
*
* [https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx The H.P.
Lovecraft Archive]
*
*
*
[https://vocal.media/bookclub/book-review-at-the-mountains-of-madness-by-h-p-lovecraft
Review of the Lovecraft's book 'At the Mountains of Madness' by Caleb
Foster]


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