Left cold at the South Pole
With the turn to the darker days of the year, the Beamers take our usual turn into darker fiction for October, finding ourselves way, way down under At the Mountains of Madness, an plunge into the depths of Antarctic deep freeze and deep time. Written in 1931 by H. P. Lovecraft, the tragic story of the Miskatonic University expedition to the Plateau of Leng was to inspire a number of other works and references numerous contemporary authors. Would its horrors or its wonders inspire the Beamers to travel to the bottom of the world, or instead to put the book at the bottom of the reading pile?
It was cosmic, but was it horror?
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a significant sf/f writer in the early 20th Century, as well as being a prolific letter writer and fan of genre works. His fiction inspired a number of his fellow authors to contribute to the core set of beings and history that Lovecraft began shaping in his own works, creating an extensive legendarium called the Cthulhu Mythos, after one of the major Big Bads that lies in suspended animation under the Pacific Ocean. Frequently adapted for film, his works are known outside the genre and have become recognized as part of American literature, often gaining him comparison to Edgar Allen Poe. Unfortunately, some of his less savory opinions on non-Europeans have also clung to his work, making him less welcome as a symbol of our genres and leading to the re-designing of the World Fantasy Award to replace a stylized bust of Lovecraft with an image of a world tree. And still, new writers read Lovecraft and react to his fiction in ways that both push further and reverse his concepts.
While most of Lovecraft’s works are short stories, we tackled a longer piece, his novella At the Mountains of Madness, to give ourselves a good-sized chunk of his “cosmic” horror, so called due to his aim of finding horror not in the traditional monsters or goblins of folklore but in a modern, scientific framework. And At the Mountains of Madness is determinedly modern in its tone, often becoming so clogged with paleontological terminology as to seem like an academic paper, according to Jocelyn, a studious Beamer. This desire to be so scientific is a characteristic that Lovecraft shared with other sf writers who viewed the genre as fiction of scientific merit, an educational angle that Hugo Gernsback, the first publisher of the first sf magazine, Amazing, liked to promote. Sadly, educational does not imply entertaining, so Chris found the work to be very poorly paced, with long stretches of expository description and little of dialogue or character development or even just plot action. While some compared the narration to epistolatory writing like Dracula, that lay a lot of foundation before switching to action, Alan complained that there was a limit to how long one should wait and if nothing is happening by page 88, something is wrong.
Say something once, why say it again?
The use of description was also problematic for most Beamers, particularly with Lovecraft being so adjective-heavy in his prose, making many passages read slowly and often falling into repetitive patterns, where Kathy was unwilling to see another mention of “poor” Danforth and I was not anxious to view another reference to “the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich” (though his works are quite good and Fran pointed to the Roerich museum in upper Manhattan). We debated the whole “show, don’t tell” admonition for fiction, with David defending the idea that telling is an older form of narration, which would not seem out of place in 1930s literature, and to which I added the observation that the book has both a “tell” opening section and a “show” climax, where the narrator and his companion (“poor” Danforth) are exploring the lost city of the Old Ones. Most Beamers did not find even that latter part of the book to be too engaging, though.
Was it horrifying, at least? Not for most Beamers, no. While I pointed to both the gory acts of violence (including Old Ones with their five-sided heads ripped off, and humans dissected like frogs) and to the sense of “deep time” that is added to make it clear how small we are in relation to the vastness of the Universe, few found it too upsetting. Kathy questioned whether an Existential view of the Universe was necessarily frightening, as even when Alan brought up the Biblical book of Job as an example of scary literature, she found the idea of death to include a sense of relief from suffering. David did not think of Lovecraft’s perspective as Existential so much as Classical, in the sense that the narrative posits a previous Golden Age from which we have steady decline to the unpleasant present and then to the less salubrious future. Which brought up the question of how the narrator was able to detect “degeneration” in the carvings of the Old Ones, anyway.
What really scares the respectable citizen of Providence
What really upset Lovecraft, though, was buried a bit in the sub-text of the work, which tied into a reason that he still excites and inspires new readers and writers, even if only to fix his flaws. One key passage in the book, for me, is the part where the narrator recognizes that the Old Ones are not evil, just curious. In the same way that human scientists dissected an Old One corpse, so did the revived Old Ones take a human and a sled dog into the lab, as well as preserving some “specimens” for later study. That recognition triggers the highest praise the narrator can offer: “Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn–whatever they had been, they were men!” And that ability to see beyond fear, to achieve a sense of wonder in the midst of the uncaring indifference, is what still brings readers and writers to Lovecraft, in my view. The 2009 Hugo for Best Novelette went to “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear, a story that looks at the ultimate baddies of Antarctica through the eyes of a marine biologist who is also African-American and sees a kinship with another set of enslaved beings. And that, as David pointed out, was the true horror of the story, the reason that Lovecraft mourned the passing of the Golden Age, because it meant not only the fall of the overlords but the rise of the underclass, the sub-humans who rebel and kill their oppressors, the Old Ones, with whom we are meant to identify (“they were men!”). Not much coincidence that a shoggoth is a “nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence”.
But at least the story does have penguins. Giant albino penguins, but penguins nonetheless.
Where could we rate such a tale of long, slow panning over vast vistas of time that comes to a seemingly backwards conclusion? We had to go in many different directions. Chris was a fan of the Lovecraft Historical Society’s silent-film adaptation of “The Call of Cthulhu”, which led him to read other Lovecraft works in addition to At the Mountains of Madness. Cathy listened to an audio version of the book and enjoyed the sound of the prose enough to start listening a second time after finishing it. Roberto had a similar experience with a video version that offered voice and visual components (like those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich). Alan felt that he needed to break his experience into halves, one for the work itself (rated 4) and one for its influence on the genre as seen in so many other pieces, like the various filmed versions of The Thing (rated 9). David preferred to unify his rating at ‘6’, while I still like the tug at wonder that Lovecraft manages to inject (or that manages to escape in spite of his shoggoth paranoia) and so bequethed a ‘7’. Jocelyn was more nonplussed and dropped a ‘6’, but she was intrigued enough by the discussion to want to finish the last unread bit. And that may be the best marking of all, that our discussion was involving enough to get us to go back and read some more.
- Posted in: Meeting Notes
- Tagged: At the Mountains of Madness, Horror, Lovecraft, Science Fiction
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