Lovecraft Retrospective: At the Mountains of Madness

This was an excellent and honest look on the actual quality of this thing as a story. It's really not that good. I remember loving it as a teenager, but I was absorbing everything Lovecraft at that time, and my critical faculties were not as developed. Now, after a re-read a few years ago, it's obviously Lovecraft trying to tie a story framework around his need to write an essay on his "mythos", or at least some sort of story bible for his future work, which he could then reference, even if he didn't share it to the public. For better or for worse, he did, and we get this slog of a short novel, that has neat ideas better explored in his other work. Conan and Kull writer Robert E. Howard, who as you probably know, often corresponded with Lovecraft, and due to this they shared elements of each others work in their stories. Howard wrote his essay "The Hyborian Age" slightly after this (1932, I believe, where Lovecraft first wrote "Mountains" in 1931, but saw it published later in 1936), which is very much a similar reference bible to his Conan tales, but it does away with any story framework. A much better approach, I think.

I suppose the matter of influence hinges a lot on Who Goes There?, in as much as The Thing (1982) was a direct adaptation of that, and has in turn I imagine been a major influence on all subsequent iterations of the scenario. The Thing From Another World (1951) may also have influenced earlier ones, though if nothing else the crinoid/krynoid link shows that The Seeds of Death at least was drawing directly on Mountains. So a lot depends on to what extent one thinks John Campbell was following Mountains, and I have no idea what the reckoning is on that.

The word you're looking when discussing the kind of people who are fascinated and crave the fictional world histories is Worldbuilding. And yes, Lovecraft is good at it in his own way. As for the way the character interprets a whole history of the Elder Things, it's also something Lovecraft does all the time. It's like something intrudes into the narrator's mind and GIVES them the answers somehow.

Very interesting, too, that Dyer was the name of some of Lovecraft’s ancestors– it opens the possibility that he and professional geezer Danny Dyer are related 🤣

I enjoyed this immensely! Like your review of “The Fly”, it’s difficult not to charge into the comments and start filling them up with random riffs that your discussion has stimulated! I actually got a graphic novel adaptation of “At the Mountains of Madness” by the Japanese artist Gou Tanabe as a present this Christmas and it’s interesting to see the changes he made to make it work in that medium. The characters are more fleshed out for a start (there is even dialogue!) but what stands out most in light of your discussion about the description of the Elder Things in the story is how the artist varies his style throughout the story. That is, in the “human” parts of the story at the beginning, his style is very direct and clear, but when the Elder Things show up, it becomes much more disturbing. There’s some influence of Giger, but in places, such as the depiction of the battle between the Elder Things and the Spawn of Cthulhu, it almost becomes abstract– everything bleeds together into a writhing mass of light and dark in which it’s nearly impossible to make out individual figures. It’s a clever way of portraying a story that almost resists a visual interpretation