Our “what happened,” novella-pinioning moment comes when Dyer and Pabodie catch up to Lake’s forward team only to find them dead, dead to the dog: The energetic professor, the generically “sailory” Scandinavian sailors, the unnamed academic assistants, and the sled huskies - all have been gruesomely murdered.
This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks’ teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons, and titanotheres. (Remember this, the material/real basis of his fiction.) For example, consider Dyer’s ecstatic and strange-sounding but ultimately scientific take on Lake’s finding of the cave, in which we don’t need a single element of the supernal or otherworldly: Lovecraft builds his fiction with meticulous attention to the natural world.
Lovecraft’s vision of an other world within our own world is not fantasy, nor the type of “gee-whiz, wouldn’t that be somethin!” science fiction in which the latest not-even-practical-enough-to-merit-being-called-an-advance “advances” are spun forward into fabulous new iterations. There, Lake finds an aeon-spanning cave, from which he recovers the desiccated bodies of several radially symmetric, many-tentacled, starfish-headed, half-vegetable, man-sized beings - the aliens who left the strange tracks, millennia ago. Sane men going insane in an utterly blank terrain.Įarly on, Lake sees a set of inexplicable triangular tracks in the rocks and eventually sets off to lead a small team further inland, arriving at a previously undiscovered and incredibly tall mountain range in the wild land’s heart. Lovecraft’s classic tale of Antarctic science-terror, At the Mountains of Madness, follows geologist Dyer and his team of experts - including Pabodie, the engineer, Lake, the biologist, and Danforth, the neurasthenic youth - as they traipse across our southernmost continent, taking bores of ancient strata of rock.
Most recently, I’ve enjoyed this text for exactly the pleasures of unraveling the structure of the novella, one which can seem intentionally awkward - the multiple elaboration of a single “what happened?” moment, a moment of sublime WTF-ness - of cosmic vertigo… In honor of the continual freezing of the cat’s water, I’m holding off on reviews of a Jean-Christophe Valtat novella in order to return to a hypnotically grim novella from my youth that I read periodically. Various editions, including several free online Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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