At the mountains of madness - By H. P. Lovecraft Page 0,1

century most frequently compared with Poe, both in the quality of his art [and in] its thematic preoccupations,” observed Joyce Carol Oates. “[He has] had an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction.” And Stephen King concluded: “H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”

INTRODUCTION

China Miéville

(WARNING: THIS INTRODUCTION DISCUSSES KEY ELEMENTS OF THE NOVEL’S PLOT.)

In a much-quoted homage, Stephen King once described H. P. Lovecraft as the twentieth-century horror story’s “dark and baroque prince.” And this is a prince who wields old-school, feudal power: like few other writers before or since, Lovecraft fundamentally defined the shape of his chosen literary field. If anything, in fact, the label “prince” is inadequate. When one considers the canonical nature of Lovecraft’s texts, the awed scholasticism with which his followers discuss his cosmology, and the endless recursion of his ideas and his aesthetics by the faithful, an alternative analogy presents itself: Lovecraft is horror’s pope.

But without diminishing the man’s peculiar genius, we must see Lovecraft as a product of his time. We can make sense of him, and his astonishing visions, only to the extent that we understand him as defined by the specific horrors, concrete and psychic, of the early twentieth century.

1. THE SURRENDER TO THE WEIRD

Genre writers, it is often claimed, are uninterested in characterization, theme, or nuance, and instead vulgarly subordinate everything to the exigencies of plot. This, of course, is nonsense. In fact, many genre writers don’t do plot either.

H. P. Lovecraft is the towering genius among those writers of fantastic fiction for whom plot is simply not the point. For Lovecraft, the point is the weird. Nowhere is this more clear than in the outstanding At the Mountains of Madness, described by one preeminent Lovecraft scholar as “a triumph in almost every way.” 1 The question concerning Lovecraft is not whether he can or cannot do plot, but whether or not plot and narrative arc are the elements that drive his art.

This is not to say that Lovecraft’s stories are clumsy in their craft. Some, like “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” move tightly and precisely, evoking growing foreboding as the protagonist listens to radio reports from a companion penetrating the horrors of a tomb; others, like the canonical “The Call of Cthulhu,” deploy the technique of cut-and-paste in a pulp bricolage, aggregating a sense of dread and awe precisely out of the lack of overarching plot. The exposition of a monstrous cosmic history, of hateful cults, of the misbehavior of matter and geometry, is all the stronger for being gradually, seemingly randomly, uncovered.

In the case of At the Mountains of Madness, the initially sedate unfolding of the story, in its careful scientific tone, builds pace brilliantly, inexorably hooking the reader in. But though what story there is emerges with astonishing power, Lovecraft’s is not a fiction of carefully structured plot so much as of ineluctable unfolding: it is a literature of the inevitability of weird.

“My reason for writing stories,” Lovecraft says, “is to give myself the satisfaction of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy. . . .” 2 Story is not the point: the point is wonder, which for Lovecraft goes hand in hand with horror, because, he claims, “fear is our deepest and strongest emotion.”

He believes this because in his “mechanical materialist” vision, humans mean nothing. The wonder of the vastness is inextricable from the horror of our own pointlessness. “[A]ll my tales,” he once wrote, “are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.” 3 Paradoxically, it is precisely this bleak atheist awe that makes Lovecraft a kind of bad-son heir to a religious visionary tradition, an ecstatic tradition, which, in distinction to the everyday separation of matter and spirit, locates the holy in the everyday. Lovecraft, too, sees the awesome as immanent in the quotidian, but there is little ecstasy here: his is a bad numinous.

The wonder and dread are achieved by his career-long depiction of an indifferent universe in which humans are, at most, inquisitive grubs, powerless next to the pantheon of monstrous deities: Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and their kin. In Mountains, it is somewhat less godlike creatures—the Old Ones—whose remains have been found beneath the ice. Next to those other behemoth powers, even the Old Ones are pygmies, although they are still effortlessly able to dispatch humans.

Traditionally, genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces