The Madness of Darkness

"Out from ruins once possessed
Fallen city, living death"

Metallica - The Thing That Should Not Be

At the Mountains of Madness does not feel like an H. P. Lovecraft story. After a chapter or two I half thought I'd picked up John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? by mistake, and not just because of its Antarctic expedition setting... or the shapeshifting monsters. In fact, Campbell's version (published two years after Lovecraft's and one year after the latter's convenient death, in the same magazine which Campbell had taken over as editor, and which horror tale would go in to inspire several movies and an entire subculture of alien doppelganger fiction) draws a suspicious amount of apparent inspiration from Lovecraft's. But as this blog post concerns itself neither with the letter nor the moral spirit of the rules surrounding plagiarism, let us skip trippingly along.

Lovecraft primarily banked on our fear of the unknown. Most of his tales hold the monster out of focus until the last moment, dangling only a few hints of its physical attributes before the reader. Their tone approached Romantic-era thrillers in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Lovecraft seems to have idolized. His mythical sunken city of R'lyeh resembles Poe's The City in the Sea much more than any of the endless myths and adventure stories about Atlantis. Purple, mythical, mystical, unknowable, indefinable, oneiric, suspenseful Gothic horror for a new century, this was my impression of Lovecraft from the twenty or so short stories I'd read. At the Mountains of Madness in contrast was obviously written with both a geographic atlas and a paleontology tract in hand. Not that this makes its scientific literacy all that impressive from my futuristic vantage point. If nothing else, the altitudes at which the heroes were working should've had them gasping their lungs inside out within five minutes from the strain of sitting, much less racing around an entire city copying murals.
But still.
The story provides more rationalization by far than his previous fare, makes exhaustive references to Antarctic geography, catalogues the Elder Things' alien morphology and physiology, tracks their civilization across major geological periods with references to the continent's climate changes, and most importantly sets up the beginnings of an overarching framework integrating the Elder Things' history with R'lyeh and the Mi-Go. Speaking of which, the story he wrote immediately preceding this one makes me think his switch in tone wasn't a one-off.

The Whisperer in Darkness starts out much like Lovecraft's earlier stories, with hints and portents of raptors in the night. But, halfway through, it ramps up to detailed descriptions of the Mi-Go and exposition as to their origins, material nature and policies vis-a-vis the naked ape. It's especially noteworthy for its ambiguity as to the Mi-Go's motivations, with its unreliably narrated conversations toward the end wide open to interpretation, where in earlier stories the inhuman monsters were almost universally malicious or at least wantonly destructive. In the larger context of his career, you can almost see Lovecraft transitioning thematically from superstition to science fiction as Whisperer progresses. On one hand, this renders his later repeated references to Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym in Mountains of Madness all the more touching, as though Lovecraft couldn't help but reaffirm his admiration of his bygone hero even as he himself outgrew the horror/mystery style of a century prior and took the first steps toward stitching together a coherent cosmology for future works. It also shines a new light on arguably Lovecraft's most accomplished tale, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, one of only two of his major works written after this period, which was carefully composed to allow for materialistic explanations despite the demonic air with which its narrator perceives events.

Then Howard died.

In 1936, five years after it was written, At the Mountains of Madness with its rationalization of worlds beyond into ersatz science was finally published, and a year later, a few months after Lovecraft's death, the magazine was taken over by John W. Campbell, the godfather of hard Science Fiction. In 1938 Campbell published the acclaimed Who Goes There? and Lovecraft remains known to the public as a writer of supernatural horror and not sci-fi.

So here's one of those "what might've been?" questions. If Lovecraft had not died at the age of 46 in relative obscurity, if he had continued his later career's shift toward SF and cobbled together an overarching cosmology for his works, if he had ridden subsequent decades' shift into hard SF alongside Campbell's other golden age writers like Heinlein and Asimov, how would our popular fiction look today? What would Middle-Earth be without The Silmarillion? A couple of romantic, nostalgic adventure stories?