The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (2 page)

So … why do they? Why do I?

And why on earth do we have the temerity to think that we can add something to a genre that already has thousands of stories and hundreds of novels in it, not to mention movies, TV shows, comic books, toys, board and video games, and even live-action role-playing.

Well … we were invited here by a guy named Howard.

Lovecraft created a great big, albeit insanely warped, canvas and then let anyone and everyone paint or scribble or splash or draw on that canvas. There has always been a long line of writers just waiting to dip a brush or a palette knife or a finger in the color box and make strange shapes on the canvas.

And here’s the freaky part. Every picture we paint is the right picture.

There isn’t a set of rules or guidelines. The Mythos is so much bigger than that. It’s like telling stories about our world. If one writer tells a tale about a boy going rafting down the mighty Mississippi, then that is as real, as true, as valid as a writer telling about the clash of armies in the dusty Mongolian steppes or a tale told about an old woman trying to draw water from a dry well in West Africa. Infinite variety, same world.

Lovecraft, however, gave us more than one world.

He gave us infinite worlds.

Here, in this volume, are a few wonderful glimpses into those worlds. A few glimpses at the infinite possibilities of a larger and darker world as seen through the eyes and perceptions of the contributors.

I’m now in my middle fifties, and even though I read every Lovecraft-inspired story I can get my hands on, I haven’t scratched the surface. Not even a little. There are so many stories out there about shambling things and elder gods and pulsating protean masses and lost cities that I know I’ll always have something new to read.

What delights me at the moment, though, is the knowledge that you, holding this book, have before you an entirely new batch of original Cthulhu stories. I know what it feels like to turn the page and be drawn back into the Mythos.

And for those who, like a certain thirteen-year-old boy way back when who tottered out of Sprague de Camp’s house with a double-armful of books, are about to experience the madness and magic of Cthulhu for the very first time. Wow! You’re going to see things you never imagined and go places you did not know existed.

Come on, turn that page … let’s go together. The darkness is waiting for us.

H. P. L
OVECRAFT WROTE
A
T THE
M
OUNTAINS OF
M
ADNESS
IN THE
first two months of 1931; but his fascination with the great white south was of much longer duration, dating to his boyhood at the turn of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he was twelve years old, he had written such treatises as “Voyages of Capt. Ross, R.N.” and “Wilkes’s Explorations”; in 1903 he compiled an “Antarctic Atlas.” None of these juvenile works survives, but the subject-matter of the first two is suggestive: they deal with Antarctic explorations of more than half a century before.

The history of Antarctic exploration can be said to begin with Captain James Cook, who attempted in 1772–74 to reach the South Pole but had to turn back because of the ice fields. Edward Bransfield of England actually sighted the Antarctic continent on January 30, 1820, and Alexander I Island (a large island off the coast of what is now called the Antarctic Peninsula) was discovered by Fabian von Bellingshausen on January 29, 1821.

In the late 1830s several expeditions did much to chart various portions of Antarctica. The American Charles Wilkes went to the Antarctic, bizarrely enough, to test the hollow earth theory proposed in 1818 by John Cleves Symmes (a theory Lovecraft attacked in a letter to the
Providence Journal
of 1906). Wilkes’s expedition of 1838–40 actually sighted land on January 19, 1840. By January 30 he had seen enough of the landmass to be certain that an actual continent was involved, not merely a series of islands or a huge frozen sea, and he made a momentous pronouncement: “Now that all were convinced of its existence, I gave the land the name of the Antarctic Continent.”

The Englishman James Clark Ross left England on September 25, 1839, for the purpose of exploring the huge ice shelf that now bears his name. In doing so, he discovered the small island at the mouth of the ice shelf now called Ross Island and named the two enormous volcanoes there (Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror) after his two ships, the
Erebus
and the
Terror
. Dr. Joseph Hooker, one of the ship’s doctors, gives a vivid impression of the first sight of Mt. Erebus: “This was a sight so surpassing everything that can be imagined … that it really caused a feeling of awe to steal over us at the consideration of our own comparative insignificance and helplessness, and at the same time, an indescribable feeling of the greatness of the Creator in the works of His hand.” The atheist Lovecraft would certainly have echoed the first half of that utterance, but expressed doubts about the second half.

Lovecraft wrote his little treatises just as new explorations were being undertaken. The Norwegian Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink launched an expedition of 1898–1900 whose great achievement was to have established the first camp on actual Antarctic soil. In a 1935 letter Lovecraft stated: “I think it was the newspaper accounts of Borchgrevingk’s [
sic
] second expedition of 1900 … which first captured my attention & interest.” By 1902, Lovecraft reported in another letter, “I had read virtually everything in fact or fiction concerning the Antarctic, & was breathlessly awaiting news of the first Scott expedition.” This latter remark must refer to the expedition by Robert Scott on the
Discovery
, which left New Zealand in August 1901, the high point of which was an attempt by Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Edward Wilson to traverse the Ross Ice Shelf beginning on November 2, 1902; the team, ill-equipped for so arduous a journey, was forced to turn back on December 30 and almost died on the return trip.

Lovecraft also admitted to writing “many fanciful tales about the Antarctic Continent” in youth; but none of these survive. He somehow did not find the impetus to write his Antarctic tale until well along in his mature literary career.

At the Mountains of Madness
was written at a critical juncture in that career. In 1926, he had written “The Call of Cthulhu”—a tale that not only launched the Cthulhu Mythos but that initiated a remarkable final decade of writing highlighted by such masterworks as “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), and “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35). By this time, Lovecraft had come to realize that the advance of science had caused the standard motifs of supernatural fiction—the ghost, the vampire, the werewolf, the witch, and so on—to become utterly played out and implausible. An entirely new approach was needed. The tales of the Cthulhu Mythos constituted one such approach: as Fritz Leiber has keenly stated, these stories were revolutionary because they “shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space.”
At the Mountains of Madness
was a critical work in this process. In a letter written at the very time he was writing the novella, Lovecraft stated:

The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming
supplements
rather than
contradictions
of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of
non-supernatural fantastic art
, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?

It is for this reason that the earlier parts of
At the Mountains of Madness
are so filled with details about the geology, biology, and botany of the Antarctic continent. Lovecraft’s lifelong studies in science were put to good use, but they also enhance the verisimilitude of the story so that the incursion of the bizarre—first the discovery of the cryogenically frozen Old Ones, then the encounter with an even more alien entity, the shoggoth—can seem plausible.

It was in this novella, too, that Lovecraft definitively “demythologized” the “gods” of his Mythos. In earlier tales (especially “The Dunwich Horror” (1928)), such entities as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Shug-Niggurath could be seen as godlike (they certainly have their share of human worshipers), whose doings are recorded in such occult treatises as the
Necronomicon
of Abdul Alhazred. But when, in
At the Mountains of Madness
, the protagonists study the bas-reliefs of the titanic city of the Old Ones, a staggering revelation dawns upon them: the Old Ones “were the makers and enslavers of [earth] life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the
Necronomicon
affrightedly hint about. They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young.” So now, the stories about the “gods” found in the
Necronomicon
are mere “myths”!

Another remarkable feature of
At the Mountains of Madness
is the gradual, insidious way in which the entities that first cause such perturbation to the human protagonists, Dr. William Dyer and a graduate student, Danforth—the barrel-shaped Old Ones—are later rehabilitated, from a moral and cultural perspective. It is true that the Old Ones apparently caused the deaths of many men and dogs in the sub-expedition undertaken by Professor Lake; but this is later explained as a natural result of their unexpectedly coming back to life after millions of years and finding themselves besieged by fur-covered bipeds and quadrupeds whose nature and intentions they cannot fathom. As Dyer and Danforth continue to study those bas-reliefs, they come to a momentous conclusion:

Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them … and this was their tragic homecoming…. Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

For, of course, the real horrors of
At the Mountains of Madness
are the baleful shoggoths—those protoplasmic beasts of burden created by the Old Ones—who later revolted against their masters and apparently overthrew them. The emergence of one surviving shoggoth toward the end of the story constitutes one of the most spectacularly terrifying passages in the history of weird fiction.

At the Mountains of Madness
is the pinnacle of Lovecraft’s “cosmic” vision and of his union of traditional supernatural fiction with the burgeoning genre of science fiction. The epic scope of the novella, both in time and in space, is impressive; and there is a further twist in that Lovecraft provides a kind of humiliating “origin of species” courtesy of the Old Ones’ ability to create life. It is bad enough that the Old Ones appear to have created all earth-life as “jest or mistake”; but later we learn that the Old Ones also created a “shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.” This must be one of the most misanthropic utterances ever made—the degradation of humanity can go no further.

And yet, the fate of the novella in print was not a happy one. Lovecraft apparently devised the tale so that it could be printed as a two-part serial, with a division in its exact middle, after Section VI. But, when he sent the story to Farnsworth Wright of
Weird Tales
in the spring of 1931, Wright sat on it for months before finally rejecting it. Lovecraft bitterly records the reasons Wright gave for the rejection:

Yes—Wright “explained” his rejection of the “Mountains of Madness” in almost the same language as that with which he “explained” other recent rejections to [Frank Belknap] Long & [August] Derleth. It was “too long”, “not easily divisible into parts”, “not convincing”—& so on. Just what he has said of other things of mine (except for length)—some of which he has ultimately accepted after many hesitations.

Lovecraft was devastated. Unusually sensitive to rejection, he refused to submit the tale to any other market. Finally, in late 1935, the young Julius Schwartz, wishing to establish himself as an agent in the science fiction and fantasy field, asked Lovecraft if he had any unpublished manuscript that he could market. Lovecraft gave him
At the Mountains of Madness
. Seeing that it was a tale that could easily pass for science fiction, Schwartz took it to the offices of
Astounding Stories
, telling editor F. Orlin Tremaine: “I have here a 40,000-word novella by H. P. Lovecraft.” Tremaine accepted it at once, without reading it. He paid $350 for it; after Schwartz’s 10 percent cut, that left $315 for Lovecraft.

But when Lovecraft saw its appearance as a three-part serial in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of
Astounding
, he was outraged. Many, many editorial alterations had been made, chiefly in matters of punctuation and in chopping down Lovecraft’s long and leisurely paragraphs into shorter ones; toward the end, about a thousand words were simply omitted, to speed up the climax. So incensed was Lovecraft at this butchery that he regarded the story as essentially unpublished.

But the opportunity for the republication of the story in its unadulterated form did not occur until long after his death. August Derleth, when preparing the story for inclusion in the first Arkham House volume,
The Outsider and Others
(1939), used Lovecraft’s own annotated copy of
Astounding
, where he had laboriously written in some—but by no means all—the corrections to the text; but this text still contained more than fifteen hundred errors, including such things as the capitalization of “shoggoth,” which Lovecraft was careful to lower-case in his manuscript and typescript, since he regarded it as a species name and not a proper name. Finally, I restored the text, based on Lovecraft’s typescript, in my corrected edition of
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels
(Arkham House, 1985). This text has now been reprinted in
At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Text
(Modern Library, 2005), although I in fact make no claims that my text is “definitive.”