Episodes 77 - 83 ~ At the Mountains of Madness

[Lambda]

This was the first HPL story I read, and while I think it's a great gateway drug it's gone from being my first love to one of my least favorite stories of his.. I think my biggest problem with it isn't the meandering structure or the sort of ridiculous elder things, but it's the way he almost completely ignores or bungles the audio. Tekeli-li? Seriously? It's such a specific onomatopoeia it's almost impossible to wringe it into any sort of form that causes the slightest inkling of unease. Beyond this, we're left with generic windy antarctic and, er, squawking penguins. OH GOD NO NOT THE PENGUINS.

It's hard to get that one without having read arthur gordon pym. Heck, it's hard enough to get it even if you've read that one. It wasn't intended to be creepy. If I read this correctly, it was just intended to be mysterious.

Holy crap! I never made that connection before, mostly because I completely forgot that Pnakotus was the name of the Yithian city (man, it's been awhile since I read "Shadow Out of Time"). But you're right! Pnakotus is totally the name of the Yithian city, and once you realize that, the clear implication is that the Pnakotic Manuscripts is a product of Pnakotus, and the manuscripts we know of from Pnakotus are the product of abducted minds from all over time and space...

Heh, Chris&Chad didn't get that either.  I lol'd when I heard it on the show.

[old book]

Great points by Eibon and TheSnark! I guess I agree with Joshi that At the Mountains wasn't so much inspired by Pym as paying tribute to Poe with little details. The last page of the Poe novel is this weird non-explanation of certain AEthiopian, Coptic and Semitic glyphs. I'm guessing Poe modeled the bird-call Tekeli-li! on the strange "writing on the wall" in the story of Esther (I think it's in the story of Esther), which has a double meaning. Lovecraft is playing around with the Turanian root-race implications I suppose, instinctual language vs. intellectual language.

The guest was completely comprehensible to me and the skype line wasn't really worse than normal. I'd appreciate it if Sich and Chard could find a Lovecraft expert in the wild heath in the Scottish highlands and get him or her on a muffled cell phone, in the wind, while he or she is munching some haggis, next time. Thanks guys.

Nice to finally achieve Pnakosis on those weird old MSS., thanx!

About those "witchy mountains," I guess Howard was on to something. Some very witchy mountains were just detected deep under the cap in East Antarctica. I assume he meant they were shaped like the tall conical hats in the witch stereotype, the ones the Tocharian shamanesses also wore.



http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/01/radar-mapping-reveals-ancient-antarctic-giant-fiords/

Radar mapping reveals ancient Antarctic giant fjords
Posted on June 1, 2011 by Anthony Watts

From the University of Texas at Austin

New map reveals giant fjords beneath East Antarctic ice sheet

....

(one man's fnjord is another man's craggy witch mountain, depending on the ambient sea level)

[Bulbatron]

Yet another great episode.  I'm usually utterly rubbish at reading graphic novels, but perhaps I'll make an exception for 'At the Mountains of Madness'.  Is it available in digital form?

[Genus Unknown]

I haven't been able to find the AtMoM graphic novel in digital format, but I did order it from Amazon a couple of days ago. I'll let you know how it is.

By the way, I think I finally put my finger on what I don't like about this story: its density.

The early parts (i.e., the parts that have been covered on the show so far) are fine. You've got Antarctic adventure, some personal conflict, the mountains, the Elder Things, and the disaster at the Lake camp. That's all good stuff, and enough for a story.

But that's just the beginning. As the story goes on, we find ourselves slammed with every "mythos" reference HPL could squeeze out of his brain. He piles it on, and piles it on, and piles it on. We get a detailed prehistory of the Earth, with different groups of space monsters battling for control. We get a history of the Elder Thing civilization, and their decline. We get a shoggoth attack. We get glimpses of something beyond the mountains.

It's all just too much. What must this story be like for someone who's never read Lovecraft? How confused must any casual reader be when they put it down?

Remember HPL's criticism of the Dream-Quest?

[These] adventures may have reached the point of palling on the reader; or that the very plethora of weird imagery may have destroyed the power of any one image to produce the desired impression of strangeness.

I think the same could be said of AtMoM. Also applicable is our duo's criticism of "The Mound" - that it starts out with a great hook that makes you want to know more, and then kills it with page after page after page of long-winded, frankly boring explanation.

[catamount]

Yeah, I agree Lovecraft just piles on the Mythos references ad nauseam. This tale, along with Dreamquest are ones that I would not recommend to anyone not familiar with Lovecraft's work. I never read this until Chad and Chris announced it was up next. I'm so glad I waited, if I had read this years ago, I wouldn't have gotten the same enjoyment out of it.

So my question is this, in order to truly enjoy this story to the fullest, what Lovecraft stories do you believe should be considered essential reading prior to hiking the Mountains of Madness?

[Bob Lovecraft]

I listened to several audio dramas of this story before I was ever able to read it in a book, and even then, it put me to sleep every night for a week before it got good. I would recommend some of the adaptations of this story to anyone who wants to read HPL, but I would only recommend reading the book if you are a completest.

Bob

[Genus Unknown]

Despite everything I said above, I'm giving it another shot. I read the first few chapters last night, and taking it slow seems to be the key. Like Dream-Quest, you have to sort of wade into it gently. Give each new development time to sink in.

I ended up reading myself to sleep with it last night, and dreamed I was camping at the foot of the mountains. I guess that would put me in the Lake camp, so it's a good thing I woke up before anything else could develop.

So my question is this, in order to truly enjoy this story to the fullest, what Lovecraft stories do you believe should be considered essential reading prior to hiking the Mountains of Madness?

"The Call of Cthulhu"
"The Dunwich Horror"
"The Whisperer in Darkness"

There's plenty more, but those three ought to give anyone enough background to at least attempt to tackle it. "Whisperer" in particular; in some vague way that I can't quite put my finger on, this story really reminds me of "Whisperer."

By the way, check out this little snippet from "The Dunwich Horror:"

The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraved, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles?

He's had Antarctica on the brain for a while.

[Genus Unknown]

Another thing: Chris says that HPL gives too much description of the Elder Things, while others (particularly SF writers and letter-writing readers of Astounding Stories) criticize this story for its vagueness. Pondering that tipped me off to a neat little trick HPL is using here.

There are three levels of description used in this story.

In the beginning, everything is laid out with scientific minuteness. The voyage, the drilling apparatus, the Antarctic landscape, all are very fleshed-out. Even when we encounter the first monsters, the Elder Things, they are described in painstaking detail. We have measurements, thorough descriptions of their various parts and appendages, and even a look at their inner workings. The ETs are strange, but describable and knowable. This grounds the story firmly in reality (or at least realism), even when describing something as outlandish as a frozen alien monster. This is the first level.

Later in the story, Dyer and Danforth encounter a shoggoth. This is given more of a classic Lovecraftian "description" - hurried, impressionistic, and vague. The scientific minuteness displayed earlier in the story serves to show by contrast the nature of the threats they face on this expedition; the Elder Things were bad enough, but at least those could be properly described. The shoggoth is something else, something less describable. This is the second level.

Finally, at the very end, as Dyer and Danforth are flying away from the mountains, Danforth has his "Lot's wife" moment and looks back, going bonkers on the spot. We've reached the third level, where even the ordinary Lovecraftian vagueness cannot serve to describe the horror. Danforth has gotten the briefest possible glimpse of what lies beyond the mountains, and his ravings and babblings are so varied, disjointed, and contradictory that the reader can't come up with a mental picture of the thing at all. Even our narrator has no idea what Danforth saw, and Danforth refuses to tell him.

So throughout the story, we progress (or regress) from the most painstakingly detailed descriptions at the beginning, to the vaguest flashes of absolute batshit insanity at the end. The entire expedition is a journey deeper and deeper into madness; the further they go and the more they see, the less sense any of it makes and the more impossible it is to describe. We start in realism, end in surrealism. Start with knowledge, end with confusion.

I see what you did there, HPL.

[theuglyamerican]

Another thing: Chris says that HPL gives too much description of the Elder Things, while others (particularly SF writers and letter-writing readers of Astounding Stories) criticize this story for its vagueness. Pondering that tipped me off to a neat little trick HPL is using here.

There are three levels of description used in this story.

In the beginning, everything is laid out with scientific minuteness. The voyage, the drilling apparatus, the Antarctic landscape, all are very fleshed-out. Even when we encounter the first monsters, the Elder Things, they are described in painstaking detail. We have measurements, thorough descriptions of their various parts and appendages, and even a look at their inner workings. The ETs are strange, but describable and knowable. This grounds the story firmly in reality (or at least realism), even when describing something as outlandish as a frozen alien monster. This is the first level.

Later in the story, Dyer and Danforth encounter a shoggoth. This is given more of a classic Lovecraftian "description" - hurried, impressionistic, and vague. The scientific minuteness displayed earlier in the story serves to show by contrast the nature of the threats they face on this expedition; the Elder Things were bad enough, but at least those could be properly described. The shoggoth is something else, something less describable. This is the second level.

Finally, at the very end, as Dyer and Danforth are flying away from the mountains, Danforth has his "Lot's wife" moment and looks back, going bonkers on the spot. We've reached the third level, where even the ordinary Lovecraftian vagueness cannot serve to describe the horror. Danforth has gotten the briefest possible glimpse of what lies beyond the mountains, and his ravings and babblings are so varied, disjointed, and contradictory that the reader can't come up with a mental picture of the thing at all. Even our narrator has no idea what Danforth saw, and Danforth refuses to tell him.

So throughout the story, we progress (or regress) from the most painstakingly detailed descriptions at the beginning, to the vaguest flashes of absolute batshit insanity at the end. The entire expedition is a journey deeper and deeper into madness; the further they go and the more they see, the less sense any of it makes and the more impossible it is to describe. We start in realism, end in surrealism. Start with knowledge, end with confusion.

I see what you did there, HPL.

Nice pickup!  It's been a long time since I even attempted the story (and I've never finished it) but as I understand it, Arthur Gordon Pym follows the same trajectory -- by the end, it's plainly left concrete reality behind.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Nice observations there, Genus unknown. I've never really thought that in-depth about HPL's descriptive style, but I see that you are dead on with this one. I only have one tidbit to contribute, and that is that since this protagonists of this story were scientists, and the descriptions of the Elder Thing were being given in the form of an autopsy report, there was no real way for Lake to describe them in any other way. I think HPL could have side-stepped the description by having Lake write the observations down in stead of broadcasting them, )but that would have shown Lake to be a completely emotionless doofus, what with him being unimpressed enough to keep the greatest scientific find of the millennium in a notebook instead of getting all excited and shouting about it) and having Dyer find the notebook and say something like, "I shall not describe to you the hideous dimensions of the thing's anatomy as Lake cataloged it. I will simply say that nothing on this earth was ever so grotesque that it was related to this unholy, star-spawned abomination."

So I think the descriptive style is a function of the setting it was in at the time of its reporting, whereas the other descriptive styles were made under extreme stress (the shoggoth) and during a mental break (the "Lot's Wife" moment) and were appropriate to those situations. He uses the same technique in "Call of Cthulhu" when LeGrasse brings his idol to the archeology (anthropology?) convention and it is described by professors used to taken meticulous notes.

Bob

PS - The name is pronounced Gedny, Chirs, not Gendy.

[Genus Unknown]

Anyone shared any pics of the Giants' Causeway yet? 'Cause the idea that this is a natural formation is freaking weird:

[Bob Lovecraft]

you know, I've never believed that you could get a geological formation that symmetrical on a scale that large. Yes, i understand you can get crystal lattice formations like this on a tiny scale, but this large and this regular? No way.

Bob

[Mike J.]

Regarding The Giants' Causeway: the same phenomenon resulted in Devil's Tower, which may be more familiar to Americans. *Cough* Close Encounters of the Third Kind *cough* Ahem. When we see Devil's Tower we're seeing the 'crystals' from the side - when we see the Giants' Causeway, we're seeing the 'crystals' from the top.


-Mike J.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Yeah, I still don't buy it. It has to be something cosmically horrifying. It just makes more sense. Crystals forming huge geometrically perfect formations: total crap. Beings of outer entity traveling to earth on membranous wings to create man as a joke and then screw with him by making things like The Giant's Causeway and The Devil's Tower: totally plausible.

Bob

[Eric Lofgren]

The topic of Hyperborea came up in Ep.4 and I believe Chad was suggesting that Howard's Conan stories were set in the Hyberborean Age. It was actually called the Hyborian Age. Hyperborea, iirc, was a country in the Conan stories, though.

Another one out of the park. Great stuff so far. And I.N.J. is a great guest