By George Daniel Lea 
My Life In Horror: Baby’s First Lovecraft (At The Mountains of Madness)
We can’t escape it. Any more than those seekers after the arcane and esoteric whose doom his tales tell of:
The influence of Lovecraft is everywhere, bred in the blood and bones of horror. If you happen to have been born after the man’s -obscure and sadly innocuous- existence, and you happen to enjoy media of the darker inclination, then said influence is already upon you, and has been from the moment you read your first horror comic, watched your first horror film.
My original brushes with what might be termed the “Lovecraftian” have already been explored to some extent in this series. As for many, they were indirect; tangential and unknown to me as such, but inextricably bound up with my life-long obsession with horror itself:
From the ineffable, evolutionary horrors of the original Alien to the more existential species explored in Stephen King’s The Mist, I’ve been encountering -and actively seeking out- Lovecraftian material since I was a boy, long, long before I encountered the man’s work in any direct sense. Video games provided oblique windows onto the themes and subjects of Lovecraftian fiction, from the alien otherness of the original Super Metroid to the obscene body-horror found in the likes of Resident Evil, System Shock 2 etc. Interestingly, the influence of Lovecraftian aesthetics on video games as a medium is profound, and worthy of an essay in and of itself (watch this space).
Without ever realising it, I was slowly marinating in the influence of Lovecraft; a writer I didn’t specifically know, save in terms of reference (King and others made mention him many times during the course of my reading, and I came to understand the allusions of the term before I’d read a single one of the man’s stories).
Even in that inchoate sense, it was apparent to me I had a penchant for the man’s peculiar forms of horror above and beyond the more mundane terrors presented by slasher films or serial-killer myths. The strange, the outré, the monstrous, have fascinated me since I was a young boy; such things have always formed the basis and principle subjects of my imagination. It’s therefore something of a surprise that I never came to him specifically until later.
Fast-forward to my early twenties, my university years: A period of rampant expansion in terms of identity and experience and an insatiable hunger for new fiction in all its forms. It was a rare day during that period I didn’t pick up something new from a local book-store, rarer still I didn’t find myself consuming several books at once. It was during this time I discovered Blake and Dante, Billy Martin (writing as Poppy Z. Brite), Ursula K. Le Guin and Phillip K. Dick (amongst others).
I came to Lovecraft almost out of a strange obligation; already immersed in horror and having started writing my own peculiar species of horror fiction, Lovecraft’s absence felt like a sincere blind-spot; an error in need of correcting. Like Mary Shelley or Edgar Allen Poe, it felt as though I couldn’t take myself seriously in my chosen craft unless I at least experienced his work first-hand.
My first exposures came in the form of two short story collections, their covers suitably lurid and unsettling, headlined by At The Mountains of Madness and The Dunwich Horror respectively. It was with some trepidation I sat down to read them, having little idea of what I was about to experience.
It feels odd to say now, but those earliest communions were hardly successful. Lovecraft, as many who come to enjoy the man’s work will tell you, is an acquired taste: He takes work to understand and enjoy. At the time, I wasn’t ready for that level or degree of commitment; my immediate reaction was based on aesthetics, before I even encountered some of the more questionable ideas his fiction is renowned for.
In retrospect, it was a mistake to start with At The Mountains of Madness; among the man’s most mythologically dense, stylistically challenging works. Whilst it has become a firm favourite in the intervening years, I recall my original reaction being one of intense frustration:
I found his prose dense and verbose, almost self-parodic in its over-description, reliance on multiple adjectives and archaisms that often require specialised dictionaries in order to interpret.
As for the story itself, I enjoyed the sense of isolation he evoked, the early mystery and intrigue the expedition encounters. However, the manner of its communication alienated me so profoundly, I found myself retreating from it, abandoning the book and Lovecraft in general, despite earnest attempts to engage.
It would be some time before I returned to him directly. In the interim, his ideas and imagery; the themes and subjects of his work, recurred constantly in other forms and media:
The horror fiction in which I’ve always been immersed referred to the man’s mythology constantly, some tales even incorporating themselves into the same cosmic horror as present-day additions to the canon. Video games again became deeper gateways into Lovecraftian concerns and notions, most notably the likes of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, arguably the most sincere effort to capture Lovecraftian horror in the medium.
I can’t recall off-hand what spurred me to return to his fiction. The absence of it had always been a persistent itch; a gap in my knowledge of horror and its history that I could never quite reconcile. Whatever the impetus, I found myself once again opening At The Mountains of Madness, not knowing if it would provide what it clearly did for so many others or simply confirm my dislike for what’s generally considered amongst the most iconic and revolutionary horror fiction of the 20th century.
The answer is neither: Whilst the flaws were still evident -arguably even more-so, given my wider context of appreciation-, I found I was able to not merely look past them, but appreciate them in and of themselves:
What he is aching to express in all of his fiction is a species of ineffable, existential horror (that’s often problematically labelled as “Cosmic”); a sense of what it is to be human in the 20th century: A mechanism of matter that’s somehow evolved to be aware of itself and, increasingly, its own profound irrelevance in the face of wider creation. That horror of being contained, sealed away in our skins and skulls, barely able to comprehend our own states before we flicker out in our brevity. . .that is Lovecraft’s horror.
Beyond any elaborate, alien monstrosity; beyond the impossible-to-render Elder Things, their amorphous Shoggoth slaves and the extra-dimensional, alien gods of his mythology, the essential core of what Lovecraft reached for is an expression of our utter, cosmic irrelevance, and how the phenomena we call consciousness isn’t built to grapple with it (much less apprehend it).
His oft-parodied excesses as a writer -the chronic over-description, sentences that run on to entire paragraphs of text, the persistent archaisms- are all derived from this essential yearning:
Lovecraft desperately, desperately aches to express this existential abyss, this aching void at the very core of human existence: The inequitable cruelty that is consciousness. And, in that effort, he drives himself to the brink of self-satire (and, occasionally, right over the edge).
There are few stories in his extensive back-catalogue that exemplify all that is best and worst in his fiction than At The Mountains of Madness. Here, every excess exists to the Nth degree, but so too does every florid idea and image and mystery. Here, the man’s penchant for over-emphasis and description borders on the unbearable (and certainly defies easy understanding).
However, it exists in service to an earnest desire to evoke existential dread in the reader that transcends ready expression. Lovecraft isn’t interested in cheap thrills or immediate threats to general well-being; the horror he seeks to elicit is of a deeper, more resonant species. In that effort, he often over-reaches, resulting in his more parodic qualities. But even in those instances, the sincerity of that dread seeps and pulses from the page. There’s even something to be said for the ostensibly more risible elements of his style resulting in a kind of confusion; a near-delirium that’s akin to an altered state of mind (either chemically or via some psychosis).
His work requires engagement and conscious effort on behalf of the reader to appreciate; there’s an element of learning to love some of the man’s foibles as a writer in order to get the best out of his work. This does not mean looking past or ignoring those elements; such would be an exercise in futility, but taking into account the context of his writing and what he was ultimately attempting to achieve:
Interestingly, despite the profundity of his ideas, Lovecraft isn’t a revolutionary writer; he’s not trying to inspire any kind of change or renaissance with reference to the apparent “evils” he explores in his work. In Lovecraft’s mythologies, it’s already far too late for that; Pandora’s box is open and can never be closed again. All there is to do is sit back and await the awful revelations and existential horrors we might unleash by our delving into realms humanity was never meant to operate in.
That quality is what makes Lovecraft’s writing so effective when the taste for it is acquired: Even at his most excessive, there’s a sumptuous intensity, a visceral terror that builds and builds and builds to abominable crescendo. Many of his stories reach for such a height and depth of horror, he inevitably sets himself up to fail (by his own admission, many of the horrors he seeks to explore are ineffable. Human language and expression isn’t the equal of them).
Even so, the effort is laudable in itself, not entirely unique or revolutionary (many of his predecessors and contemporaries sought similar expression), but it’s arguable Lovecraft who comes closest to touching that particular condition of existential desolation, a horror which threads beyond mere concern for physical well-being and into abstract realms.
Learning to appreciate those qualities was akin to being given the combination to some occult lock or seal. Suddenly, forbidden portals ground open and all manner of fresh hells seeped and slithered out. Whereas originally I’d abandoned and avoided the man’s work, now I devoured it ravenously, starting with that original foray:
At The Mountains of Madness became my gateway, the work that drew me in and gave me a road map of the man’s obsessions, peculiarities and contentions. As an introduction, it’s simultaneously the best and worst of times: It contains practically every concept that obsessed the man during his lifetime, as well as many of the images his name has become synonymous with (there are arguably few more classically “Lovecraftian” tales in the man’s extensive canon). When it comes to the extended mythology against which most of his tales are set, there are few as explicit in its exploration as this:
What begins as a tale of ineffable, alien horror gradually shifts into one of cosmic, existential revelation as Arctic explorers discover a lost city upon whose walls is recorded a hieroglyphic account of the world’s unknown history; a history that includes profoundly inhuman, alien species that occupied the planet long before the original evolution of humanity (and who may, in fact, have a hand -or tendril- in engineering that evolution): The extra-dimensional, god-like “Old Ones,” who operate in spheres of existence so profoundly beyond humanity’s comprehension, their presence alone foments madness and physical malformation.
Here, he paints the picture of not only a world whose strata and geological history hides terrible secrets and forbidden revelations, but also a cosmos whose nature is so far beyond our comprehension, even to attempt engagement with it is to court madness and open the gateway to corrosive alien influence. As is the case in most of the man’s work, the unknown is a terrible, yawning abyss where sanity becomes anathema, where the mere fact of geological and cosmic time becomes in themselves articles of horror.
This is the subtle appeal of At The Mountains of Madness; a sincere grappling with a species of existential terror we all feel at our cores, in the most forbidden and denied depths of our subconscious. Unlike many -even those of us who operate in horror in some capacity-, he seems to have had no barrier or distinction separating him from that abyss: It’s clear from the likes of At The Mountains of Madness that this existential anxiety preoccupied him to such a degree it often eclipsed immediate concerns of living or social operation.
His overt and overwhelming agenda here is to communicate that to his readership, to slowly break the seals on the forbidden doorways of their psyches and have them peer into that darkness, no matter what happens to peer back.
It’s a profound and ambitious agenda for any horror tale; one that’s arguably doomed to failure, in some respects, yet the effort is laudable. He rarely writes arbitrarily or whimsically; there’s always a great sense of macabre import in his work, and At The Mountains of Madness exemplifies that quality:
There’s nothing approaching irony or self-consciousness here. He is sincerity itself as a writer (for both good and bad), intent on not only communicating cosmic terror to the reader, but that they feel it to their core. His success in that regard is a matter of debate: On the one hand, the baroque, over-embellished nature of his descriptions creates a nightmare-like ethos in which details swirl and merge, the horrors he conjures almost too elaborate for imagination to grasp. On the other, there’s a credible criticism that his over-description occasionally robs his prose of immediacy and elegance, diluting the very qualities he’s attempting to evoke.
For my part, it took time and a degree of perseverance before I could fully appreciate the sincere genius of his work; that desperate yearning for an existential condition almost beyond description, that Lovecraft himself couches in language of dread and horror, but the sincere awe of which bleeds through from every page.
He reaches through the story for a mental condition, an emotional and intellectual state, in which all context and assumption are blasted apart. He attempts to subtly inveigle the reader early on, enticing us with mystery, before the story descends into near-violent efforts to drag us into the Stygian depths of its horror. After events start to snow-ball, Lovecraft introduces so many ideas and concepts and existential confusions as to leave the reader bewildered and breathless.
Far from being a fault, this is part of the sincere joy of the story; in order to appreciate it fully, it’s necessary to approach it in an almost zen-like state of intellectual stillness; to not obsess too deeply over its imponderables and just let the experience wash over and through. There’s a cascading effect to it all, in which the reader slips and slides and delves deeper and deeper just as the characters do, as unfathomable alternative histories and alien timelines conflict with our assumptions of the past, even our own origins and evolution.
Beyond the immediate horrors Lovecraft describes -the various alien monstrosities that secretly infest the lesser-wandered portions of our planet-, the story seeks to unseat the pervasive historical assumption that human beings have any poetic meaning or wider destiny in the grand scheme of the cosmos:
Here, he slowly builds to the revelation that human beings are the product of a kind of forced evolution by a race of alien “Elder Things,” essentially a slave-race specifically bred to engage in physical labour for their bizarre overlords. In this, Lovecraft eradicates all of human mythology regarding its creation and essential nature, obliterates any less-specific notion we might entertain regarding our place in the cosmos:
All of recorded human history exists because, at some point in unfathomable primordia, our ancestors rose up against their creators and either murdered them or drove them into hiding. We are products of technologies and intelligences we cannot hope to fathom, designed to be slaves and chattel rather than entities of any wider poetry.
That, more than any of the extant monstrosities he throws at us -and this story contains quite a few- is the true source of horror here. Beyond any threats to self or physical preservation, the story pulses with an incipient, existential dread; an abyssal despair concerning the utterly incidental nature of human existence. Here, humanity is, at best, an expendable resource, at worst, barely a by-product of more profound, ineffable processes. In a single deft sweep, Lovecraft consigns all of human culture and history to the abyss, proclaiming it little more than a futile fleck of nothing in the eye of creation.
In the face of such nihilistic, misanthropic horror, sanity can barely sustain. This, more than anything, is what so consistently drives his characters to madness: The Great Old Ones, such as Cthulhu and Azathoth, are ultimately metaphors for the existential despair innate to our conditions: The universe, reality itself, is so much more complex and incomprehensible than any of our assumptions allow for. Even science, which arguably brings us closer than any ideology or system we’ve thus far contrived, serves only as the key to deeper mysteries, more fathomless abysses and the horrors they contain.
In that, the overwhelming nihilism, the utter existential despair of his work, may prove alienating for some in itself: It’s a mistake to approach his writing expecting clear-cut resolutions or any kind of moral conclusion. These are not stories in which human value can win out, because part of their essence lies in the deconstruction of the very notion.
Here, humanity has no grander metaphysics, no poetry or purpose. Even those we apply to ourselves, through our arts, cultures and sciences, mean absolutely nothing in the face of the cosmic and extra-dimensional revelations waiting to drive us insane and consume us both physically and abstractly. The unrelenting nature of that quintessential despair might prove alienating to those seeking something more reinforcing from their horror fiction (the demon banished, the ghost exorcised, the power of faith, love, family and/or reason winning the day).
He has no interest in such things; for all the issues his fiction presents (both technically and in terms of theme and subject), his consistent, over-arching design is in evoking dread that borders on despair, not merely the fear of immediate or physical harm, but a species that fillets us to the soul, leaves us hollow and without the delusion of hope.
Whilst he might not always hit that mark -and occasionally lapses into the ridiculous in its pursuit-, the ambition alone is oddly laudable; a kind of challenge to self-fancied fans of horror media (You consider what you consume horror? He seems to ask. Do you dare stare into this abyss? Do you dare look past the aesthetic and into the true darkness at the heart of being?).
For some, the lure of that forbidden knowledge, the sumptuous, unambiguous horror of what Lovecraft presents, is irresistible; we are so made that the abyss sings to us, the forbidden is a Siren song. In many respects, Lovecraft draws parallels between readers of his fiction and his protagonists (almost all of whom are seekers after the arcane and the unknown, driven by a curiosity that cannot be sated, and ultimately proves self-destructive). We come to his work in the same spirit; that same desire for forbidden secrets, sanity-blasting revelation, heedless of the wider consequences or actively flaunting them (in the very best manner of Herbert West, among others).
Returning to At The Mountains of Madness served as my gateway into his work as a whole; an acquired taste that took time and conscious consideration to cultivate. I can certainly see a circumstance in which I never returned to his fiction, and I would’ve been the poorer for it.
Love or loathe him (and I can certainly see how one can fall into either camp), the man’s legacy, the DNA of his work, is as intrinsic and quintessential to horror fiction as his chief inspiration, Edgar Allen Poe, or previous generations of luminaries in the genre (Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker etc). If you read or experience horror media in any format, it’s impossible to avoid Lovecraft’s influence to some greater or lesser degree. For me, it was important to engage with that legacy, in all of its problems and ambiguities.
It remains to this day one of the most complex and turbulent relationships I have with media of any kind; a state as fluid and changeable as the various metamorphic horrors the man himself conjures.
George Daniel Lea 26-02-2025
Further Reading
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The passionate team behind The Ginger Nuts of Horror delivers thoughtful critiques and recommendations that delve into the nuances of storytelling, character development, and atmospheric tension. Whether you’re looking for hidden gems to stream on a dark and stormy night or want to explore the work of up-and-coming horror filmmakers, this page is packed with content that will ignite your imagination and keep you on the edge of your seat.
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