Hello everyone and welcome to the thirteenth week of our book club exploring H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle.
In this week’s thread we discuss the first 5 chapters of At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931. Our reading assignment for this week is the second half of At the Mountains of Madness, from Chapter VI onwards.
A PDF of the short story is found in the collected works curated by the Arkham Archivist here. A LibriVox audio recording is available here.
Very sorry for the late submission this week. My department is hosting an algebra conference and I’m spending my evenings “networking” (read: getting drunk while ranting about the Representation Theory of algebraic groups). Unfortunately, pleasure has to be sidelined by business until Wednesday evening. I’ll post comments on the first five chapters as soon as possible but expect significant delays for this week.
On the off-chance that the set of British Lemmy Users interested in Lovecraft and Representation theory of algebraic groups isn’t a one-member set, I’m the guy with the beard in a purple mushroom shirt.
Image Credit goes to Deviantartist Zhekan.
Chapter IV pulls back the veil on the convenient lies told in Chapter III.
While the group reported that all but one human body was found and all sled dogs were dead, in fact two human bodies were missing from the campsite and all but one dog was found. Further inspection of the site revealed that clumsy dissections of the human bodies had taken place, and most bodies were missing various chunks. A large pile of viscera was determined to belong to an eleventh human body and the body of a sled dog. Evidently, the cruel imprecise hacks at these bodies hint at early experimentation with dissection equipment. The group rejects the idea that the missing scientist Gedney could be possible for this barbarity. Unfortunately, a need to cover up that events of this site led to the convenient attribution of the deaths to a maddened Gedney.
Though sufficiently scared, the surviving group are singularly taken with a sense of scientific adventure and so seek out the ancient discoveries. The cave mouths leading to the large hollow complex seem suspiciously uniform in size and shape, and are entirely absent of stalactites stalagmites. The group begin to conceive of an intelligent design to the cave complex.
Dyer and fellow Poe reader Danforth ascend the mountain by plane, wanting to see what lies beyond the mountain range. They eventually glimpse beyond the peak to spy an ancient and alien landscape.
This draws the mind back to Carter’s shantak flight from Inganok to Leng as the prisoner of the strange merchant. So far this very much seems like a waking world parallel to Unknown Kadath.
Here again we see our favourite Lovecraftian trope of an ostensibly intelligent person being acutely aware of horror and impending doom, yet borne onwards by an insatiable lust for knowledge.