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Автор Говард Филлипс Лавкрафт
At the Mountains of Madness
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
1936
On an expedition to Antarctica, Professor William Dyer and his colleagues discover the remains of ancient half-vegetable, half-animal life-forms. The extremely early date in the geological strata is surprising because of the highly-evolved features found in these previously unknown life-forms. Through a series of dark revelations, violent episodes, and misunderstandings, the group learns of Earth’s secret history and legacy.
At the Mountains of Madness is a very good introduction to Lovecraft’s mythology of the Old Ones and the glories and horrors that preceded humankind and that still linger in places. It is a good novella on it’s own, and helpful to understanding events and creatures in his other works.
ISBN: 978-9949-9424-4-2 (epub)
2013
Table of Contents
Biographical note
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 — March 15, 1937) — known as H. P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction. He is one of the seminal horror authors of the twentieth century who wrote more than one hundred stories, and achieved popular acclaim in such publications as Astounding Stories and Weird Tales.
Lovecraft’s major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror; the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien.
Although Lovecraft’s readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century.Notes On Writing Weird Fiction
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc. ), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best — one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature—defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why
