… “For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleus and center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth’s history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we knew had shambled out of apedom….” —H.P. Lovecraft At the Mountains of Madness * H.P. Lovecraft was, among many things, a basket-case. Though he’s recognized as a brilliant and influential writer, one cannot separate this from the reality that he was also an incendiary racist, a cultural snob, an elitist, anti-Semite (despite his short, and disastrous marriage to a “well-assimilated Jew”) and a general nose-bleed with a pronounced dislike of “common” people and the cities they lived in. Despite (or because of) all of this, he has also crafted one of my favorite novels: one I’ve returned to numerous times, simply for the sheer pleasure of reading a well constructed (and only vaguely improbable) story about aliens that look a lot like ambulatory barrels with tentacles, wings, and afro-enhanced starfish for heads. The novel (actually a novella) also features a slime ball with eyes and rude, improvisational protuberances making its prerequisite (and rather moist) Lovecraftian appearance at a vital part of the story. Of course, At the Mountains of Madness is also a quintessential Lovecraft story in that much of its horror is underscored by the First-Person narrator continually referring to the “unspeakable horrors” as “unspeakable.” I’ve since finished reading the novella, and—as expected—I enjoyed it immensely. Of course, it was probably the ambulatory barrels with tentacles and afro-enhanced starfish for heads that drew me back. Or maybe it was the really-miffed slime ball with eyes. In all honesty, I think it’s the dip into science fiction that draws me. Okay, in all honesty, it’s Lovecraft’s treatment of an alien city that really appeals to me. Though a healthy dollop of suspended disbelief is required, my main draw to this novella is the element of xeno-archaeology running through the entire story. Without giving too much away, all that we learn of the Old Ones is derived from their carvings in one of their now-abandoned, though not-entirely-dead cities. It was the city of the Old Ones that popped into my head, when I stood with my friend, Beth, on the observation deck of the John Hancock Center, looking out over the haze-muddled stretch of Chicago. For a moment, I understood something about H.P. Lovecraft. I laughed at it as I came to the conclusion that all of the distasteful aspects of Lovecraft the misanthropic basket case were the strengths of Lovecraft the Gothic Horror writer. H.P. Lovecraft was actually two different beings. In one aspect, he was a distasteful twit with a superiority complex, and on the flipside, he was a literary force, not entirely human at all, as the brilliance of Lovecraft’s writing seems to exist independently of the actual flesh-and-blood entity known as Howard P.. As a literary force, he was a mass of perceptions: non-personal, detached and universal in that his stories embody Fear without the governing framework of actual human understanding. Chicago is not a ruined city. It is not all that remains of an alien civilization that—gasp! outshines Anglocentric human achievement. It is, however, something that would have terrified Howard P. simply because of the presence of subways (a vast, underground labyrinth) beneath the angular regularity of “unholy” architecture. It’s full of people he wouldn’t like…and on the day that I took this image, it wore a veil of fog, delighting itself in the strange, cryptic shapes it formed as lake-born winds danced through it. * As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great weekend/week.