At The Mountains of Madness

Since I am now finished school until September, I am relishing the free time outside of work to read whatever I please. In this case it's H.P. Lovecraft right now, particularly his lengthy "At The Mountains of Madness" - an Antarctic tale of unspeakable exploration, weird paleontology, and primordial horrors. I am taking the time to bask in the beautiful prose, even its occasional verbosity is a delight to read - Lovecraft is a true unsung hero of writing, who is only starting to get the recognition he is owed. The trouble with reading reviews criticising his writing is they shoehorn him as a verbose, over-the-top writer, instead of taking the time to see that his writing has a sensitive rhythm - no doubt the inspiration for music in horror movies - that depends on three (now common) stages of suspense: (1) the build-up (movie: think of the Jaws orchestra music) (2) heightened suspense (movie: the sharp, screeching violin, drum or trumpet followed by a brief moment of silence) , and the finale (3) ruptured language (movie: the sudden, violent orgasm of a violin, trumpet and drum, scream or onscreen violence).

But most of all I relish the profound, philosophical imagination--everything is a deep metaphor or symbol--he invests in his writing. Vivid prose like this is rare:

Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us, and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust. (513) --New American Library edition of Lovecraft: Tales.

His ideas and writing are simply chilling, yet blood-curdling at the same time. Infused with the mythological, evolutionary, and gothic, Lovecraft's tales of horror slice open our mind's imagination of the primordial past and present (1920s-30s) and performs surgery - often a lobotomy. Simply delightful.

Don't make the mistake of countless scholars: dwelling on the biographical to explain the prose. Lovecraft was a racist, no one ever argued otherwise, even his prose has racism in it - in "The Rats in the Walls" one of the characters has a cat named "Nigger-Man". But we cannot only see this as latent authorial racism - Lovecraft's tales are classic metaphors as well as psychological portrayals of the human mind and its inner being - but we must also see it as an interoggation or exploration of a certain psychological moment. Do we condemn Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird for the racism in its pages? No. We study it in high school. The author lived in a racist society, but so did Lovecraft. Why can't we examine them, like Richard Wright's Native Son as capturing a moment in time - which might eventually become a reminder, or relic as important as Homer's Odyssey.