Lost world novels were very popular during the end of the major period of European colonisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. King Solomon’s Mines for example establishes many of the characteristics of the genre, and is sometimes considered the first lost-world narrative. European explorers set out to an unexplored part of the world, often protected by some great natural barrier which has previously prevented it from being explored, and discover a great civilisation which they set out to subdue. Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1918), are all classic examples of this genre. As time went on, unexplored lands were becoming hard to find, which perhaps explains why Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is set in one of the last remaining wildernesses on earth, the Antarctic.

It seems certain that Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written almost a century earlier than Lovecraft’s novella, was also an inspiration, hinting as it does at there being undiscovered mysteries at the South Pole, and is explicitly referenced in the later novel at several points.

Written ostensibly as a warning against a forthcoming Antarctic expedition, the first person narration by the geologist and explorer William Dyer, a professor at Arkham’s Miskatonic University, tells the story of his earlier disastrous expedition.

The novel adopts a traditional horror structure of hinting at unknown terrors to be revealed, and only describing them with reluctance after long delays. This is a conventional way of building suspense, but as a warning to the world not to disturb the Antarctic it is hardly convincing. The reader is always happy to suspend disbelief if given a decent enough reason to do so, but when the narrator behaves irrationally and unrealistically like this it undermines the credibility of the relationship between the reader and the text.

The details of the expedition are thoroughly and exhaustively set out, and initially all goes well. The narrator reminds us what we are told we already know, namely that the expedition’s advance party reported the discovery of the remains of prehistoric life-forms unknown to science, before being mysteriously wiped out.  Some form of dissection experiment has been done on one of the slaughtered explorers. Another member of the party is missing – did he go mad and massacre everyone one before heading out into the snow?

Dyer and a fellow explorer, Danforth, fly across the mountain range against which the advance party had pitched camp and discover a massive abandoned city, unlike anything found elsewhere on earth. They explore the city and find murals which tell the history of this lost civilisation. It is at this point that Lovecraft aficionados will start to sit up and listen, as more of the myth of ancient aliens with which Lovecraft is most closely associated is laid out. This city was built by the “Elder Things” in the very early days of the earth’s history, with the help of “shoggoths” — bio-engineered creatures they created to act as their slaves. It takes Dyer and Danforth a while to put the pieces together, and I suspect most readers will be there well ahead of them, but they finally work out that the slaughter at the camp was caused by the Elder Things who have somehow been reanimated. That’s not the end of their problems, because it seems that while the Elder Things killed out of curiosity, hence the attempts at dissection, the shoggoths have also survived and are getting peckish.

There are a number of problems with this novel, not least the structure which makes little sense in the context of it being presented as a warning to the world. There is no character development whatsoever, indeed almost no characterisation – all the explorers are diligent, good at their jobs, but completely anonymous and interchangeable. In terms of the plot the aliens are all there is – there’s no-one working secretly to undermine the expedition, sending secrets to an enemy nation keen to capture the alien technology. The aliens themselves are dull. Virtually all of the first half of the novel is a long set up for the visit to the lost city, where the interpretation of the murals tells the history of the Elder Ones. Devotees of all things Cthulhu will enjoy the canonical detail about the Elder Ones and their intergalactic struggles with the Mi-Go – but it left me cold. The horror element of the story is very limited in impact, and as an adventure story it also misses out – the first person narrative tells us that Dyer survives his ordeal, were that to be in any doubt. The novella is at least short, and I can now honestly say I have given Lovecraft the benefit of the doubt. This is a curiosity, nothing more, and unless you are into alternative mythologies, and I can’t imagine why you would be, I would give this a miss.