Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Multi-eyed protoplasmic entities, flesh-eating ghouls, animate corpses, time-traveling body snatchers, and, yes, huge albino penguins. These are some of the bizarre creatures that populate the universe created by American horror author H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft has influenced many of today’s most famous writers and artists, including master of contemporary horror fiction Stephen King, Academy Award-nominated director Guillermo Del Toro, and artist and Alien set-designer H. R. Giger. This collection includes three selections from the Cthulhu Mythos: the novella At the Mountains of Madness, which is often considered Lovecraft’s masterpiece; “The Thing on the Doorstep”; and “The Shadow Out of Time.” While including all the chilling “cyclopean vistas,” monstrous abominations and appalling transformations that readers have come to expect from Lovecraft, this also showcases his fantasy writing in stories such as “The Cats of Ulthar,” “The Silver Key,” and notably The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

And Other Weird Tales

At the Mountains of Madness

Laura Dobie

I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long death.

Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature's laws. Thenceforward ne ten of us - but the student Danforth and myself above all others - were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could.

If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last - even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.

Perhaps we were mad- for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit - albeit in a less extreme form - in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half paralysed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

At the Mountains of Madness quotes

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