A “Maze of Stone-shadowed Twilight”

The Disorienting Nightmarescape of H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”

Abstract

This article analyzes H. P. Lovecraft’s only novel At the Mountains of Madness (1936), the author’s most representative endeavor of what I would refer to as “neosupernatural parascientificfiction” – a literary mode defined by the efficacious interplay of (dreadful) unnatural phenomena and science-oriented veracity. Interrogating the persistent oscillation between linguistic overdescription and referential ambiguity in Lovecraft’s longest story, while assessing its evident but idiosyncratic indebtedness to E. A. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837), I argue that At the Mountains of Madness dwells on conceptual, chronospatial as well as textual complexity to establish a connection between form, content and readerly experience. I turn to Graham Harman’s weird realism theory and Joseph Frank’s seminal notion of literary spatiality to posit that the story’s thematic apparatus, labyrinthine discourse, and intertextual dynamics concur to set up a trap into which readers are lured, in order to elicit in them a growing sense of disorientation.