Ignorance is Bliss
It is interesting that despite Cthulu being somewhat popular that you don’t really get any movies appearing in the mainstream cinemas, or even its own television show. However, I suspect it has more to do with the whole genre being more part of a sub-culture than anything else. If we take the roleplaying game for example, it was never going to be all that popular beyond a small group of enthusiasts namely because people really don’t particularly like games where there is a very strong possibility that if you don’t end up mad, then you are going to end up irreconcilably insane.
That is the thing about the works of HP Lovercraft – we are dealing with things that are best left unknown. For all of the arrogance of humanity who have risen up to dominate the world, there are things beyond the ken of our senses that if we were fully confronted with our minds simply could not handle it and we would become little more than bubbling idiots. Take for instance that humanity is a mistake. This simply goes far beyond the idea of we being simply an evolved species that has a power to forge its own destiny, nor something created by a loving and caring god to be the fulfilment of creation – instead we are a by product of an experiment gone wrong.
At the Mountains of Madness is one of the short stories conceived by Lovecraft, though it probably is somewhat longer than your average short story, though not long enough to be considered a full blown novel. Here we are dealing with an expedition to the Antarctic, one of the last frontiers on the Earth (and also remember that is is set in the 1920s). While the expedition starts off on a general scientific basis, after one of the planes crashes near a range of mountains that make the Himalayas look tiny in comparison, they uncover some fossils of some rather alien creatures – then the expedition disappears.
The rest of the story is about the second expedition looking for them, but not quite, because they come across this massive city, and as they descent into the city they uncover a room of hieroglyphs that pretty much lay out the history of the Earth from the arrival to the Great Old Ones, though to the ‘modern era’, where they have been effectively driven back into the oceans, and in a way vanished. This story gives us a pretty good over view of the mythology as its stands, and the origins of the Earth in Lovecraft’s mind. However, it doesn’t end there because after spending a huge amount of time in this gallery, they decide to explore further, and descend into the Abyss, where they suddenly discover their mistake and while they manage to escape with their lives, their sanity is another thing.
The thing with Lovecraft, or at least with this story (since this is so far the only one that I have read) is that it isn’t like your traditional horror – they tend to lurk in the background, and there is a build up to the climax when the true horror of the situation comes to light. This isn’t a slasher story, or one of the dead coming back to life, but rather it is dealing with the full horror of the reality in which we live. This is a world in which humanity lives in ignorant bliss, and those who dig deeper inevitably discover things that best remain hidden. It is a world where fringe universities document the horrors of the world, but the research doesn’t reach the mainstream, and it is a world where it is best that the mainstream remain ignorant of this reality.
A friend of mine describes the Cthulu deities as not so much being evil, but rather amoral. We simply do not matter, and in some cases are interesting curiosities. However, we are less than weak, we are like ants to these great old ones, ones that have virtually disappeared from the face of the Earth, but are still lurking there, just beyond our senses, not so much waiting to return, but rather in some deathlike sleep, until some stupid and ignorant researchers accidentally release them, and when that happens then insanity will reign.
- Goodreads rating – 3.84
- REVIEW – David Sarkies