The Shoggoth came over the mountain

Today I finished Alice Munro’s brilliant story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, which I had been reading at a friend’s excellent suggestion.

The very next story I read today was H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”. I had picked it up at a different friend’s equally excellent suggestion, and I greedily finished it in one sitting.

The two stories, in an odd way, form a perfect pairing. Both are about the abyss, the unnameable horror lurking just around the corner of our safe illusion of life’s normalcy. And both are about the struggle we can face in finding a path of sanity in the face of the unfaceable.

Yet the two stories proceed by exactly opposite methods. Munro is a miniaturist, using the tools of everyday situations, of tiny precise moments and emotional shifts, all with a perfect economy of mood and description. She never uses three words where two would suffice, and her characters reveal their pain entirely through indirection, by the very process of holding back.

Lovecraft is, if anything, a maximalist. He revels in the bubbling horror, the revelation of the unfathomable beast from the depths — spun in extravagantly turgid word poems — of humanity’s worst nightmare made hideous flesh. In a Lovecraft story, one word will never two where ten could suffice.

And yet the two authors speak to the same theme — the theme of how precious is this little illusion we have of safety and sanity, how fragile is the wonderful and oft-overlooked refuge of the everyday. In the hands of an expert author we are made to see and to cherish this simple truth: That just outside our little circle of human warmth, the bitter cold and howling winds lie ever ready.

2 thoughts on “The Shoggoth came over the mountain”

  1. Nice one! Or, as another Canadian might say, “Dance me to the end of Lovecraft”.

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