EURAMERICA Vol. 39, No. 1 (March 2009), 1-27 http://euramerica.ea.sinica.edu.tw/ © Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica On At the Mountains of Madness —Enveloping the Cosmic Horror Chia Yi Lee Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Chiao Tung University 1001 University Road, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract As the culmination of H. P. Lovecraft’s late style in delineating the cosmic horror, At the Mountains of Madness poses several questions, the most interesting of which may concern the story’s narrative efficacy in evoking horror that has been presented in the form of science fiction or, to be more precise, in scientific realism. The pivot of this narrative revolves round the novelette’s central sections (7 and 8) where a genealogy of the sentient entities that precede humans’ earthly emergence is recorded. Whether the genealogical enveloping of the cosmic other can summon up the cosmic horror as is textually intended, and what function the enveloping plays against the backdrop of the story as a whole—these will be the main concerns of this paper. Key Words: horror, science, supplementarity Received April 7, 2008; accepted June 10, 2008; last revised July 10, 2008 Proofreaders: Jeffrey Cuvilier, Hsueh-mei Chen, Chia-chi Tseng, Ying-tzu Chang 2 EURAMERICA I H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is one of his longest works, at around 50,000 words, which would have made it suitable for publication as a single-volume novelette. Yet ironically, by the time of Lovecraft’s death in 1937, only one book with his name stamped on cover had been published (Joshi, 1999: 264).