In the Mad Mountains: Stories Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (2024) by Joe R. Lansdale
"...tapping at the walls that separate us from them”
Readers unfamiliar with In the Mad Mountains may wish read my note below after reading the collection.
Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale
"I believe I am through," Lansdale writes about making more Lovecraft-type fiction.
[....] Here’s an odd note: I really don’t care much for Lovecraft’s writing. It always seemed as unnecessarily difficult as trying to remove a Himalayan snowbank with a garden trowel and a bucket of hot water. What I liked about Lovecraft were his ideas of the Old Ones. That science-fictional horror he created. I find that vastly appealing.
I don't think it's odd to dislike Lovecraft's style. I appreciate it, myself. The second chapter of Charles Dexter Ward is an achievement I don't want to live without. Ditto for "He" and "The Rats in the Walls." And Chapter XI of At The Mountains of Madness, when Danforth, in extremis, begins “chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel.”
[....] many may find his rococo use of language exciting.
I don’t.
For me, it’s all about Cthulhu and that whole gaggle of Old Ones.
They’re fun. A little creepy. Unsettling. They wait just outside our realm, tapping at the walls that separate us from them, and there’s always someone trying to assist them in their endeavor for a nebulous reward.
Really, guys?
I mean, they seem so trustworthy, these horrible beings from beyond.
[....] He had a vision so strong that it leapt over his massive walls of sometimes-unintelligible prose and entered into the human consciousness as if those alien entities might actually exist.
“The Bleeding Shadow”(2011) is a two-fisted, post-war find-the-man detective story. The characters are Black, and the milieu is hard-scrabble blues music Texas.
Tootie, a blues guitar man, has put himself behind the eight-ball via the sale of his soul. Now, to keep something from fetching him away, he must play a record of noxious not-quite-music.
Richard, the laconic first-person detective narrator, finds Tootie and tries to get him out of the deal.
I went back to the hotel, and when I got there, Tootie was just about asleep. The record was turning on the turntable without any sound. I looked at the wall, and I could see the beak of that thing, chewing at it. I put the record on, and this time, when it come to the end, the thing was still chewing. I played it another time, and another, and the thing finally went away. It was getting stronger.
“The Bleeding Shadow” makes no concessions to love or friendship. Richard understands nemesis when he sees it. A fit subject for the blues.
Dread Island (2010) appears on the Mississippi the first night of every full moon. As the short novel opens, two river pros discuss it.
“Huck, that island is all covered in badness.”
“How would you know? You ain’t never been. I mean, I’ve heard stories, but far as I know, they’re just stories.”
I was talking like that to build up my courage; tell the truth, I wasn’t so sure they was just tall tales.
Jim shook his head. “I ain’t got to have been. I know someone that’s been there for sure. I know more than one.”
I stopped walking. It was like I had been stunned with an ox hammer. Sure, me and Tom had heard a fella say he had been there, but when something come from Jim, it wasn’t usually a lie, which isn’t something I can say for most folks.
“You ain’t never said nothing before about that, so why now?” I said. “I ain’t saying you’re making it up cause you don’t want to go. I ain’t saying that. But I’m saying why tell me now? We could have conversated on it before, but now you tell me.”
Jim grabbed my elbow, shook me a little, said, “Listen here, Huck. I ain’t never mentioned it before because if someone tells you that you ought not to do something, then you’ll do it. It’s a weakness, son. It is.”
I was startled. Jim hadn’t never called me son before, and he hadn’t never mentioned my weakness. It was a weakness me and Tom shared, and it wasn’t something I thought about, and most of the time I just figured I did stuff cause I wanted to. But with Jim saying that, and grabbing my arm, calling me son, it just come all over me of a sudden that he was right. Down deep, I knew I had been thinking about going to that island for a long time, and tonight just set me a purpose. It was what them preachers call a revelation.
“Ain’t nobody goes over there in they right mind, Huck,” Jim said. “That ole island is all full of haints, they say. And then there’s the Brer People.”
How do Jim and Huck find themselves on the island on a fateful night for the human race? Because Huck cannot say no to Becky Thatcher, whose fiance has gone to the island to snoop.
Once on the island, Jim and Huck are captured by a troop of Brer Fox’s bipedal weasels. Their fellow captives are Tom, Brer Rabbit, and Amelia Earhart, wearing a kind of leather cap, and she had on pants just like a man. She was kind of pretty, and where everyone else was hanging their heads, she looked mad as a hornet.
Brer Fox is preparing these captives for sacrifice in a ritual he read about in a book bound with flesh from a human face.
The weasels and Brer Fox and Brer Bear, and that nasty Tar Baby, all made their way quick like to the tallest stone in the muck. They stood in front of it, and you could tell they was nervous, even the Tar Baby, and they went about chanting. The words were like someone spitting and sucking and coughing and clearing their throat all at once, if they was words at all. This went on for a while, and wasn’t nothing happening but that rain, which was kind of pleasant.
“Huck,” Jim said, “you done been as good a friend as man could have, and I ain’t happy you gonna die, or me neither, but we got to, it makes me happy knowing you gonna go out with me.”
“I’d feel better if you was by yourself,” I said, and Jim let out a cackle when I said it.
There was a change in things, a feeling that the air had gone heavy. I looked up and the rain fell on my face and ran in my mouth and tasted good. The night sky was vibrating a little, like someone shaking weak pudding in a bowl. Then the sky cracked open like Brer Rabbit had told us about, and I seen there was light up there in the crack. It was light like you’d see from a lantern behind a wax paper curtain. After a moment, something moved behind the light, and then something moved in front of it. A dark shape about the size of the moon; the moon itself was starting to drift low and thin off to the right of the island.
I don't think I have read a description that so perfectly epitomizes the sublimity cosmic horror aspires to:
[....] It was light like you’d see from a lantern behind a wax paper curtain. After a moment, something moved behind the light, and then something moved in front of it. A dark shape about the size of the moon….
Dread Island does not go very far as a pastiche of Huckleberry Finn. In fact, Lansdale’s Huck and Jim have some unfavorable things to say about their first chronicler. But this literary character riot is gleefully daring, and Lansdale conveys the knockabout fun and danger with real skill.
“The Gruesome Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning” (2013) is a pithy Dupin pastiche with plenty of Parisian drollery. The story mixes cross-species Frankenstein-style transplants with plenty of showing-off by the narrator and the Chevalier. They juggle sword-canes, dueling pistols, and sad-faced human-skin-covered ancient tomes, all the while fighting to suture-shut rips in our reality.
“The Tall Grass” (2012) is a throwback tale.
Never step off your train for a breath of fresh air on the Great Plains while the engineer is trying to build-up steam to resume your journey. And it’s between 12-2am.
[....] Their breath rose up like methane from a privy and burned my eyes. There was no doubt in my mind that they meant to bite me; and I somehow knew that if I was bitten, I would not be chewed and eaten, but that the bite would make me like them. That my bones would come free of me along with my features and everything that made me human, and I knew too that those things were originally from train stops, and from frontier scouting parties, adventurers, and surveyors, and all manner of folks who, at one time, had been crossing these desolate lands and found themselves here, a place not only unknown to the map, but unknown to human understanding. All of this came to me and instantly filled me with dread. It was as if their very touch had revealed it to me.
I kicked wildly, wrenching my boot heel from the dog-shape’s toothy grasp. I struggled. I heard teeth snap on empty air as I kicked loose. And then there was warmth and a glow over my head. I looked up to see the train man with a great flaming torch, and he was waving it about, sticking it into the teeth-packed faces of those poor lost souls.…
“The Case of the Stalking Shadows” (2011) features Lansdale's ghost-breaker Dana Roberts. This early adventure, from the “Musgrave Ritual” amateur adolescence of Dana's career, has enough open-air folk horror elements for any taste. It begins with a game of hide-and-seek on a family estate.
“You’ve seen it too?”
She nodded. “I told you the woods were strange. But I had no idea until tonight how strange. After the game ended, the others thought it quite funny that you might still be hiding in the woods, not knowing we were done. I was worried, though.”
How so? I thought, but I didn’t want to interrupt her train of thought.
“I actually allowed myself to be caught early,” Jane said. “I wanted out of the game, and I planned to feign some problem or another and come back to the house. It was all over pretty quick, however, and this wasn’t necessary. Everyone was tagged out. Except you. But no one wanted to stay in the woods or go back into them, so they came back to the house. I think they were frightened. I know I was. And I couldn’t put my finger on it. But being in the woods, and especially the nearer I came to that section where it thinned and the trees grew strange, I was so discomforted it was all I could do to hold back tears. Then, from the window, I saw you running. And I saw it. The shadow that was shaped like a man. It stopped just beyond the line of trees.”
I nodded. “I thought I imagined it.”
“Not unless I imagined it too.”
“But what is it?” I asked.
Jane walked to where I stood and looked out the window. The man-shaped shadow did not appear and the woods were much darker now, as the moon was beginning to drop low.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve heard that some spots on earth are the homes of evil spirits. Sections where the world opens up into a place that is not of here.”
“The Crawling Sky” (2009). A six-gun preacher (Perhaps Mitchum in “Five Card Stud”?) passes through the man-made hell of a small town, then has a supernatural showdown. The mise en scene is carefully observed, and Lansdale works with meticulous clarity.
“Starlight, Eyes Bright” (2013) is a brief story about of woe of marriage and the perils of skepticism. It's more magic horror than cosmic horror, given the absence of any sense of “awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”
“In the Mad Mountains” (2015) is an ambitious novella. It begins with a Titanic-type disaster, from which a class cross-section of humanity rows away in their lifeboat. They land on a frozen Sargasso. Gavin and Amelia, the healthiest survivors, search through various ships and aircraft.
They stumbled forward, trying their best to keep an eyeline back to their ship. Now and then there was a gap in the blowing snow, and it gave them an occasional glimpse of a recognizable ice formation, but those kinds of things could change quickly, reshaped by snow and wind.
Amelia tripped over one of the dog sleds they had encountered earlier. As she was rising, the wind and blowing snow shifted, and she saw moving in the brief gap of white, a naked man wearing a strange and oversized headdress. The head gear was flapping and blowing in the wind with the frantic movements of a bird with its feet tied to the ground. It was visible for an instant, then gone.
“Did you see that?” Amelia said.
“Hardin,” Gavin said. “It was Hardin.”
“Naked? Wandering through snow? How could that be?”
“How could it be anyone?”
They tried to see Hardin again, but the snow had wrapped him up and hidden him away.
“What was he wearing on his head?” she asked.
“No idea.”
“Should we try and find him?”
Gavin shook his head. “We are lost ourselves. And remember, he didn’t want to be found. Maybe he stripped down to die quicker.”
“But he’s been out here for days now.”
“Perhaps he holed up somewhere for a while before he made his final move.”
“So he hung out, then today stripped naked, put on a weird headdress, and wandered out in the snow?”
“Hell. I don’t know, Amelia. I know what you know.”
As the story proceeds, the number of survivors dwindles. Further travels lead Gavin and Amelia to an ancient, frozen city that is not unpopulated.
They arrived at a great drop off, wide and deep and full of stink, lit by cracks of light from above. Hanging over the pit, fastened there by a scarf to what looked like a dry hose running above her, was a woman. She was wearing khaki pants and a leather jacket. She wore pilot gear, goggles pushed up on her head, and tight on her skull was a leather cap with ear flaps. Her skin was yellow, and her neck was long. The meat was beginning to rot, speeded up by the hot stink rising from the pit beneath her. Her feet dangled over the great and stinking pit, and one boot was slipping free of her rotting flesh, soon to fall into the pit below.
“The pilot,” Gavin said. “Has to be. She ended up here somehow, and it must have been too much for her. The things we felt she must have felt, that damn presence, force, whatever. She didn’t have anyone to bolster her and give her strength. She was on her own, so she just quit.”
Amelia nodded, looked down into the pit.
“What is that?”
In The Mad Mountains is an outstanding collection of cosmic horror short stories. Lansdale might dislike everything about Lovecraft's style, but his own skill and gusto at rending the veils in these tales is unmatched. Borderlands appear initially as squalid rooming-house walls, prairie railroad embankments, or skies over tumultuous polar seas.
Some of the stories are brief, with a special charm. Others are high-concept: hefty and ripe with amplitude. Cosmic horror is fairly madcap most days, so cliches come in handy for metabolic moderation.
Jay
28 October 2024
I've always enjoyed Lansdale's stories and novels. Thanks for this, Jay. Sounds way excellent.