Читать книгу At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror - Говард Филлипс Лавкрафт - Страница 5

H. P. Lovecraft wrote only three novels among his many short stories and novelettes, and each of them is properly viewed as a short novel — that is, longer than the novella form, but not yet a full-length novel. The most ambitious of these is undoubtedly The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, originally written in 1927-1928, but not published until 1941, when an abridged version appeared in Weird Tales. The first full-length version was published in 1943 in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, since which time it has been separately published in England, and in America has been turned into a typical horror movie with Vincent Price in the leading role — titled, hilariously enough, with typical Hollywood vagary, Edgar Allan Poe’s Haunted Palace! Second in length is At the Mountains of Madness written in 1931, and preceding the longer novel in date of publication, in Astounding Stories, where it, too, was somewhat abridged.

The third, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, was very probably conceived and written well in advance of the other novels, sometime in the early or mid-1920’s, but, unlike those novels, it was evidently never extensively revised and remains the least satisfactory of them. It is properly not a part of the Cthulhu Mythos — to which both The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness belong — but, despite certain facets borrowed from the Mythos, it belongs rather to an earlier period of Lovecraft’s work when he was more obviously under the influence of Lord Dunsany’s fantastic tales. It is one of four stories written about Randolph Carter, who came into existence as representing Lovecraft himself in a dream story of Lovecraft’s titled The Statement of Randolph Carter, written in 1919, when such work as Lovecraft was then producing was making occasional appearances in the amateur press publications of that day. It is very probable that The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was begun not long after, and evidence suggests that it was worked at at intervals over several years, for its general looseness suggests that Lovecraft initially at least had no very clear plan for it.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was put aside for future revision but the Cthulhu Mythos enlisted most of his creative interest from the mid-1920’s onward. Nevertheless, Lovecraft twice returned to Randolph Carter after completing The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, carrying on Carter’s story. In 1926, he wrote The Silver Key, and in 1932, at the urging of his friend and correspondent, E. Hoffman Price, he was persuaded — after Price himself had written his version of a sequel to The Silver Key — to expand and revise Price’s story, which was ultimately published as a collaboration under the title of Through the Gates of the Silver Key. All four of the related stories are published here in their proper sequence.

The Carter tales are essentially Dunsanian in mood and style, for all their increasing drawing upon the Cthulhu Mythos, and they are secondary to the two remaining works in this collection. At the Mountains of Madness represents a radical departure in setting, at least for it is Lovecraft’s only tale set in the Antarctic wastes, and its convincing atmosphere of horror may be attributed in part to Lovecraft’s own horror of and allergy to any temperature lower than 20° and frequently, later in life, 30°.

However unsatisfactory The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath may be on analysis, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness are two of Lovecraft’s most successful macabre tales. Each is carefully wrought, hough, with Lovecraft’s customary uncertainty about his work, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was never submitted to an editor during his lifetime, and At the Mountains of Madness, rejected by Weird Tales, was withdrawn from submission — ‘At the Mountains of Madness,’ wrote Lovecraft later, ‘represents the most serious work I have attempted, and its rejection was a very discouraging influence.’ — and was accepted by Astounding Stories only through the offices of an agent, Julius Schwartz, the sole occasion of the instrumentation of an agent in the placing of Lovecraft’s stories, though Donald Wandrei and others of Lovecraft’s friends and correspondents sold stories for him in the face of Lovecraft’s reluctance to submit after one rejection.

Unlike The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which was interrupted constantly by Lovecraft’s revisionary tasks and by his interests in amateur pressdom, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness were brought into being without any significant hiatus, and without interruption other than correspondence. Lovecraft was comparatively reticent about The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in his correspondence, other than to refer to its length and to his reluctance to prepare a typescript from the manuscript written and revised in his spidery script, but not At the Mountains of Madness, about which he was beset by doubts which rejection of the manuscript by the editor of Weird Tales only strengthened. ‘At the Mountains of Madness has a certain kind of cumulative horror,’ he wrote in April 1931, shortly after beginning his revision of the manuscript, ‘but is altogether too slow for the cheap artificial markets… Half of the pages are corrected, transposed, and interlined beyond all human legibility!’ Lovecraft was so dubious about the merit of the story or its effectiveness that he infected some of his correspondents sufficiently with his own doubts to leave them, too, uncertain about the story at first reading, but, like most of his longer works, At the Mountains of Madness grows in power and effectiveness at each successive reading. So, too, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. For sheer cumulative horror, these two novels must stand among the best fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.