At the Mountains of Madness by I.N.J. Culbard

Quests are not my favourite type of yarn as they can easily become a mere parade of ‘wonders’ that become boring after a while. It’s weird fantasy set in imaginative realms with almost no connection to the mundane world. Nasty zoogs and gugs are out to get him but the cats of Ulthar are his friends. So he prays to the hidden gods of dream and goes on a quest, which takes him across several different landscapes, where he encounters a variety of strange creatures. He wants to go and live there in the dreamworlds, leaving the real one behind. In this story, Randolph Carter, Lovecraft’s alter ego, has dreamed three times of a marvellous city named Celephais, ‘ in the valley of Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian hills’. He never wrote with the market in mind, which is why he’s so original and deservedly has gained a literary reputation. In fact, Lovecraft always wrote to please himself and the fact that someone actually wanted to print the stuff was a bonus. A few of them were written very early in his career for his own pleasure. These include ‘The Cat’s Of Ulthar’, ‘The Doom That Came To Sarnath’, ‘Celephais’ and ‘Nyarlathotep’, amongst others. This story brings together several elements from other tales in Lovecraft’s so-called ‘Dream Cycle’.

Posthumously, of course, every word he ever penned in now available in one form or another. ‘The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath’, a quirky work even by Lovecraft’s standards, was not published in his lifetime. Lovecraft story after winning an award for ‘At The Mountains Of Madness’.

At the Mountains of Madness by I.N.J. Culbard