The narrator of Mountains, Professor William Dyer of Miskatonic University, reappears in Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch-House, written later that same year. The creatures known as Shoggoths are mentioned again in The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Thing on the Doorstep. Lovecraft shows off his knowledge of the works of his idol Edgar Allen Poe here, providing an explanation of the location of Mount Yaanek from Poe’s Ulalume.

Because of its great length, Weird Tales rejected At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft, who claimed that typing it had half-killed him, was naturally furious with Farnsworth Wright. In 1935, the story appeared instead in Astounding Stories magazine.

For a variety of reasons – his own intransigence among them – Lovecraft never achieved the level of fame and success his talents deserved while he was alive. Had it not been for the work of a few friends and admirers, his fiction might have vanished into obscurity with his death. But this volume, and the others in this series, serve as proof that his legacy of terror continues to thrive in our technological age. The Providence of the 1920s is long gone, but no matter how many years have passed, we can never escape that gnawing fear that there is something unnatural, something evil, waiting just around the corner . . . Welcome to H. P. Lovecraft’s world.

M. J. ELLIOTT

M. J. Elliott is a writer and radio dramatist whose articles, fiction and reviews have appeared in the magazines SHERLOCK, Total DVD and Scarlet Street. For the American radio, he has scripted episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Classic Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles the Gentleman Thief, The Father Brown Mysteries, Kincaid the Strangeseeker, The Adventures of Harry Nile and the Audie Award-nominated New Adventures of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. He is the creator of The Hilary Caine Mysteries, which first aired in 2005. For Wordsworth, he has contributed to The Game’s Afoot and edited The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. Lovecraft, The Right Hand of Doom and The Haunter of the Ring by Robert E. Howard, and A Charlie Chan Omnibus by Earl Derr Biggers.

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

Dagon

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weak-ling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.