Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories. Today we’re looking at “The Mound,” written in the winter of 1929-1930 and first published in the November 1940 issue of Weird Tales. You can read the story here. Spoilers ahead.
Summary: An unnamed ethnologist visits Binger, Oklahoma, chasing the legend of a mound haunted by the apparition of a man during the day, and a headless woman at night. Those who visit often come back mad, or don’t return at all.
Some have gone not merely to, but into, the mound: most recently a pair of brothers. One returned alone three months later, hair white and internal organs mirror reversed. He shot himself, leaving a note about the terrible power of the mound’s inhabitants.
The narrator views the apparitions and talks with the local Wichita. Gray Eagle, the chief, warns him off (in truly excruciating faux dialect). When he’s determined to go, Gray Eagle lends him a pendant made by the people under the mound. He suggests that it may protect the narrator—given that it’s apparently responsible for his family’s century-plus lifespans, that seems likely. Nice of him to lend it out!
Atop the mound, the grass shows no sign of a regularly pacing guard. He unearths a cylinder that the disk sticks to “magnetically,” covered with dreadful carvings. Inside is “The Narrative of Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman, of Luarca in Asturias, Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinaián, A. D. 1545.”
We now switch to the memoir of Zamacona, a conquistador following Coronado’s fruitless search for El Dorado. Zamacona meets a young man named, gods help us, Charging Buffalo, who tells him in Wichita Up-Goer Five—you have a bad problem and will be going to R’lyeh today—about his abortive expeditions under the mound.
Zamacona follows CB’s instructions through underground passages, past bas reliefs of the gods Yig and Tulu. Eventually he emerges under a writhing blue sky over a vast plain.
He sees a distant herd of animals—indistinct but frightening—and glittering abandoned towns. He finds a ruined temple surrounded by statues so nauseating that his Catholic mores preclude explicit description. Inside, he finds something even more shocking: nearly everything is made of solid gold.
He hears the approaching herd and, frightened, forces closed the temple door. They try to get in, seeming more deliberate than animals ought, but eventually leave. In the morning, human-looking people arrive. They explain through wordless telepathy that they’ve come in response to the herd’s message.
The K’n-yan are aliens, ancestors of humanity, driven underground long ago. Nevertheless, they are intensely curious about the outside world. Regretfully they cannot permit visitors to return home, lest they reveal the K’n-yan’s survival. On hearing about America’s new conquerors, they resolve to once more post sentries at their gates.
They bring Zamacona to Tsath, a city of gargantuan spires. He sees the various slave classes—intelligent herd-beasts doing human-style work, slaves working under hypnotic commands, and animated corpses. Many corpses have been mutilated—are headless, or have parts transposed or grafted on. The K’n-yan entertain themselves not only by changing between material and immaterial forms, but by shaping other people and objects at will. The slaves are also a source of meat. Even the conquistador is disturbed.
They give Zamacona a schedule of scholarly meetings, and assign him an “affection group” and (apparently very necessary) bodyguards.
For four years he lives among them—avoiding many activities and foods, counting his rosary in penance for others. He desperately wants to leave. The K’n-yan are degenerating rapidly, and his own presence may be accelerating this process by introducing both fear of invasion and a restless desire to see the outside world. People sate this restlessness with transmutation, sadism, and superstition.
Zamacona makes an abortive escape attempt, then begins to write this account. He worries what will happen when his hosts grow bored with him, and starts to parcel his knowledge out like Scheherazade.
One woman out of his 50-person affection group, T’la-yub, falls in love with him and joins his next escape attempt. Her family are lords of a minor—and secret—gate. He’s using her, though—once free he intends to abandon her for a proper Spanish wife.
They dress as slaves and sneak away with five beast-loads of gold, because conquistadors. One beast bolts and runs away.
They almost make it, but the escaped beast tattles and they’re captured. T’la-yub is sent to the amphitheatre, beheaded, and forced to guard her family’s gate. Zamacona is spared, but if he tries to escape again, he’ll suffer a similar—worse—fate. But of course he’d never try anything like that, right?
Of course, he does—this time traveling in an energy state, undetectable. He plans to bring along this document. And that’s where the memoir ends.
Returning to the present: the narrator presents the manuscript to Binger as a hoax, but secretly wonders what befell Zamacona. Did he escape—or did he fail at the last moment, captured by his own undead lover?
On the mound, he finds his pick and shovel stolen. Using his machete, he breaks into an inner chamber.
He finds a flashlight from the most recent explorer. He finds bas reliefs matching those in the manuscript. He stops expecting the reader to believe him.
Unseen hands seem to pluck with increasing force, driven off by the talisman. He speculates wildly: the increasingly degenerate K’n-yan have become more immaterial and more superstitious, and are now held off only by their veneration of the alien metal.
He sees his pick and shovel. And now he believes he can see the K’n-yan and their beasts: “the four-footed blasphemies with ape-like face and projecting horn… and not a sound so far in all that nitrous hell of inner earth…”
He hears something coming towards him. He sees—something—framed between statues of Yig and Tulu. He drops everything and runs in unthinking panic back to the surface.
What he saw was Zamacona’s reanimated body—headless, armless, without lower legs—with words carved on it in Spanish: “Seized by the will of K’n-yan in the headless body of T’la-yub.”
What’s Cyclopean: Masonry, in the tunnel to the underground world. Idols of alien metal. Ruins in the deeper, red-lit world of Yoth (twice). The crypt inside the mound gate.
The Degenerate Dutch: American Indians (Wichita, specifically) apparently worship Yig, Father of Snakes, and talk in stilted pidgin about “bad medicine” and “big spirits” and “um”.
K’n-yan history suggests decidedly odd attitudes about race and class. The bit about idealistic industrial democracy resulting in “masses” only fit to be bred with cattle…
Mythos Making: The K’n-yan worship Tulu (Cthulhu) and Yig. The toad-god Tsathoggua was also worshipped once; the cult was abolished after they found creatures of black slime worshipping the same idols in Yoth. For the K’n-yan, the terrifying entities of the Mythos have become friendly parental figures and fertility goddesses, while torture and sacrificial horror have moved into the secular realm.
Libronomicon: Just the one, terrible manuscript.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Visitors to the mound are rarely sound of mind when—and if—they return. The narrator wants to dismiss his experiences as hallucination. Doesn’t everyone?
Ruthanna’s commentary
YOU GUYS IT’S ANOTHER NAMED FEMALE CHARACTER IN A LOVECRAFT STORY I TOTALLY FORGOT. But that’s about all I like unreservedly about this one. Wow, this is squickier than I remembered. So very much squickier, on so very many levels.
First, the meta-squick: I’d forgotten that this is a collaboration: one of three between Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop. Explanations of their respective contributions hint at a whole lot of “how to suppress women’s writing.” Some sources claim that it was written from a one-sentence outline of Bishop’s, others that she wrote the original, but that Lovecraft revised so extensively as to be essentially the ghostwriter. Bishop was apparently more often a writer of romances, not one of which is available or discussed anywhere I can find; a search for her name merely turns up her collaborations with Lovecraft.
And yet, and yet—this story is different from Lovecraft’s other work. While the dizzying, deep-time descriptions of K’n-yan culture echo his other long works, and “cyclopean” appears often enough to constitute a signature, in other places the seams show clearly.
The racism is less naïve, more systematic, and more horrifically “of its time” than usual. Normally Lovecraft’s xenophobia is pure gut: “instinctive revulsion” and similar assumptions that most Anglo-Saxons are simply grossed out by anything the least bit different. We break this tradition here with an anthropologist narrator, and a narrative deeply informed by 30s anthropology. While at first this seems more open-minded—putting aside for a moment the amazingly offensive dialect and stereotyped names, the narrator seems happy to engage the Wichita as fellow humans—the story descends, like the conquistador Zamacona, into something far more dreadful than expected.
From start to finish, The Mound is informed by at-the-time-current ideas about cultural life cycles: that all cultures begin in savagery, rise into civilization, and descend into decadence—here typified respectively by the Wichita, the white citizens of Binger, and the K’n-yan. Normally when Lovecraft dives into another species’ culture they are truly alien, but also ultimately recognizable as worthy fellow sapients. The K’n-yan, by contrast, are humanoid and indeed ancestors of humanity. At their height, they shared recognizable morals, laws, and family structures with modern Europeans. While the rise and fall of civilizations is typical fare for Lovecraft, this isn’t: in his other stories humanity is one of a string of species with wildly divergent form and psychology, no more or less central to Earth’s history than any other.
The similarity between the K’n-yan and (white, European) humanity seems to be by way of warning: their descent into decadence was explicitly precipitated by the well-meant dangers of meritocratic democracy and abstract art. This matches fears expressed by Lovecraft elsewhere, but seems more sophisticated. One imagines his exchanges with Bishop, each building on the other’s ideas to produce a terrible hybrid.
And the K’n-yan’s decadence really is terrible. Their lives revolve around hedonistic sadism, they have no real affection for each other… unlike the alien details of the Yith or the Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness, descriptions of the K’n-yan are just one long string of “ick.”
Anne’s commentary
The nameless ethnologist appears in an earlier Lovecraft/Bishop collaboration, “The Curse of Yig,” a much tighter tale of the serpent god’s revenge on a woman who killed his rattlesnake children. I find “The Mound” a novella screaming to be a novel. At its current length, it’s all set-up: first the frame, then Zamacona’s notes on K’n-yan civilization. Fully four-fifths of the story has passed before Zamacona meets T’la-yub and things start to look really interesting. Alas, she’s there as ironic plot device only; if Bishop was hoping for some of her usual romance, she didn’t get it here. Poor T’la-yub. In an affection-group of extraordinarily gorgeous females, she’s only “moderately beautiful” and only of “at least average intelligence.” Also, she’s not a suitable Spanish noblewoman, though Zamacona might possibly settle for “an Indian princess of normal outer-world descent and a regular and approved past.” So there. I wish the pair had escaped to the outer world. I’d love to read about T’la-yub’s response when the man for whom she risked all tried to dump her. Remember, Z, she can dematerialize people. Or parts of people. Just saying.
Anyhow. Too much set-up, not enough climax, plus the usual short shrift given to relationships. Old Grey Eagle gets all chummy with the ethnologist in their very first meeting. We get next to zip about Zamacona’s interactions with T’la-yub or the rest of that affection-group assigned to amuse him. Man, what Jacqueline Carey or Anne Rice or E. L. James couldn’t do with this! And surely those amphitheaters are grim-dark enough for any fantasist. Zamacona may not have accepted Skybox seats to the great communal tortures, or eaten any suspect meat. So what did he have to feverishly finger his rosary beads about? What did his “Catholic” sensibilities prevent him from describing? The sexy stuff, of course. HPL will never do more than hint about that, as in Doorstep. “Shadow out of Time’s” narrator loses wife and children to his long “absence,” but never reports his reaction to this (one would think) crushing blow. Man, domestic angst is a terrible thing to waste.
Nevertheless, “The Mound” offers some cool stuff. It’s a rare departure from New England, and in the vast Oklahoma sky we get a sense of both beauty and the vague menace of a cosmic “vault” from which the flat landscape offers little protection. The narrator of “Color Out of Space” will also feel vulnerable under a sky too open and expansive. In Mythos stories, things always filter down from there, you know.
Including the K’n-yan. “The Mound” seems watered by streams from both the Cthulhu Mythos and the Dreamlands cycle. The Cthulhu influences are obvious, with frequent references to Big C himself. Shub-Niggurath also gets a nod, and a god Not-To-Be-Named whom I’m thinking must be Azathoth, and that mysterious Tsathoggua. The Vaults of Zin are part of the Dreamland subterranean geography. The reptilian race that ruled Yoth could be the infamous serpent men of Valusia. Lomar and Olathoe are mentioned.
Most interesting Mythos addition, for me, is the notion that Cthulhu brought the K’n-yan, ancestors of humans, to earth. Some conflict here with the “Mountains of Madness” notion that humans evolved from a creation of the Antarctic Old One radiates? It kind of makes sense for Cthulhu’s associates to be into the whole sadism thing, since “The Call of Cthulhu” tells us that the Great Squid means to murder and raven in great delight upon awakening. He’s such a hedonist, nothing like the coolly intellectual Yith and Old Ones.
And speaking of the Yith and Old Ones, I’d be so down with visiting either of those races. The K’n-yan? I’ll pass. No, really, I insist. They are indeed one of the squickiest of literary creations, right up there with Dolores Umbridge. No, they make Dolores look like one of her cutesy kitten plates. Once creatures of enormous intellect and technology, they have degenerated into sensation-seekers fully sanctioned and abetted by their slumping society. Immortality has bored them, alas. Is this because they’re human, creatures both of mind and emotion—way more emotion than the other great races seem subject to? Or is it just too easy for Lovecraft to imagine how a human civilization might devolve? After all, he knows how bad humans can be when we depart from the “dignity, kindness and nobility” once paramount to K’n-yan culture—and to Lovecraft’s own deep nostalgia for an imagined 17th or 18th century England.
In horror and fantasy, it’s always been humans who scare me most, and that goes quadruple for the K’n-yan. I’d much rather hang out with the black slime who worship Tsathoggua in black N’kai. Speaking of the black slime, they are this story’s entry into Lovecraft’s Irredeemably Weird Bestiary, where they join shoggoths and space polyps. Anything that can spook a K’n-yan is okay by me, and if Zamacona would just pull himself together, we could go on a nice expedition to their lightless vault of unspeakable troughs. Not that I’ve ever encountered a trough I couldn’t speak about. I’m bad-ass that way.
Join us next week for a truly dreadful message in a bottle in “The Temple.”
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land.” Her work has also appeared at Strange Horizons and Analog. She can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal. She has never posted pictures of her cat in either of these venues, suggesting that she may be doing this whole internet thing wrong.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “Geldman’s Pharmacy” received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” is published on Tor.com, and her first novel, Summoned, is available now from Tor Teen. She currently lives in a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island.
The god who is Not-To-Be-Named is probably Hastur, who is often called He-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Named (kinda like Voldemort). Tsathoggua and his black slime worshippers were created by Clark Ashton Smith, I think in one of his Dying Earth stories.
Binger, on the other hand, is a real place, the birthplace of Johnny Bench. They don’t really have a mound. There is one, but it’s closer to another town and is shaped differently.
We get another look at a governmental/societal form in this one. In this case, a sort of aristocratic communism, which contrasts nicely with the fascism in “Shadow out of Time”. HPL seems rather less enamored of this approach
But what really jumped out at me is that the core of both this story and “Shadow out of Time” is essentially a sojourn in an alien and terrifying culture. Peaslee and Zamaconda seem to have spent about the same amount of time among their captors, though they adapted differently. Of course, Peaslee knew he was only there for a limited time and the narrative demanded that Zamaconda at least get to a point where he could send his manuscript to the outer world, but both spent time among the upper classes and learned a lot. But what I wonder is just how much of these two narratives was inspired by Lovecraft’s time in New York. For him, that was an alien and terrifying culture, which nevertheless had its high points and attractions. His time there was also about the same length as his two protagonists.
I found the build-up at the beginning of this story to be very creepy and well-done, but once it switched to Zamacona’s memoir, it turned dreadfully dull. (On a side note, the aforementioned “Curse of Yig” is one my favorites of HPL.)
Well, I had mercifully forgotten about the transcribed Native American dialect until this re-read. On the whole, it’s an interesting story, if not exactly one I like. I feel that Bishop pushed Lovecraft out of his comfort zone: certainly, “Weird Westerns” aren’t typical Lovecraft territory. I also remember that the K’n-yan were regular guests in my nightmares after my first read. Still, so much of this story is reading about someone reading about something that happened to someone else and, of course, this is one where the racism is foregrounded. Perhaps it’s best to consider this a “test run” for his later, better, attempts to depict alien civilizations, like “The Shadow Out of Time”, as @1 suggested.
Tsathoggua was invented for the CAS Hyperborea story “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”, though apparently Lovecraft gets the first print reference in “The Whisperer in Darkness”.
“The Mound” was originally published in the November 1940 issue of Weird Tales. Not a classic issue by any estimation: Lovecraft enthusiasts may be interested in “Wine of the Sabbat” by Robert Bloch and August Derleth’s “The Sandwin Compact”.
The real Binger: http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/B/BI010.html
SaltManZ @@@@@ 2: I’m a “Yig” fan, myself. I think the Zamacona narrative is a good example of how a truncated version of a naturally longer story can be a more tedious read. After Z arrives in the underworld metropolis, it’s all worldbuilding tell, tell, tell and really no dramatized show until we get back to the frame narrative.
“Yig,” with a succinct frame and a fully staged central incident, has neither more nor less material than a short story needs.
Despite my attempts, I have found rather little on the subject of Zealia Bishop. This article covers much of what is known and said, suggesting that she may be the Zealia Brown Reed who wrote “One-Man Girl” for Cupid’s Diary: http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/bishop-lovecraft-curse-of-yig.html.
I remember liking this story alot when I was a teenager despite it’s meandering style and sort of vague petered out ending. It’s nice when HPL occasionally moves out of his New England settings.
Also DemetriosX, Lovecraft would have been referring to Azathoth as the unspeakable one as the whole concept of “Hastur the Unspeakable” was created by August Derleth after HPL’s death. And Tsathoggua first appeared in one of Smith’s “Hyperborea ” tales. “Dying Earth” was Jack Vance. A very similar flavor and I could see why you’d mix the two up.
R & A, I’m really enjoying your reviews of the old gent, it’s interesting to get a womans view of these tales. When I first started reading HPL back in 1975 or so it seemed there were no women who liked Lovecraft. (At least that I knew.) Plenty who liked Tolkien and others but they were as indifferent to HPL as they were to Progressive Rock.
Please continue generating cooties;)
ia! Shub-Niggurath!
@6
I had forgotten how few references to Hastur are actually in Lovecraft’s own works (and a lot of my mythos knowledge is tied up in my Call of Cthulhu playing years). But I’m not sure the god in question would have been Azathoth either. Azathoth has its epithets, but is there much reluctance to name it? Nyarlathotep might be another possibility, since he sometimes answers when he is spoken of.
And I couldn’t remember Hyperborea off the top of my head. Dying Earth is the specific name of Vance’s series, but it’s the same conceit and is often used as a shorthand for the trope in general.
@7: It’s not impossible that it is Hastur: Lovecraft had read The King in Yellow by the time of this story and the one official reference in “The Whisperer in Darkness” came shortly after this one.
CAS did indeed have a fantasy series at the far end of time but that was Zothique.
The accounts of the decadence and horrific amusements made me think at once of what passes for entertainment these days, much of which I have heard of but knew better than to click on; porn and reality shows and so on. It was as if HPL was seeing 75 years ahead. I don’t have my copy of the story at hand but that was what came into my mind.
The black slime entities flowing in the lowest abyss [or was it really the lowest?] are an intriguing detail. Oklahoma, if I recall right–and I haven’t been there in half a century or so, maybe it was Kansas instead–turned out to be underlain by black liquid, all right, and it was formed from ancient decay, pumped up by spooky-looking machines, and now being used up at an alarming rate, causing climate damage that might not be fixable. Just think what HPL would have made of that one…
Fritz Leiber did a good job on it in “The Black Gondolier”, and someone else had a story in one of the Chaosium anthos called “Recrudescence”, both of which I recommend, although the latter might be hard to find. Anyway, a thoughtful and interesting article, as usual.
As a side note, while this particular mound isn’t real, the mounds of the Midwest are an actual thing. Cahokia holds the remains of the oldest city in what is now the U.S. At its height it was more populous than contemporaneous London; it was also the largest—and only—city north of the Rio Grande. It stands within sight of the Saint Louis arch; there’s just something about the area that makes people want a really good view. It’s not especially related to the story, except that sometimes reality is pretty strange and awe-inspiring, and the New York City of the 1200s makes an excellent counterweight to BS anthropology.
DemetriosX @@@@@ 1: Ooh, that’s interesting, I hadn’t caught the similar time frames between the two fictional sojourns and the real one. I did notice that the K’n-yan city looked an awful lot like a modern metropolis as seen through the eyes of a medieval conquistador.
SchuylerH @@@@@ 5: That’s a lot more than I found–thanks for the detective work! And looks like another point in favor of, at the very least, deeply ambiguous authorship for this story.
Festerbestertester @@@@@ 6: I plead nonexistence for most of 1975 as an excuse for not yet having enjoyed Lovecraft. But I do understand why many women (and other readers dismissed or despised by him) wouldn’t care for his work. In some ways its easier to be a fan of problematic things now that we have more accessible fora in which to discuss their contradictions.
I know of many other writers who suffered from lesser prejudices than Lovecraft, but whose blind spots somehow interfere more completely with my reading experience. Normally, I believe that a shallow understanding of humanity’s variability tends to lead to shallow–and thence dull and obnoxious–worldbuilding. Part of my goal in this reread is to figure out why Lovecraft is, at least for me, an exception. His worldbuilding clearly grows from his bigotry, but seems sometimes to transcend it.
Angiportus @@@@@ 9: I think you may perhaps overestimate the taste and kindness of past entertainments.
Charlie Stross has asserted that Lovecraft wrote brilliantly and presciently about the Cold War, but climate change maps pretty well too. Perhaps one of the appeals of cosmic horror is that it maps well to just about any conceivable apocalypse.
In fact, “Charging Buffalo” is a reasonably credible Caddoan name (the Wichita spoke a Caddoan language).
Actual examples from that language group: Walking Bear, Charge-the-Camp, White Horse, Mad Bear, Yellow Fox, etc.
Lovecraft could either have looked up some Witchita or Pawnee names, or just pulled one out of the air that sounded vaguely Plains Indian.
In this case, the stereotype is perfectly accurate; that happens sometimes.
English-speakers are accustomed to personal names being an abritrary sound attached to an individual, but that’s a product of a specific history — the Norman Conquest and the post-Christianization fashion for Biblical names, names in languages the people using them didn’t understand.
Prior to that, Germanic names had similar meanings; Wolf Chief, Iron Bear, Blood Wolf, that sort of thing.
@9: “Recrudescence” was by Leonard Carpenter. It was first published in the January 1988 Amazing Stories, reprinted in Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XVII in 1989 and was mostly recently anthologised in 1996 in Robert M. Price’s The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror. In this case, Abebooks may once again be the collector’s friend.
Acquisition of “The Black Gondolier” ought to prove trivial: there are ebook editions of the collection of the same name from UK (SF Gateway) and US (Open Road Media) publishers, with a paperback from Open Road for the technology-averse.
Joatsbuddy @@@@@ 12: I retract the complaint–I had frankly assumed a poorly chosen name because the rest of the portrayal was so dubious. Color me surprised and a bit impressed at Lovecraft’s (or Bishop’s) research accumen.
“One imagines his exchanges with Bishop, each building on the other’s ideas to produce a terrible hybrid.”
What exchanges? Bishop’s ideas consisted of two sentences, as recorded by R. H. Barlow: “There is an Indian mound near here, which is haunted by a headless ghost. Sometimes it is a woman.” I’d like to know what other sources claim that HPL rewrote a draft by Bishop.
The setting also came from Bishop — Lovecraft prepaired a kind of questionnaire for her to get details of landscape etc. correct
Joatsbuddy @@@@@ 12 I envy societies with cool names. I couldn’t even get the nuns to go for “Galadriel” as my confirmation name, and I would have preferred the highly appropriate “Ambling Badger.”
The “Mound” name I dislike is T’la-Yub. The woman is subjected to enough indignities and injustices — must she bear that thudding “Yub” on top of everything else?
@8: Except that Lovecraft never referred to Hastur as “not to be named” or “the unspeakable”. Given only the phrase “the Not-To-Be-Named One”, it is impossible to say that he refers to Hastur at all.
The ending of the Zamacona part seemed good, but the middle was such a bore. Like others said, this is like an early draft for “Shadow out of time”, and Shadow did it better. The frame within a frame story is not done so well here. The social commentary is interesting, as the K’n-yan civilization has some resemblance to then current America, with the tall towers being skyscrapers, casual sex and so on.
Ryamano @@@@@ 18: At least fifty-person affection groups could fill up all those echoing McMansions out there and take advantage of group discounts. Sort of the underworld equivalent of the Framily?
@17: The plot thickens: in “The Whisperer in Darkness”, in the same paragraph as the Hastur reference, I find “the Magnum Innominandum”, which is supposed to be the “Great Not-To-Be-Named”, though I wouldn’t be surprised if Lovecraft’s Latin was as bad as his German. Apparently, there’s a reference to it in De Vermis Mysteriis…
SchuylerH @@@@@ 20 Thinking about it one way, it should be relatively harmless to name Azathoth, since he’s mindless chaos and doesn’t go in for social media, unlike his Mind and Messenger Nyarlathotep. Or would chaotic mindlessness really bar him/it or anyone from Facebook and Twitter? More thought required.
Hastur is cryptic to me, though that King in Yellow incarnation sounds kind of touchy, hence dangerous to tweet about.
At any rate, Nyarlathotep would probably Google his name constantly in order to deploy avatars to those who take it either with adulation or in vain.
Right about the equal nastiness of past “entertainments”. I kind of left that one out, when adducing the current material on offer.
As for sounds, “T’la-Yub” does not thud when I say it. The euphony or dysphony of unfamiliar or consonant-heavy words is partly dependent on who is speaking, as well as who is listening.
I suspect what Lovecraft had in mind when coming up with the decadent underground civilization of the K’ny-an was more or less Imperial Rome, as an analogue to how contemporary culture could perhaps go spectacularly wrong.
Western Civ. has been haunted by the ghost of Rome for a very long time — it’s not an accident that we’re governed by a Senate from a big building with a dome and columns — but also by early Christianity’s grudge against Roman ‘decadence’.
This opposition is used as a framing device in nearly every cultural/political struggle from at least the Renaissance on down through the 19th century, and in the Enlightenment the Good Republic/Bad Empire thing was thrown into the pot.
Kipling was playing off Britain/Rome analogies in his historical stories during Lovecraft’s lifetime. It was a commonplace trope.
MartinA @@@@@ 15: The documentation is far from complete and I’m not persuaded. They did have an ongoing correspondence, much of which does not appear to be preserved–and certainly very few of Bishop’s papers are. But I’m not trying to make any deep literary detective claims here. All I’m in a position to say is that 1) this story doesn’t *feel* like the Lovecraft-alone stories, on several different axes, and 2) the evidentiary gaps are not inconsistent with Bishop deserving more credit than she gets, for both good and ill.
AMPillsworth @@@@@ 16: One can do worse than names given in ancient ancestral tongues, meanings hidden to the casual glance.
I do admire the willingness to go ahead and make alien tongues sound alien. The number of writers who insist on ending a woman’s name in a nice gentle vowel, never mind if she’s from Alpha Centauri, defies all worldbuilding logic. And it’s a pattern I fall into if I’m not careful; it’s the implicit grammatical rules they don’t teach in school that are hardest to cut from my conlangs.
Joatsbuddy @@@@@ 23: I’m not even should it was “could perhaps go spectacularly wrong.” The belief seems to have been that Rome was an inevitable template for all civilizations everywhere. Thus the obsession of the time’s anthropology with parallels between individual and societal development/decline. Thus also Kipling’s entertaining willingness to have the decadent empire overcome by Picts in one poem and Vikings in another.
I recently read in a German newspaper that someone wanted to give a kid a Charging Buffalo/Grey Eagle-type name (I forgot what exactly it was). That was not allowed, but an onomatology professor tracked down the Indian original and that was fine.
@24 Ruthanna
Tolkien fell into this, too. He even states flat out in the appendices that masculine hobbit names end in -a, but he changed it in his “translation” because it would seem odd to his readers. His two heroes were actually Bilba and Froda in their native tongues.
@25 birgit
German naming law can be terribly arbitrary, mostly because it’s up to the local registry office to say yes or no. It’s astonishing what gets through sometimes.
I am at work and will go back to my references on The Mound regarding authroship later.
One thing that has not been mentioned much is the really cheesey device of ending the story in italics, I guess to give it more pulpy punch. The Mound, a story I did not like) is the worst offender as it does so in both Spanish and English.
As far as I know there are no films, animations or comics of The Mound. There are quite a few sequels or riffs on the subject, however. Two recent notable ones include the novel from Japan by Asamatsu Ken from 2008, Queen of K’n-yan. This wa sa pretty good action story riffing on genetic research and war crimes. The other is in the book Cthulhu Unbound 3, where Cody Goodfellow has a part Native American bounty hunter follow a trail under the earth. There is also a good bit of action here, unusual in Cthulhu mythos type works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv1mtARUahE
Interestingly, Ghost Mound in Hydro, OK (near Binger) appears to be the inspiration for the story’s setting.
Angiportus @@@@@22 & REmrys @@@@@ 24 – True as to different “ear-feels” for different ears, with different cultural conventions adding to the mix. For me, anything that rhymes with “bub,” “chub,” “tub,” “scrub,” “flub,” and even “shrub” is a thud (thub?) Then there’s that classic cartoon sound for drowning or thick liquid draining, “glub, glub, glub.”
DemetriosX @@@@@ 26 Re Tolkien’s names, in Beowulf alone we have mention of the big tough Anglo-Saxon/Norse guys Breca, Halga, Offa, and (yes) Froda. I’m on the fence about whether he was wrong to change the endings to make the names sound more masculine to the modern ear, but I’m afraid my personal ear-reaction to the terminal ‘o’ is that it must be a clown name. Especially Bilbo.
Tolkien does have three of the most beautiful female character names in literature, I think, none of which end in a vowel: Galadriel, Eowyn, and Arwen. Elanor is nice, too.
Shelob suffers from the same terminal “b” thud as T’la-Yub, alas, for all her magnificence.
With the arguable exception of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (which
can be interpreted as taking place entirely within a sort of loosely-defined
cavern world), “The Mound,” with a self-sustaining society inhabiting “blue-
litten” K’n-Yan–with “red-litten” Yoth and the “black realm” N’kai still
deeper–has Lovecraft’s most elaborately developed subterranean setting.
However, viewed as science fiction, “The Mound” leaves much to be desired.
The origin of the enormous cavern is not mentioned. In reality, under Earthly
conditions of gravity and rock strength, a cavity even a fraction of that size
would collapse. Its illumination is accounted for only by vague mentions of
“the aurora” and “phenomena of radio-activity.” In a cavity so deep in the
Earth as to require three days of downhill walking to reach the main void,
the atmosphere should be too hot to sustain life. And at a depth that would
probably be below sea level, where could the underground rivers go?
The supernormal abilities of the inhabitants, including telepathy,
dematerialization by will-power, and animation of the dead, are no better
explained. Their use of gold as a building material is impractical (too
heavy; too soft). Perhaps Lovecraft himself realized these deficiencies; he
subsequently handled such technical aspects much more plausibly in At the
Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow Out of Time.” I agree with those who suggest that “The Mound” could have served as a practice run for those better stories.
I have wondered whether the cavern of “The Mound” might owe some
inspiration to Carlsbad Cavern. They are in the same part of America, and
Carlsbad, like HPL’s invented K’n-yan, is entered by a long, downtrending
entrance passage series that is the portal of a huge chamber. If Lovecraft read
the National Geographic magazine, he could easily have learned of Carlsbad
Cavern by 1925, when it was brought to public attention by that journal. On
the other hand, I may be over-interpreting. If you are going to postulate a
habitable world beneath the surface, something like that geometry is
practically a necessity; and it has been approximated in imaginative writings from Homer’s account of the ancient Greek underworld through various hollow-earth theories and Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Its conformity to that archetype is one of the reasons why Carlsbad Cavern is interesting, but may have been only coincidental in regard to Lovecraft’s use of that pattern.
I would not be surprised if the 2003 Preston and Child thriller Still
Life With Crows owes something to “The Mound.” It is set relatively nearby in western Kansas, and like “The Mound,” features an invented Carlsbad-style
cavern. Preston and Child have acknowledged influence by Lovecraft in earlier books.
I have to ask: where’s the page image from? I can’t find it on ISFDB…
@29: Carlsbad may have had some influence: Clark Ashton Smith sent Lovecraft a clipping about it in a letter of the 9th of January 1930 while Lovecraft responded on the 17th, noting that he had “long known about the cave” and “urged a friend in New Mexico to visit it”. Both letters may be found on the Clark Ashton Smith website Eldritch Dark.
DGDavis @@@@@ 29 As a lover of cavey, tunnelly, all-around-underground stories, I’m having a great time reading your contributions. The subterreannean world of K’n-Yan never did ring true to me, as a subterrane setting. That subworld of N’Kai seemed much more interesting. I kind of look upon the whole system more as an alternate reality reached through the entrance tunnel than as an actual underground. The Dreamlands underworld — if, indeed, it’s not all an underworld — escapes from similar quibbles by being, well, a dream land, beyond our waking laws.
Of Lovecraft’s collaborations/ghostwritings, my favorite underground setting is in “Under the Pyramid” — much more dramatic and immediate.
Underworlds/undergrounds in Lovecraft — an interesting general topic. Bad stuff goes on down there, Freudian overtones intended.
SchuylerH @@@@@ 30 I was wondering the same thing about the image — is it a scan from someone’s vintage paperback? I wanted a closer look at the violet-clad figure. I’m thinking it’s a white-washed T’la-Yub. I’m also wondering if Z would have worn his comic-book version of Conquistador gear for a long underground crawl.
The human-beast hybrid is pretty cool, actually, and something I’d like to avoid, like Z.
A couple of other remarks by Lovecraft from Eldritch Dark:
In a letter of the 5th of October 1929, Lovecraft describes “The Curse of Yig” as “practically mine”. He claims that [Frank Belknap] Long also did work for her and says that she contributed “a synopsis of notes describing a pioneer couple, the attack on the husband by snakes, the bursting of his corpse in the dark, & the subsequent madness of the wife.”
On the 3rd of December, Lovecraft is still griping about Bishop, claiming that he is working from “a single paragraph of locale and subject orders” and claims that the K’n-yan and Zamacona are his creations.
It’s entirely possible that Lovecraft is being a little self-serving but it’s at least of historical interest to see how the matter was set down at the time. I would have liked to see some remarks on “Medusa’s Coil” but there are none of Lovecraft’s letters from May 1930 on that website.
@32: I’m wondering if it’s preliminary art, as I can’t find a collection of that name on my usual databases. It might be fanart but the assumption that this story has fans may be going too far.
For the Mods: Self Flagging
On the Tor.com mobile site, the link for the Lovecraft read only goes to the intro post. It doesn’t take you to the “Latest.” So it becomes very hard to find this thread.
@Braid_Tug: Thanks! We’ve let the production team know, and they’re looking into it.
@25 & 26: But the point behind the Charging Buffalo / Grey Eagle type names would be lost if someone just picked one for their child.
In some tribes, the point was to look outside the dwelling and name the child after what the father saw. It was seen as omen.
Or in different tribes, adult names were granted based on deeds the youth had done prior.
But the point behind many naming traditions has been tossed out the window.
Edit: Thanks BMcG!
Re the cover, I’m also curious. Google has never heard of this title. It does have the vague feel of an e-book cover, so maybe somebody cobbled this together? I don’t think the purple figure is supposed to be T’la-Yub. Looks male to me, so it’s probably the guy who first met with Zamacona outside the temple. He does look whitewashed, though.
Gah, that’s what I get for using the heuristic, “pictures of covers are fair use.” Checking more carefully, this is one of four custom dust jackets done by artist Pete Von Sholly for his own private collection, and I will now go and find something with less fraught IP to replace it with.
Ah hah! Hence the mysterious title, which was the artist’s substitution of a favorite story for the “Horror in the Museum” of the Arkham House title, which tome of “other revisions” this cover graces. Good sleuthing.
I’m not sure the story answered its initial mystery: what of the two ghosts? It seems they are y’m-bhis that guard the gate, but isn’t the point of having guards that the underworld is supposed to remain secret?
After spending a few hours under the Mound, the narrator is able to extrapolate things about radioactivity and electrons from the writings of a mad XVI century Spaniard he barely understands, that describes information he got from telepathic conversations with aliens… Those parts remind me of The War of the Worlds, when the narrator describes the normal ecology of Martians in their environment: did he went to Mars for research purpose, or did he directly asked the guys in the tripods what they liked to eat?
I also wonder about where Zamacona got the proper spelling of names ans words like Gll’-Htaa-Ynn. We learn in the end that he taught the K’n-yans a bit of Spanish, but who decided that their names had such horrible spellings? How did they decide of the convention that this one eldritch sound would be transcribed in Roman letters with a double consonant followed by an apostrophe and a hyphen?
I liked that the scary aliens too had haunted doors to the underground that they were scared to disturbed. I also enjoyed the description of Tulu as a spirit of universal harmony: it’s interesting that we progressively learn more about Great Old Ones that are not relevant to the story, and we learn this information from various points of view. Does Lovecraft reference his past stories or his future ones the most?
BTW, that is exactly one of issues Lovecraft himself had with planetary romance of his time. In one of his letters he complained about how in them, everytime our hero contacts with some alien culture and romances some alien princess, she always has a name ending with nice Indo-European -a! So alien. Much wow.
Poor T’la-darling; once outside, she’d suffer the same fate as Ariadne – though her revenge would be more a Medea-like one, actually.
ERMGARSH. H. P. was riffing off of actual first nations stories with the stuff about the blue red and black litten worlds!!
Look at this! A Navajo emergence myth! Like, where people have to climb out of underground world after underground world to reach the present one on the surface.
“The First World, Ni’hodilqil,[1] was black as black wool….The Black Cloud represented the Female Being or Substance. For as a child sleeps when being nursed, so life slept in the darkness of the Female Being. “
https://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/nav/omni/omni02.htm
What did he call the black realm, the deepest one? Wasn’t it N’kai or something?
And yes, he was screwing particular females/the female element over in so many ways with this story…
@43 This is almost the comment I was about to make. Louis L’Amour wrote a similar story called Haunted Mesa about a private investigator whose friend goes missing after excavating an ancient Hopi kiva. The folks in the “Third World” beneath, however, want out so they can expand their influence into our world, instead of being isolationists like the K’n-yan.
https://deepcuts.blog/2020/01/11/the-mound-1940-by-zealia-bishop-h-p-lovecraft