At the Mountains of Madness

The American author H. P. Lovecraft wrote the science fiction and cosmic horror novella At the Mountains of Madness in 1931, and it appeared in three instalments in 1936. Weird Tales rejected it on the grounds of its length and was serialised instead in Astounding Stories, and it has been anthologised many times since.

The narrator is Dr William Dyer of Miskatonic University, whose account covers an expedition he led to Antarctica in September 1930, how badly it went and what the party found there. Beyond the ice the party finds the ruins of a civilisation far older than the human race, and murals and sculptures that record a history of the planet nobody was meant to read.

Dyer writes down events that have not been told before, hoping to put off a second expedition that wants to return to the continent. What the expedition meets there is why the account exists at all, and the narrator's warning is addressed to a future expedition.

Lovecraft wrote the novella after reading about Antarctic exploration, and it belongs to the cycle of stories that share his invented mythology. It is a standalone tale.