Tag: Ghost Mountains

In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness

Pierce Mostyn is back in an all new adventure! A creature feature extraordinaire: In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness.

I’ve been sharing snippets with the folk on my mailing list. If you want to get in on sneak peeks and exclusive never-before-published content, sign up for my VIP Horror Readers Club. Plus, you’ll get the exclusive novella, “The Feeder” — which is not available in stores.

And if you haven’t yet discovered Pierce Mostyn, take a look at the books and pick your monster!

This time around, Mostyn and his team are sent to Antarctica to investigate why a Russian base has suddenly gone silent. Once they find out why, Dr Rafe Bardon, the director of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, sends them off to the subglacial Gamburtsev Mountains, also known as The Ghost Mountains. Because Dr Bardon thinks they fit the coordinates of the infamous Mountains of Madness.

Those familiar with the stories of HP Lovecraft will immediately recognize where the inspiration came for my story.

Lovecraft welcomed other writers to write in his Cthulhu Mythos universe. And many took him up on the invite, and many more continue to do so today.

I enjoy working in the Mythos. It’s a walk in a world where we are not at the top of the food chain. It’s a world where there are forces at work much bigger than we are. Beings to whom we are not unlike the ants on a sidewalk. Blithely stepped on without a second thought.

The universe of the Cthulhu Mythos puts humans in a place where we are not only not equal with nature, we are less than nature. It’s a universe that makes me stop and think about all of our petty squabbles. It makes me realize how, in the big picture, our troubles and problems are truly insignificant.

I’m looking at the 25th of March as the launch date of In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness. Stay tuned!

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

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The Real Mountains of Madness

I’ve had a love affair with Antarctica since I was around 11 or 12. Someone gave my mom a number of National Geographic magazines and one of them contained a map of Antarctica. I devoured the information on that map. And before that Shackleton had become something of a hero for me.

So it’s only natural that I found myself drawn to Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness. And recently reread the novel for background information as I researched my eighth Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation, which takes Mostyn and friends to the bottom of the world.

Of course today we know there are no massive mountain ranges as Lovecraft described in his book, and there’s no sacred city of the Elder Things nestled in the foothills and valley of the smaller of those great ranges.

That is the stuff of fiction. When an unexplored continent provided plenty of room for the imagination to take flight.

However, one aspect of Lovecraft’s tale is at least partially true: there are indeed freshwater lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Whether or not they are inhabited by Elder Things and shoggoths remains to be seen.

Of interest, ironically so, the coordinates Lovecraft gave for the Mountains of Madness are not far off from the location of the great sub-glacial Gamburtsev Mountain range, also known as the Ghost Mountains.

The mountain range, however, is not visible. It is entirely below the surface of the ice. Exploration is being carried out by modern technology. What a wonderful world in which we live where we can go where no one has gone before without actually going there!

The Gamburtsev Mountains are the real Mountains of Madness. But will we find the caves and strange cube-like structures that Lovecraft described on the mountains? Will we find on the eastern side, nestled in the foothills, an enormous metropolis preserved by the ice as Pompeii and Herculaneum were preserved by Vesuvius? Will we find a tunnel leading to the sub-glacial lakes, occupied by those blasphemously hideous agglutinations of protoplasmic bubbles?

Who knows? Perhaps Lovecraft was right after all. Dr Rafe Bardon, Director of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, has his own ideas, and the Russian drilling into and possible contamination of Lake Vostok might have greater consequences of dire import than we could ever imagine, or Lovecraft either, for that matter.

What I do know is that Pierce Mostyn… Wait a minute. Is that a knocking at my door I hear? Let me see who it is. I won’t be long.

As Mr Hawes hasn’t returned, I, his VA, will end the post as he usually does. Hopefully he’ll be back in time for next week’s post. 

Comments are always welcome! And until next time (if there is a next time), happy reading!

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