Spent the week with a geologist who wanted, more than almost anything, not to have been believed.

That’s the strange centre of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness — a narrator who documents everything so scrupulously that the reader arrives at the horror before he’s willing to admit he’s arrived there himself. No shadows. No door left conveniently shut. Just measurements, in order, until the measurements stop being safe to have made.

Turns out the manuscript got roughly the same courtesy from its own editors that Dyer’s report gets from his colleagues. Rejected once for running too long. Picked up, eventually, by a man who by most accounts didn’t read it closely before he bought it, and who then cut about a thousand words nobody asked him to lose. Lovecraft never lived to see it put right.

There’s something worth sitting with in that, if you’re the sort who sits with things.

I mostly am, down here.

Full introduction, two essays, and the rest of that publication history are up on Kindle now. Novel typed live, one keystroke at a time, on YouTube.

— G. H. Schreiber 

16/08/2026