Hinterland Horror: Geographical Extremity as Revelation in Blood Meridian and At the Mountains of Madness

ABSTRACT Despite its frequent depiction of atrocity, Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre has received scant consideration as a contribution to genre horror. This article addresses this gap by reading Blood Meridian through the lens afforded by H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. It draws parallels between these texts’ depiction of frontiers in terms of experiences of metaphysical and moral extremity. Both Lovecraft’s Antarctica and McCarthy’s Southwestern wastes are encountered as sites not simply of jeopardy, but of dread. This terror emerges from the manner in which the natural becomes uncanny through apparent optical illusion. In both, mirage becomes the stuff of horror as its revelations unveil a true and more than earthly danger. For Lovecraft, the desolating reality uncovered by extreme geography is that terrestrial life began with extraterrestrial creators who concocted earth-life as a mere caprice: a flattening of metaphysics into physics that renders the universe utterly hostile and inhuman. McCarthy’s West offers a similarly terrifying mirror, a terra damnata whose hallucinatory geography also promises horrors, but of a less strictly natural sort. Notwithstanding critics’ emphasis on an optical democracy that erases human significance, what the altered perceptions of Blood Meridian’s hinterlands reveal is the abiding theological terror of human fallenness.