he worked hard on the story that he called “Frozen Hell,” generating five false starts and cutting an opening section of more than forty pages. He based the setting on a book by the explorer Richard Byrd, but he may also have been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” which had been serialized in Astounding. Campbell was no fan of Lovecraft’s—particularly of his trick of hinting at terrors “too frightful to mention”—but he was drawn to the challenge of depicting horrors that others left undescribed, and it gave him more pleasure than anything else he had ever written:
...more
