So our group finished At the Mountains of Madness…finally!  I didn’t really like the book, I’m not very big on sci-fi stuff.  Throughout the whole book I could not figure out why this had anything to do with what we were doing in class, especially after I looked at the other groups wiki’s and noticed their books had a lot in common with the canonical themes that we had made a list of in class.  Ours didn’t apply to many, and if they did it was sort of stretching it.  In class though our professor pointed out something that I never would have picked out on my own.  She referred it back to the underground rail road.  Now everything sort of makes sense in a different way.  The shoggoths in the book where building an underground railway of some kind and taking over, and that is what the white people back then thought.  A quote that we actually chose for a close reading has some information in it that when read with out this knowledge it doens’t make sense, but now that I know what he is really referring to, I understand it more. Here is the quote… “We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see-for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned- was something altogether different, and immeasurable more hideous and detestable. It was the utter objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform-the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.”