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Quirky, Quixotic, and Inspired by Dark Dreams of Madness: Caitlin Kiernan’s “Our Lady of Arsia Mons”
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on November 19, 2025
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Caitlin Kiernan’s “Our Lady of Arsia Mons,” first published as “Our Lady of Tharsis Tholus” in Sirenia Digest in August 2012, but most easily available in the column-favorite Dreams From the Witch House anthology. Spoilers ahead!
Conglomerate Headquarters, Tharsis Montes, Mars:
Four people discuss what happened at Arsia Mons when investigators opened a chamber below the extinct caldera. As Conglomerate higher-ups, shielded from the hazards of actual field work, none of them were present. Chief Warrant Officer Tine Sayles presides. Other attendees are a “Conglomerate man, through and through,” the IVF-generated Jack Doran; geologist Emily Liang; and former site overseer Kagan Cetinkaya.
On the table are seven artifacts from the chamber, greenish stone carvings protected by electrical barriers. A security breach has leaked their existence to Earthside press. Sayles hopes the media will be “happy with talk of aliens.” They’re already comparing the Arsia Mons “Temple” with Tutankhamen’s tomb, but haven’t adopted the “Pharoah’s Curse” angle.
The artifacts are carved from a porphyry unlike Terran forms, though no one’s yet found porphyry deposits on Mars. A bigger mystery: Two and a half centuries before, on Earth, a man carved “essentially identical versions” of the figures!
* * *
An excerpt from “The Quirky Quixotic Kingdom of Henry Clews Jr. [Lannie Goodman, The Sienese Shredder, 2007]:
Henry Clews Jr. (1876-1937) was the renegade offspring of old New York wealth. In 1918 he began restoration on the medieval French fortress of La Napoule, for which he sculpted “reminiscent of the hybrid animal kingdoms of Hieronymus Bosch, Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss…cross-breeds of fish, crustaceans, birds, reptiles, monkeys and predatory beasts.” Porphyry was his favorite material.
* * *
WHERE I END AND YOU BEGIN (THE SKY IS FALLING IN):
Tannishtha Bandopadhyay has worked on Mars for two years, as a psychiatrist in the HQ infirmary. “The bleakness and hostility of Mars” wears on human minds, and the company releases no employee uncured. To date, no psych ward patient has left.
She’s assigned to anthropologist Clay, one of the team which entered the Temple chamber. Against regulations, Clay touched an artifact and afterwards stabbed a teammate. She presented with “all the symptoms of schizophreniform disorder Type B,” but responded to no treatments. Today she’s dreamed of shoggoths, which she can’t describe, and of monsters led by “a mountain [that] walked.” She wanted to touch the artifact. Given a second chance, she’d touch all seven.
* * *
THE BEFORE (July 21, 2141):
Bench McDermott, prospector, drives a malfunctioning “dragger” across vast Martian dust flats, with a windstorm blowing in. He sees dust devils in the murk. They don’t register on radar, but resolve into a procession of gargantuan monstrosities. The thought “A mountain walks” invades his mind. They sing, urging him to join them. Instead, he orders the dragger AI to film them. When tempest-driven sand shrouds his windows, Bench is grateful.
* * *
Pete Sazerac is watching his “softsuit” heal in a soupy blue gel. The biological construct, cultured from his DNA, is a “human slipcover” that protects against the Martian environment, but Clay’s attack penetrated it. A teammate, Oklahoma, visits. Another teammate, she says, has asked for a discharge, but the Conglomerate won’t release anyone from their contracts. Best they can hope for is to end up like Clay, doped to docility. That, or dying on their next walkabout.
* * *
Chase Greco, Head of Systems Integration, and coworkers Dylan and Maxwell, meet with Conglomerate bureaucrat John Smith. The “alphas” have heard rumors that something’s amiss with the Temple suit-cam data. Videos contradict each other. Yamashita’s feed shows a figure resembling a hippo-footed, bat-winged octopus. It shows Clay touching another figure. But then it shows Clay leaving the chamber without attacking Sazerac. Morgan’s feed shows Clay attacking Morgan. Sazerac’s feed shows himself touching a figure, but not letting Clay touch it.
The suits have undergone rigorous testing. The cam footage, Maxwell says, is “going to fucking turn physics on its [head.]” Unmoved, Smith orders them to purge the files, keeping no private copies. He leaves. The techies make private backup copies before starting the purge.
* * *
Mary Nzeogwu wakes from a nightmare about monstrosities marching across Martian plains. Their “fearful symmetries” fade, but not her certainty that they’re linked to the Temple chamber. The horrors are led by an “octopotamus.” A chant rises: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu…
Her discharge request’s been denied. She hears her mother asking if she’s “sure she wants to do this.” She puts on her favorite music, and takes a cyanide capsule.
* * *
The Conglomerate conference room: The same four have gathered, but the statues have disappeared. Central, Sayles says, has “initiated a complete redact of the [Arsia Mons] findings.” On Earth, Crew’s works are hidden in a super-secure vault. Evidence of an alien civilization would have been tolerable, but not the Crews conundrum, not the cam feeds enigma. Central’s announced that the Temple site has collapsed. A terrorist incident in Moscow distracts the media. The exploratory team will have pertinent memories wiped. The same goes for present company.
Emily Liang walks out, furious. Never mind, Sayles says. She’ll be relieved to forget Arsia Mons once she’s over the shock. Now, on to other items on today’s agenda…
What’s Cyclopean: Petrological curiosities.
The Degenerate Dutch: Mars has no labor laws, whether about days off or workplace safety. Appreciate your OSHA while you have it.
Libronomicon: “The Quirky Quixotic Kingdom of Henry Clews Jr.” is a real article, one of the few extant writings about the man and his work. His sculptures are reminiscent of Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss.
Weirdbuilding: Have you ever heard of a shoggoth? Or a mountain that walks?
Madness Takes Its Toll: The Conglomerate’s Martian psychiatric facility is larger than anyone offworld knows. “The bleakness and hostility of Mars is anything but good for the human mind,” and they have a policy against returning anyone to Earth with evidence of that fact. And that’s before the Clewsian idols come into it.
Anne’s Commentary
This story sucked me into a warrens-worth of internet rabbit holes, some occupied by technical terms, others by maps of Mars, still others by quotations and allusions. I finally had to retreat from the labyrinthine burrows of research, like a dachshund who’s realized she’s digging too deep after the alluring badger that is “Our Lady of Arsia Mons.” The wise dachshund knows that eventually the badger gets to the turnaround chamber where he’ll make his stand.
I wanted to figure out when the story takes place. The section titled “THE BEFORE” takes place on July 21, 2141. Jack Doran must have been “petri-custom-grown” after 2152, when his particular IVF program was instituted. However, we don’t know when after 2152 Doran was “grown,” or how long it took him to reach his story-opening age (or apparent age). Not knowing that, we can only say the story opens after 2152.
Technical terms: Makroclear, the stuff of Kiernan’s tabletops and artifact stands, is a real material, available now. (I was kinda hoping it was a cool made-up word.) Dynamothermal metasomatism and the other geological terms, real stuff as well, as I figured given Kiernan’s studies in the science. Due to how Kindle broke up “dynamothermal” at margin’s end, I read it as “dyna-mother-mal.” That inspired visions of an energetic but evil Mother of Stones.
“The Quirky Quixotic Kingdom of Henry Clews Jr.” is an actual article about the actual artist and his actual Chateau de la Napoule. Clews is supposedly the sculptor who replicated the Temple idols with “mean deviations of less than .052 percent” exactitude. I didn’t find any images of Clews’s versions; one of his original pieces, fittingly, is “a long-tentacled half bird, half octopus” called “the Og of Octopi.”
The porphyry of the idols is not Terran porphyry, so it must be native Martian, right? Except no porphyry has been found on Mars, even though the conditions for its formation are present. Sayles carefully says she’s “been asked to set aside” this fact. Could it be the Conglomerate doesn’t want people speculating that the idol porphyry could be alien to both Earth and Mars? That aliens could have brought the artifacts from…elsewhere?
Here’s a map of the Tharsis Region of Mars. I had a good time-eating time trying to pinpoint on it Conglomerate HQ and Bench McDermott’s dragger.
I had the best time-eating time looking into materials quoted by characters. Emily Liang quotes the “Curse of the Pharaoh” from Tutankhamen’s tomb. In fact, there was no such curse—it was the child of sensational journalism. Appropriate, then, that Liang suggests the “Curse” would be a nice distraction to toss their own hungry media.
The title of Tannishtha and Clay’s section, “Where I End and You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In)” is a Radiohead song. You could probably write a thesis extracting the connection between song and story.
Given Cthulhu’s talent for invading human dreams, I expected Mythosian fragments. Several characters either speak or think Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” description: “A mountain walked or stumbled.” In her dream, Mary Nzeogwu hears the monstrous procession chant “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” (In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.) Plus some “Ia! Ia! Cthulhu!”s and “Ia! Ia! Shub-Niggurath!”s.
Maybe those ominous words float psychically in the aether of a Mars where lurks an Old One presence. And while Cthulhu’s poked around in human dreams, he may have harvested the bits of human poetry and song that float into character’s minds, even if they’ve never read or heard them. Bench plays the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” in his stranded dragger. Later, Mary’s dream-wind croons, “Hey, Jude, don’t be afraid…”
The maddened Clay mutters a mangled quote which Tannishtha semi-misidentifies as William Blake. “Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d/Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc” is from Blake’s “America a Prophecy.” Clay’s version is “fiery the angels fell, burning…and as they fell, deep thunder rolled, indignant, burning.” The pertinent change, fell versus rose, may echo Roy Batty’s purposeful alteration in Blade Runner: “Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled around their shores; burning with the fire of Orc.”
Mary delivers some Blake (“The Tyger“) in her perception of the monsters’ “fearful symmetries.”
At his first glimpse of the monster procession, Bench thinks of a “nasty snatch of poetry” he can’t recall encountering: “Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the man that’s wise!” The blind prophet Teiresias delivers the line in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” opening parallels this: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
Apparently the Conglomerate prefers not to correlate any more contents of the Arsia Mons Temple, let Kagan Cetinkaya protest all he may. I wonder if paleontologist Kiernan might share some of his dismay at closing so promising a dig.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
There are things man was not meant to know. Some of them are buried under the sands of the Australian dessert. Some of them are at your local library. But Earth is not the center of the universe or even particularly important: some of them are on Mars.
Mars is presumably not particularly important, either. But it’s important to us: our second stop on our way to our destiny in the stars. Or so say the legends of our corporate masters, not to mention any number of science fiction novels. Of course, it comes as-is and needs a lot of work. And many of those with the fortunes to get there aren’t interested in doing the work themselves. Beware any job where your ride home depends on your employer.
So there are two inhuman horrors in this story. One of them uses people as disposable pawns, driving them mad for purposes beyond their understanding. The other is Cthulhu.
Lovecraft and Henry Clews, Jr., were contemporaneous, born in the late 1800s and dying four and a half months apart in 1937. Lovecraft’s life and creation are extremely well-documented, so we know that he wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” in Summer 1926; it’s one of the best things to come out of his I HATE NYC period. Clews is less well-documented. He’s from New York but spent much of his later life in France. Some of his work was definitely on display in New York City in 1916, other sculptures in 1939; it’s not implausible that Lovecraft could have seen some in between. But The Og of Octopi (I found an image!) was sculpted in 1928, while Clews was in France, and exhibited in New York after both men were dead. Kiernan’s not the only one to suggest a connection. Perhaps they were mutual fans, or perhaps they were both inspired in ghastly nightmares by powers beyond mortal ken.
Erasing the records of Clews’ existence seems rude, either way. But the Conglomerate isn’t a particularly nice inhuman power. It’s not clear exactly what they’re trying to do on Mars—purposes, lack of understanding, see above—but archaeology appears to be a mere corner of it. They don’t like the publicity from evidence of alien life. If that were their focus, you’d expect them to hide the resulting violence, but cheerfully create action figures of Cthulhu’s Cosmic Marching Band
for sale back on Earth. I’d guess they’re mostly there to mine unobtainium, and look for interesting artifacts on the side.
Not porphyry, though, which the company hasn’t yet found on Mars. This isn’t necessarily all that mysterious, as it’s hard to find on Earth, too. Purple-red “imperial porphyry” is particularly challenging to acquire, which is presumably why Clews used other colors. That rare color would certainly be appropriate for Mars. And imperial would be appropriate for the walking mountain.
This is the second of Kiernan’s archeological stories that we’ve read, the first being “A Mountain Walked,” linked above. Much as I appreciated the Bone Wars going all eldritch, the corporate indentured servitude prison-asylum of Mars gives this one an additional punch of gothic energy. Being locked in with the abomination is much scarier than giving it a figurine to go away!
Then there are the alternate realities seen through the skinsuit recordings. Whatever these monstrosities are, they break our ideas of time and continuity. If you can’t trust your own memories and experiences, if two cameras or two people captures different events, that really is “anything but good for the human mind.”
Next week, Savannah continues her reign of personal convenience through Chapters 18-19 of Sister, Maiden, Monster—and then we begin Part III with Chapter 20. The section title is intriguing: “Mater Calamitus”.[end-mark]
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