Gongnardia has a new review/appreciation of The Mound, Lovecraft’s 29,000-word novella which was ghost-written for his revision client Zealia Bishop, who apparently never paid him for it. His work for Zealia Bishop was built around the barest of plot ideas and outlines — “slim plot synopses”, as they are referred to in the notes to Lord of a Visible World: an autobiography in letters. Undertaken late 1929, the tale has a modern man discovering the manuscript of a 16th century conquistador explorer in the Old West (Oklahoma). A vast underground civilization of extraterrestrial beings is encountered, and in the process a large sweep of geological ‘deep’ time is described. This makes The Mound (written 1929-30) an interesting “trial run” for Lovecraft’s own novella At the Mountains of Madness (written Feb/Mar 1931). This is one I don’t seem to remember reading as a youth, and it’s not one I’ve so far encountered in my current re-reading of Lovecraft.
The story doesn’t seem to have been done as an audio book, either free or commercially. But it is online here. The full and complete manuscript version only appeared as a critical edition in print in 1989, in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions