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At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
A complete short novel, AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is a tale of terror unilke any other. The Barren, windswept interior of the Antarctic plateau was lifeless--or so the expedition from Miskatonic University thought. Then they found the strange fossils of unheard-of creatures...and the carved stones tens of millions of years old...and, finally, the mind-blasting terror of the City of the Old Ones. Three additional strange tales, written as only H.P. Lovecraft can write, are also included in this macabre collection of the strange and the weird.
Table of Contents:
At the Mountains of Madness • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1936) • novel by H. P. Lovecraft
The Dreams in the Witch-House • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1933) • novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
The Shunned House • (1928) • novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
The Statement of Randolph Carter • [Randolph Carter] • (1920) • shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft
Table of Contents:
At the Mountains of Madness • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1936) • novel by H. P. Lovecraft
The Dreams in the Witch-House • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1933) • novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
The Shunned House • (1928) • novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
The Statement of Randolph Carter • [Randolph Carter] • (1920) • shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft
184 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
About the author
H.P. Lovecraft
4,152 books17.5k followersHoward Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
— Wikipedia
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
— Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 587 reviews
March 20, 2022
“I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss."
Reading H.P. Lovecraft is sometimes a bit frustrating. The same is true for his At the Mountains of Madness. I enjoyed it up to a point. Still, there is only so long that the nameless terror can move the narrative forward. Perhaps a longer review to follow which might explain how I can like Lovecraft, and continue to read his work, without really liking his writing.
“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”
Reading H.P. Lovecraft is sometimes a bit frustrating. The same is true for his At the Mountains of Madness. I enjoyed it up to a point. Still, there is only so long that the nameless terror can move the narrative forward. Perhaps a longer review to follow which might explain how I can like Lovecraft, and continue to read his work, without really liking his writing.
“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”
July 22, 2015
great collection.
3 stars for "The Statement of Randolph Carter"
a fun, brief shaggy dog story with a pretty famous last line. moral of the tale: don't go looking for kicks inside of tombs. duh!
3 stars for "The Shunned House"
Lovecraft at his most Lovecraft. displays his strengths and weaknesses equally. a whole lot of tell and not a lot of show... but the "history" recounted in the story was really absorbing to me. I love History as Horror. a whole lot of florid prose and hysterical emotions... annoying to some, I suppose, but I love it. this story can be boiled down as such: the sadly brief adventure of two gents trying to figure out what exactly is up with a terrible house in Providence. two-thirds of the story recounts the creepy story of this house and its various doomed inhabitants and the last third is about those two curious fellows spending too long in a particularly bad room of that house. what they discover is surprisingly weird and not what I expected.
4 stars for "Dreams in the Witch-House"
this is the real find of the book as it doesn't often make its way into Lovecraft collections. young Walter Gilman is a student at Miskatonic University and a resident of one of Arkham's apparently common haunted houses. he encounters a dead witch, her rat-like familiar Brown Jenkins, and the "black man" also known as Nyarlathotep (my personal favorite of the Cthulhu bunch). many psychedelic dreams ensue in which Walter travels across multiple dimensions and sees bizarre things while slowly realizing he is being entrapped in a plan to sacrifice an infant and then be whisked away on a one-way trip to the throne of Azathoth. those dreams were fascinating and included all sorts of details that were both vividly odd and surprisingly precise. I was fascinated by the image of the witch and her familiar's dream-shapes: "a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colors and rapidly shifting surface angles". the whole story has the feeling of a hysterical, escalating fever dream. I love those sorts of dreams!
5 stars for "At the Mountains of Madness"
classic novella about an ill-fated expedition into an alien city on the Antarctica Plateau. this is the make-it-or-break-it point for Lovecraft novices. if you can't deal with the hyperventilating style and all of the history as horror, best to give up because this is Lovecraft in a nutshell.
during my re-read, I realized that my favorite thing about this novella is the parallel narrative that is submerged within the story. there's the tale recounted by the expedition leader that makes up the entirety of the narrative... but within that is the story of aliens woken by this expedition, forced to cope with an entirely new world after a millennium of sleeping, their journey back to their now desolate and abandoned homeland, and their tragic battle with the monsters that have remained there. poor aliens! I really felt for them. and I was surprised at the amount of sympathy that the often offensively xenophobic Lovecraft clearly had for them as well. I guess we all have our soft spots...
awwwwwww, just look at this adorable lil' baby Cthulhu and his sweet little button-eyes that don't even recognize you as sentient:
all he wants to do is grow up, invade our dreams, and re-takeour his planet. don't judge him.
3 stars for "The Statement of Randolph Carter"
a fun, brief shaggy dog story with a pretty famous last line. moral of the tale: don't go looking for kicks inside of tombs. duh!
3 stars for "The Shunned House"
Lovecraft at his most Lovecraft. displays his strengths and weaknesses equally. a whole lot of tell and not a lot of show... but the "history" recounted in the story was really absorbing to me. I love History as Horror. a whole lot of florid prose and hysterical emotions... annoying to some, I suppose, but I love it. this story can be boiled down as such: the sadly brief adventure of two gents trying to figure out what exactly is up with a terrible house in Providence. two-thirds of the story recounts the creepy story of this house and its various doomed inhabitants and the last third is about those two curious fellows spending too long in a particularly bad room of that house. what they discover is surprisingly weird and not what I expected.
4 stars for "Dreams in the Witch-House"
this is the real find of the book as it doesn't often make its way into Lovecraft collections. young Walter Gilman is a student at Miskatonic University and a resident of one of Arkham's apparently common haunted houses. he encounters a dead witch, her rat-like familiar Brown Jenkins, and the "black man" also known as Nyarlathotep (my personal favorite of the Cthulhu bunch). many psychedelic dreams ensue in which Walter travels across multiple dimensions and sees bizarre things while slowly realizing he is being entrapped in a plan to sacrifice an infant and then be whisked away on a one-way trip to the throne of Azathoth. those dreams were fascinating and included all sorts of details that were both vividly odd and surprisingly precise. I was fascinated by the image of the witch and her familiar's dream-shapes: "a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colors and rapidly shifting surface angles". the whole story has the feeling of a hysterical, escalating fever dream. I love those sorts of dreams!
5 stars for "At the Mountains of Madness"
classic novella about an ill-fated expedition into an alien city on the Antarctica Plateau. this is the make-it-or-break-it point for Lovecraft novices. if you can't deal with the hyperventilating style and all of the history as horror, best to give up because this is Lovecraft in a nutshell.
during my re-read, I realized that my favorite thing about this novella is the parallel narrative that is submerged within the story. there's the tale recounted by the expedition leader that makes up the entirety of the narrative... but within that is the story of aliens woken by this expedition, forced to cope with an entirely new world after a millennium of sleeping, their journey back to their now desolate and abandoned homeland, and their tragic battle with the monsters that have remained there. poor aliens! I really felt for them. and I was surprised at the amount of sympathy that the often offensively xenophobic Lovecraft clearly had for them as well. I guess we all have our soft spots...
awwwwwww, just look at this adorable lil' baby Cthulhu and his sweet little button-eyes that don't even recognize you as sentient:
all he wants to do is grow up, invade our dreams, and re-take
August 12, 2010
To save you time, I shall summarize this novelette for you. If the subject comes up at a cocktail party, (1) pretend you've really read it, (2) find cooler cocktail parties. But, really, this has some INTENSE spoilers.
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (Now with additions to satisfy the whiners)
Okay, so, there's like TEN scientists, and it doesn't matter what their names are, because none of them have personalities. For the purposes of making this more exciting, lets say their names are Michael, Eh!, Jacob, Ceridwen, Caris, Jason, Manny, Brian and Aerin. And, by the way, now would be the appropriate time to turn all the lights off, except for maybe a few candles to get a spooky mood going.
Okay, so! Our brave crew of scientists are going down to the South Pole to study something Scientific. Lets imagine it's the effects of global warming. They're gonna check to see how much more ice has melted, and whether or not the penguins are sweating to death and whatnot. But, when we get down there to the pole, there's a big snow-storm! Some of us are kinda big pussies, so we don't want to fly to the research site and maybe die on the way, so we let the most courageous ones go first. So Ceridwen, Brian, Jason, and Eh! all hop into the plane and fly into the snowy sky.
We cowards are all hanging around and playing Mario Kart and arguing about whether Jay-Z is the new Frank Sinatra, and, if so, whether Beyonce is Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr. We're waiting on messages, but we're all on T-Mobile, and you can't even get service in fucking KANSAS CITY on T-Mobile, so you aren't getting SHIT at the south pole. Every now and then, though, our associates manage to get a text message through to us. The first one is all like,
WEIRD BUILDINGS, REMINISCENT OF ROERICH PAINTINGS, ALSO OF CHAPTERS FROM THAT OH-SO-HARD TO LOCATE TOME, THE NECRONOMICON, WRITTEN BY THAT CRAFTY FOREIGNER, ABDUL AL HAZZAD BIN LADEN.
And we're all like, "Yeah, I remember that old, impossible to find tome. I was flipping through its shadow-laden pages for no reason whatsoever this one time. So, there's general agreement: sounds like Necronomicon, chapter 5: "On Scary Arctic Architecture and Other Scary Things Too."
Meanwhile, Ceridwen was building a small hospital with her bare hands, crafting perfect rectangular bricks out of snow. Jason, who was practicing his quickdrawing skills, said, "Do you want any help with that?"
"Nope," Ceridwen said. "It's just a small hospital; it shouldn't take me too long."
Meanwhile, Eh! was standing in a snowdrift in deep meditation. Focusing her qi energy, she pitched a ball of focused, dense air forward, and used it to explode the head off of a snowman that Brian was making.
"Stop doing your ninja moves on my snowmen, Eh!" Brian said. "That's the fifth snowman you've ruined!"
With a shrug, Eh! turns toward a high plateau of ice and begins focusing her qi once again. With another blast of air, she caused an avalanche of frozen ice shards that levelled the rest of Brian's snowman army.
Back in cowardville, the phone vibrates again, and says WE FOUND SOME FREAKY, HALF-VEGETABLE-HALF-ANIMALS THAT SEEM PERFECTLY FROZEN. WE'RE GONNA DESCRIBE THEM FOR LIKE 1000 WORDS, BUT YOU AREN'T GONNA HAVE A FUCKING CLUE WHAT WE'RE SAYING, and then they do. When they're done describing the strange beasts, they say, WE'RE KINDA FREAKED OUT, IT LOOKS LIKE SOME STRANGE ANCIENT RACE HAS LIVED HERE IN THE PAST. WE ALL AGREE IT SOUNDS LIKE THE "ANCIENT ONES" FROM THE NECRONOMICON, CHAPTER 7.
Now, we were all excited about the scientific possibilites, so much so that Jacob thoughtfully scratched his ironic beard, and Caris jizzed in his pants. We waited, and we waited, but no more texts arrived.
Then, finally, we got one last message:
AAAAAAARRRRRGH! ICK. DEAD.
And we were skeptical about exactly what this means, so we all loaded into the other helicopter. (The arctic storm had lessened, btw.) We flew out there to the research site, and we saw the penguins were indeed sweating to death. But, more importantly, we saw the strange, arctic structures that immediately reminded us of our undergrad perusals of that old, lost and forgotten tome, and also the Roerich painting. (This comparison to Roerich is VERY important: if my imitation were even more close to the original, it would sound more like this:
Roerich, Roerich Roerich. Roerich? Roerich, Roerich Necronomicon Roerich!
[image error]
But, in my efforts to entertain, I will omit much of the Roerich-ing.)
Even more importantly than these strange ancient structures (Roerich) was what we then saw: the mutilated bodies of our erstwhile comrades! Brian was all over the campsite in gloopy red chunks, like someone had broken a pinata filled with raw sirloin. Ceridwen lay with huge bites out of her, as if some large beast had been noshing on her. And, stranger still, Jason's body was in the very small hospital Ceridwen had built with her bare hands. It appeared a surgery had been done on him, very carefully inspecting all of his insides, but leaving him mostly intact. Part of his body was missing, cut away with amazing precision, as if by a laser.
Anyway, this was all incredibly frightening, and we couldn't imagine what had happened to our unfortunate comrades. But we were on a set schedule, so we went to doing our work.
We went in to check out the strange buildings, and Manny is all like, "I'm going to go off alone this way and see what I can find," and we're like, "Okay, whatev." A few minutes later, as we walk with our torches through the very very unpleasantly dark hallways, we hear Manny scream. Like a girl. Then silence.
We pressed on.
Strange pictures were scattered around the walls of these inner chambers, pictures of those strange creatures from the Necronomicon. The pictures told a story of how the creatures came to earth, and how they created life as we know it as a cure for their boredom, and how they grew people in a big bowl, kind of like sea monkeys.
We passed through vast chambers, many of them, for like pages and pages...I mean, hours and hours. By the time we were done looking at all the wall murals, several more of our party had died from boredom.
Jacob was walking along with the torch, and he was like, "Is that one of those ancient whatchamacallits?" And it was: recently dead, looking like it has died out of pure fright. Then, we heard a deep, throaty cackle from down one of the chambers.
Brad said, "What the shit was that?"
And I was all like, "I didn't know you were here, Brad!"
And he was like, *shrug*.
"It sounds like some tremendous bird!" Jacob said.
"Like a really big chicken!" I said.
We noticed a great, foul-smelling fog coming from the darkness before us, like we were buried in a pile of high school gym socks filled with dog poop. We started running and shrieking through the dark, dank, dark corridors. Turkeys are fucking dangerous as hell, and this thing sounded even bigger.
For some stupid reason, Caris was all like, "Let's simultaneously turn and look and see what's back there, looming up from the stenchy darkness!"
So we did. And it wasn't just a chicken. It was scarier than that. It was a big blob of protoplasm flowing forward, with an endless supply of eyeballs and mouths rising to its surface, the mouths howling out in that frightening "cluck, cluck, cluck."
We came to a chamber with some penguin babies in it, and we started field-goal kicking them back into the darkness, hoping to slow down the onset of that protoplasmic horror from the depths of earth's coldest and darkest recesses.
It didn't slow the thing down, so we tripped Brad. Then, Caris tripped on a pocket of strangely dense air. Jacob and I kept running.
I smelled feces, and I had a suspicion about what just happened in Jacob's pants. Behind us, behind that wall of rancid fog, we could hear that blob of ancient unknowable soulless funkiness devouring Brad and Caris, and they moaned with pain and horror as they sank into it and were quickly digested.
Finally, we got back outside and ran to the helicopter. Aerin was snoozing in the pilot's seat. We shook her awake and said, "Step on it!"
The helicopter lifted into the air, and Aerin was like, "It smells like you guys stepped in shit." And I said, "It was Jacob," and he said, "Way to narc me out," and I was like, "Dude, it's not a big mystery, maybe next time we go investigate ancient evils you should wear a diaper." He was upset, and, in an attempt to distract himself from the embarassing situation, looked over his shoulder at the receding mountains...and glimpsed something so petrifyingly horrific, so vast and abysmally bleak, horror that Jacob may never fully recover emotionally, and might only speak in sentence fragments for the rest of his life:
"The spires. . . of doom. . . . the ancient blood of souls forgotten. . . the peaks of apocalypse birth. . . the cluttered geography of darkness. . . "
Not to mention he shat himself again.
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (Now with additions to satisfy the whiners)
Okay, so, there's like TEN scientists, and it doesn't matter what their names are, because none of them have personalities. For the purposes of making this more exciting, lets say their names are Michael, Eh!, Jacob, Ceridwen, Caris, Jason, Manny, Brian and Aerin. And, by the way, now would be the appropriate time to turn all the lights off, except for maybe a few candles to get a spooky mood going.
Okay, so! Our brave crew of scientists are going down to the South Pole to study something Scientific. Lets imagine it's the effects of global warming. They're gonna check to see how much more ice has melted, and whether or not the penguins are sweating to death and whatnot. But, when we get down there to the pole, there's a big snow-storm! Some of us are kinda big pussies, so we don't want to fly to the research site and maybe die on the way, so we let the most courageous ones go first. So Ceridwen, Brian, Jason, and Eh! all hop into the plane and fly into the snowy sky.
We cowards are all hanging around and playing Mario Kart and arguing about whether Jay-Z is the new Frank Sinatra, and, if so, whether Beyonce is Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr. We're waiting on messages, but we're all on T-Mobile, and you can't even get service in fucking KANSAS CITY on T-Mobile, so you aren't getting SHIT at the south pole. Every now and then, though, our associates manage to get a text message through to us. The first one is all like,
WEIRD BUILDINGS, REMINISCENT OF ROERICH PAINTINGS, ALSO OF CHAPTERS FROM THAT OH-SO-HARD TO LOCATE TOME, THE NECRONOMICON, WRITTEN BY THAT CRAFTY FOREIGNER, ABDUL AL HAZZAD BIN LADEN.
And we're all like, "Yeah, I remember that old, impossible to find tome. I was flipping through its shadow-laden pages for no reason whatsoever this one time. So, there's general agreement: sounds like Necronomicon, chapter 5: "On Scary Arctic Architecture and Other Scary Things Too."
Meanwhile, Ceridwen was building a small hospital with her bare hands, crafting perfect rectangular bricks out of snow. Jason, who was practicing his quickdrawing skills, said, "Do you want any help with that?"
"Nope," Ceridwen said. "It's just a small hospital; it shouldn't take me too long."
Meanwhile, Eh! was standing in a snowdrift in deep meditation. Focusing her qi energy, she pitched a ball of focused, dense air forward, and used it to explode the head off of a snowman that Brian was making.
"Stop doing your ninja moves on my snowmen, Eh!" Brian said. "That's the fifth snowman you've ruined!"
With a shrug, Eh! turns toward a high plateau of ice and begins focusing her qi once again. With another blast of air, she caused an avalanche of frozen ice shards that levelled the rest of Brian's snowman army.
Back in cowardville, the phone vibrates again, and says WE FOUND SOME FREAKY, HALF-VEGETABLE-HALF-ANIMALS THAT SEEM PERFECTLY FROZEN. WE'RE GONNA DESCRIBE THEM FOR LIKE 1000 WORDS, BUT YOU AREN'T GONNA HAVE A FUCKING CLUE WHAT WE'RE SAYING, and then they do. When they're done describing the strange beasts, they say, WE'RE KINDA FREAKED OUT, IT LOOKS LIKE SOME STRANGE ANCIENT RACE HAS LIVED HERE IN THE PAST. WE ALL AGREE IT SOUNDS LIKE THE "ANCIENT ONES" FROM THE NECRONOMICON, CHAPTER 7.
Now, we were all excited about the scientific possibilites, so much so that Jacob thoughtfully scratched his ironic beard, and Caris jizzed in his pants. We waited, and we waited, but no more texts arrived.
Then, finally, we got one last message:
AAAAAAARRRRRGH! ICK. DEAD.
And we were skeptical about exactly what this means, so we all loaded into the other helicopter. (The arctic storm had lessened, btw.) We flew out there to the research site, and we saw the penguins were indeed sweating to death. But, more importantly, we saw the strange, arctic structures that immediately reminded us of our undergrad perusals of that old, lost and forgotten tome, and also the Roerich painting. (This comparison to Roerich is VERY important: if my imitation were even more close to the original, it would sound more like this:
Roerich, Roerich Roerich. Roerich? Roerich, Roerich Necronomicon Roerich!
[image error]
But, in my efforts to entertain, I will omit much of the Roerich-ing.)
Even more importantly than these strange ancient structures (Roerich) was what we then saw: the mutilated bodies of our erstwhile comrades! Brian was all over the campsite in gloopy red chunks, like someone had broken a pinata filled with raw sirloin. Ceridwen lay with huge bites out of her, as if some large beast had been noshing on her. And, stranger still, Jason's body was in the very small hospital Ceridwen had built with her bare hands. It appeared a surgery had been done on him, very carefully inspecting all of his insides, but leaving him mostly intact. Part of his body was missing, cut away with amazing precision, as if by a laser.
Anyway, this was all incredibly frightening, and we couldn't imagine what had happened to our unfortunate comrades. But we were on a set schedule, so we went to doing our work.
We went in to check out the strange buildings, and Manny is all like, "I'm going to go off alone this way and see what I can find," and we're like, "Okay, whatev." A few minutes later, as we walk with our torches through the very very unpleasantly dark hallways, we hear Manny scream. Like a girl. Then silence.
We pressed on.
Strange pictures were scattered around the walls of these inner chambers, pictures of those strange creatures from the Necronomicon. The pictures told a story of how the creatures came to earth, and how they created life as we know it as a cure for their boredom, and how they grew people in a big bowl, kind of like sea monkeys.
We passed through vast chambers, many of them, for like pages and pages...I mean, hours and hours. By the time we were done looking at all the wall murals, several more of our party had died from boredom.
Jacob was walking along with the torch, and he was like, "Is that one of those ancient whatchamacallits?" And it was: recently dead, looking like it has died out of pure fright. Then, we heard a deep, throaty cackle from down one of the chambers.
Brad said, "What the shit was that?"
And I was all like, "I didn't know you were here, Brad!"
And he was like, *shrug*.
"It sounds like some tremendous bird!" Jacob said.
"Like a really big chicken!" I said.
We noticed a great, foul-smelling fog coming from the darkness before us, like we were buried in a pile of high school gym socks filled with dog poop. We started running and shrieking through the dark, dank, dark corridors. Turkeys are fucking dangerous as hell, and this thing sounded even bigger.
For some stupid reason, Caris was all like, "Let's simultaneously turn and look and see what's back there, looming up from the stenchy darkness!"
So we did. And it wasn't just a chicken. It was scarier than that. It was a big blob of protoplasm flowing forward, with an endless supply of eyeballs and mouths rising to its surface, the mouths howling out in that frightening "cluck, cluck, cluck."
We came to a chamber with some penguin babies in it, and we started field-goal kicking them back into the darkness, hoping to slow down the onset of that protoplasmic horror from the depths of earth's coldest and darkest recesses.
It didn't slow the thing down, so we tripped Brad. Then, Caris tripped on a pocket of strangely dense air. Jacob and I kept running.
I smelled feces, and I had a suspicion about what just happened in Jacob's pants. Behind us, behind that wall of rancid fog, we could hear that blob of ancient unknowable soulless funkiness devouring Brad and Caris, and they moaned with pain and horror as they sank into it and were quickly digested.
Finally, we got back outside and ran to the helicopter. Aerin was snoozing in the pilot's seat. We shook her awake and said, "Step on it!"
The helicopter lifted into the air, and Aerin was like, "It smells like you guys stepped in shit." And I said, "It was Jacob," and he said, "Way to narc me out," and I was like, "Dude, it's not a big mystery, maybe next time we go investigate ancient evils you should wear a diaper." He was upset, and, in an attempt to distract himself from the embarassing situation, looked over his shoulder at the receding mountains...and glimpsed something so petrifyingly horrific, so vast and abysmally bleak, horror that Jacob may never fully recover emotionally, and might only speak in sentence fragments for the rest of his life:
"The spires. . . of doom. . . . the ancient blood of souls forgotten. . . the peaks of apocalypse birth. . . the cluttered geography of darkness. . . "
Not to mention he shat himself again.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 19, 2019
Ohhhhhhh THIS is why everyone loves H.P. Lovecraft!
Jeez why didn't anyone tell me?
Let's talk about horror. I don't mean Stephen King horror where no matter how many alien clowns or rabid dogs there are the worst monster will always be man's cruelty. And I don't mean zombie plague horror. Or even Dick Cheney, Bohemian Grove, we all know there's a shadow government running everything oh jesus I need to build a bomb shelter real world horror.
I'm talking about primordial, instinctive, part of your blood and bones horror.
Because that's the kind of horror H.P. Lovecraft was interested in.
Before I began reading his work my impression of Lovecraft was limited entirely to large monsters with octopus faces. And to be fair there are an abnormally high number of those in many of his stories. Creatures like that do figure somewhat in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror but they're part of much grander, bleaker story that totally delighted me and gave me the best kind of shivery tinglies.
The story is told from the perspective of geologist William Dyer. In the early 1930's Dyer was part of a much publicized expedition to Antarctica that ended under a shroud of mysterious tragedy. The details of what actually transpired were never made public. Now, some years later, on the eve of another expedition Dyer is telling his story to the world in the hopes of averting an even greater disaster.
Right out of the gate the stakes are enormously high. There's a sense of urgency to everything Dyer shares with us. Even as he chronicles the more mundane details of organizing the trip and the initial days of discovery there's a roiling tension underneath that only grows as the expedition moves further into heretofore unexplored territory. Lovecraft just totally nails the balance between the desolation of this part of the world and the intense, untouched beauty of it. I wanted to see this place with my own eyes, he totally made me understand why these men wanted to go there.
This place is epic in every way. I could feel the endless expanse of it, the fucking agelessness of the place. I wanted to know what it looked like thousands of years ago, what amazing mysteries might be hiding under the ice that could change the entire history of civilization just as much as Dyer did.
Inevitably things start to go very wrong. Dyer and his fellow scientists discover some fossils that simply do not make any sense and the geological formations they can begin to make out in the distance look distinctly unnatural. Then tragedy strikes when a group breaks off from the original party to scout ahead and their camp is attacked. Dyer and the survivors are left to learn what became of the scouts and what or who is responsible. But even when they find the answers it seems there is something else out there in the blinding, white, and ageless mountains that is more terrible than anything they could have imagined.
Honestly I don't want to go into too much more detail than that because even if you think you know how the story plays out, even if you've read monster's from beyond the dawn of time tales a hundred times, you haven't read nothin' till you've tried this one on.
There's something so seductive about the way Lovecraft blends mounting terror and the sort of preternatural beauty of his setting. Even while you're dreading the inevitable confrontation with some kind of epic evil you want the men to keep going so you can see more of this world. Its like he breaks his characters (and the reader) down to these very basic, primitive forms. These explorers don't have a choice but to keep moving forward even while logically they know what they're risking. The war between primitive instincts and modern knowledge is just totally gripping.
Yes, Lovecraft's language gets a little overwrought sometimes. If he can't figure out how to describe something he literally writes things like "I don't know how to describe this but trust me it was so scary!" I've read short stories of his that are utterly absurd in that regard. But, At the Mountains of Madness is one for the ages. I finally understand why he's regarded as the father of modern horror. I am desperate to see Guillermo Del Toro make his into a movie.
This isn't just a scary monster story, its a fascinating parable about the damage hubris can do, where it can lead. The search for knowledge is a noble one but its also fraught with dangers that we can't even conceive of. Not all the answers to our questions will be the ones we want. Not all the things under the ice were meant to be found. We have to decide which terror we can stand. The terror of not knowing or the terror of knowing too much.
Jeez why didn't anyone tell me?
Let's talk about horror. I don't mean Stephen King horror where no matter how many alien clowns or rabid dogs there are the worst monster will always be man's cruelty. And I don't mean zombie plague horror. Or even Dick Cheney, Bohemian Grove, we all know there's a shadow government running everything oh jesus I need to build a bomb shelter real world horror.
I'm talking about primordial, instinctive, part of your blood and bones horror.
Because that's the kind of horror H.P. Lovecraft was interested in.
Before I began reading his work my impression of Lovecraft was limited entirely to large monsters with octopus faces. And to be fair there are an abnormally high number of those in many of his stories. Creatures like that do figure somewhat in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror but they're part of much grander, bleaker story that totally delighted me and gave me the best kind of shivery tinglies.
The story is told from the perspective of geologist William Dyer. In the early 1930's Dyer was part of a much publicized expedition to Antarctica that ended under a shroud of mysterious tragedy. The details of what actually transpired were never made public. Now, some years later, on the eve of another expedition Dyer is telling his story to the world in the hopes of averting an even greater disaster.
Right out of the gate the stakes are enormously high. There's a sense of urgency to everything Dyer shares with us. Even as he chronicles the more mundane details of organizing the trip and the initial days of discovery there's a roiling tension underneath that only grows as the expedition moves further into heretofore unexplored territory. Lovecraft just totally nails the balance between the desolation of this part of the world and the intense, untouched beauty of it. I wanted to see this place with my own eyes, he totally made me understand why these men wanted to go there.
This place is epic in every way. I could feel the endless expanse of it, the fucking agelessness of the place. I wanted to know what it looked like thousands of years ago, what amazing mysteries might be hiding under the ice that could change the entire history of civilization just as much as Dyer did.
Inevitably things start to go very wrong. Dyer and his fellow scientists discover some fossils that simply do not make any sense and the geological formations they can begin to make out in the distance look distinctly unnatural. Then tragedy strikes when a group breaks off from the original party to scout ahead and their camp is attacked. Dyer and the survivors are left to learn what became of the scouts and what or who is responsible. But even when they find the answers it seems there is something else out there in the blinding, white, and ageless mountains that is more terrible than anything they could have imagined.
Honestly I don't want to go into too much more detail than that because even if you think you know how the story plays out, even if you've read monster's from beyond the dawn of time tales a hundred times, you haven't read nothin' till you've tried this one on.
There's something so seductive about the way Lovecraft blends mounting terror and the sort of preternatural beauty of his setting. Even while you're dreading the inevitable confrontation with some kind of epic evil you want the men to keep going so you can see more of this world. Its like he breaks his characters (and the reader) down to these very basic, primitive forms. These explorers don't have a choice but to keep moving forward even while logically they know what they're risking. The war between primitive instincts and modern knowledge is just totally gripping.
Yes, Lovecraft's language gets a little overwrought sometimes. If he can't figure out how to describe something he literally writes things like "I don't know how to describe this but trust me it was so scary!" I've read short stories of his that are utterly absurd in that regard. But, At the Mountains of Madness is one for the ages. I finally understand why he's regarded as the father of modern horror. I am desperate to see Guillermo Del Toro make his into a movie.
This isn't just a scary monster story, its a fascinating parable about the damage hubris can do, where it can lead. The search for knowledge is a noble one but its also fraught with dangers that we can't even conceive of. Not all the answers to our questions will be the ones we want. Not all the things under the ice were meant to be found. We have to decide which terror we can stand. The terror of not knowing or the terror of knowing too much.
January 13, 2008
I just don't know what to say about Lovecraft. It's all good spooky fun, but... he really isn't a good writer. He's very repetitive, and tends to fall back on the trick of "this is the memoir of stuffy and stilted layman, so that's why it's badly written." Also there's way too much "ZOMG! It was so terrifying to behold that words cannot describe it!" "It was like that indescribable utterly terrifying thing that you are utterly terrified of but can't describe because it's so utterly terrifying!"
Needless to say I'll be reading more of it.
Oh yeah; it's interesting to compare Lovecraft's stuff to M.R. James' ghost stories. James is also no great writer, but he has equally cool horror ideas (haunted binoculars, anyone?). He's a tad more aware of his limitations though; there are even places where he effectively goes "and then they had a scary ride home, blah blah whatever; on to the next bit".
Needless to say I'll be reading more of it.
Oh yeah; it's interesting to compare Lovecraft's stuff to M.R. James' ghost stories. James is also no great writer, but he has equally cool horror ideas (haunted binoculars, anyone?). He's a tad more aware of his limitations though; there are even places where he effectively goes "and then they had a scary ride home, blah blah whatever; on to the next bit".
September 16, 2022
This selection of Lovecraft tales was put together by August Derleth in 1943, but the stories first appeared in Astounding Stories in 1936. The first, and by far the longest, is "At the Mountians of Madness," one of Lovecraft's most iconic stories. Mountains chronicles the events of a scientific mission (put together by the Miskatonic University of course) to explore the uncharted areas deep in Antarctica as narrated by one of the survivors of the expedition. This was quite fun, but it did get rather tedious when they began exploring the ancient city of the Old Ones.
"The Shunned House" is a classic haunted house story set in Providence. "The Dreams in the Witch-House" is another iconic work by Lovecraft, filled with multidimensional horror, and the last work is "The Statement of Randolph Carter," recounting an ill-fated expedition to an old graveyard, but it is only a few pages long.
Even though I have been a long time horror fan, I never really adored Lovecraft and his otherworldly mythos. These stories are classic in that they inspired countless other writers and indeed, have been 'rewritten' many times as well by more contemporary authors. So, as a landmark in the genre, horror fans will appreciate these tales, but whether or not you will love them? YMMV. 3 solid stars!
"The Shunned House" is a classic haunted house story set in Providence. "The Dreams in the Witch-House" is another iconic work by Lovecraft, filled with multidimensional horror, and the last work is "The Statement of Randolph Carter," recounting an ill-fated expedition to an old graveyard, but it is only a few pages long.
Even though I have been a long time horror fan, I never really adored Lovecraft and his otherworldly mythos. These stories are classic in that they inspired countless other writers and indeed, have been 'rewritten' many times as well by more contemporary authors. So, as a landmark in the genre, horror fans will appreciate these tales, but whether or not you will love them? YMMV. 3 solid stars!
April 20, 2011
I've read several collections of Lovecraft. Often I've read the same story as he was mortal and had to stop writing at his death...though if anyone might have continued on it would probably have been H. P. Lovecraft or Poe.
Oddly (I suppose) I'm not a "died in the wool" horror fan, but something about Lovecraft and his original twist on "it" (which has been copied often since) caught my interest. I've since looked up books Lovecraft himself listed as influences and read many of his "pulp era" peers and successors.
Lovecraft's voice frankly dancing along the borders of madness in some of his stories contrasts with others of the time and since. He gives us stories where "normalcy" gives way to the strangeness beneath. They are well done and often stick with you.
In short,I like Lovecraft.
Oddly (I suppose) I'm not a "died in the wool" horror fan, but something about Lovecraft and his original twist on "it" (which has been copied often since) caught my interest. I've since looked up books Lovecraft himself listed as influences and read many of his "pulp era" peers and successors.
Lovecraft's voice frankly dancing along the borders of madness in some of his stories contrasts with others of the time and since. He gives us stories where "normalcy" gives way to the strangeness beneath. They are well done and often stick with you.
In short,I like Lovecraft.
May 30, 2016
The color out of space.
Lovecraft, what can I say that has never been said? You tend to babble and overindulge in unnecessary explanation, but I forgive you. Aeon is your favorite word and fittingly so. Your art will last as long, if not longer.
At the Mountains of Madness: 4
The Shunned House: 2
The Dreams in the Witch-House: 4
The Statement of Randolph Carter: 3
Lovecraft, what can I say that has never been said? You tend to babble and overindulge in unnecessary explanation, but I forgive you. Aeon is your favorite word and fittingly so. Your art will last as long, if not longer.
At the Mountains of Madness: 4
The Shunned House: 2
The Dreams in the Witch-House: 4
The Statement of Randolph Carter: 3
September 12, 2020
Unlike most collections of Lovecraft short stories, this one is built around a single lengthy novella, with a smattering of (largely unrelated) other tales thrown in to validate the price. It receives the coveted 5-star rating from me, however, because the quality of the stories, and especially the centerpiece, is so high.
"The Mountains of Madness" is one of Lovecraft's most ambitious projects. It describes the discovery of the ruins of an ancient pre-human civilization at the South Pole by a typical scientific expedition, and their slow realization that what appears to be frozen and dead beneath the ice may be poised for revival. Someone recently commented to me that the essence of Lovecraft's writing was "the slow peeling back of layers of denial," and, if that is so, the long format required (or allowed) him to place more layers of denial between the reader and the actual story, with the truth only crashing in with a crescendo at the end. This story also has a great deal of minute scientific detail, suggesting that HPL did a good deal of research to make it as cutting-edge as possible for the time in which it was written. This detail, as well as the presentation of the story in terms of a report on scientific findings, lends an air of modernity and reality to the outre events described. The race of the "Old Ones" is one of the best-conceived monsters in the Lovecraft mythos, both in terms of their biological description and their complex culture, as discovered in the series of bas-reliefs in the crumbling city. Lovecraft surpassed himself in trying to create a logical species to inhabit his elder world, which conforms with biological possibilities, while still being totally alien in nature. This story also gives the best-described encounter with the loathsome Shoggoths, which are mentioned in several other stories, but only clearly seen by a narrator here. In all, this is a first class tale of high imagination, adventure, and horror.
The next story in the volume is "The Shunned House," which is unusual in the Lovecraft canon in being a modern take on on of the "traditional" monsters - a vampire. The technique of peeling back denial still applies, however, and the narrator begins by suggesting that the unusual number of deaths associated with the house in question may result from mould or dampness or some similar natural cause. When the monster is at last revealed, it is original in both appearance and nature, based as usual on Lovecraft's understanding of advanced science, not on European folklore or gothic romances.
The third tale is "The Dreams in the Witch-House," probably one of HPL's best-loved short stories, and one in which the Old Ones from "Mountains" put in a cameo appearance. It is a story of a young mathematics student who discovers that certain angles allow one to defy the known laws of physics and travel through the fourth dimension to other points in the space-time continuum. This discovery unfortunately attracts the attention of another such traveler - a hideous crone who used to live in the very house where he lives and who has made blasphemous pacts with those dwelling in Outer realms. Again, we watch as Gilman is slowly forced to reject mundane explanations for his situation and begins to appreciate the horror of what he has unleashed upon himself.
The final (very) short story is "The Statement of Randoplh Carter," which may have been Lovecraft's one attempt to intermingle humor with his particular style of horror. It describes a late-night visit by two occult researchers to an abandoned graveyard and the unknown Thing which one of them sees and which speaks to the other. Denial takes the form of a faulty memory here, allowing the story to move ahead rapidly to its climax with minimal attempts at alternate explanations.
This book may not be the best introduction to HPL's work, as the main story requires attention and devotion of time, but it is an excellent representation of both the most mature and a few of the most simple of his stories.
"The Mountains of Madness" is one of Lovecraft's most ambitious projects. It describes the discovery of the ruins of an ancient pre-human civilization at the South Pole by a typical scientific expedition, and their slow realization that what appears to be frozen and dead beneath the ice may be poised for revival. Someone recently commented to me that the essence of Lovecraft's writing was "the slow peeling back of layers of denial," and, if that is so, the long format required (or allowed) him to place more layers of denial between the reader and the actual story, with the truth only crashing in with a crescendo at the end. This story also has a great deal of minute scientific detail, suggesting that HPL did a good deal of research to make it as cutting-edge as possible for the time in which it was written. This detail, as well as the presentation of the story in terms of a report on scientific findings, lends an air of modernity and reality to the outre events described. The race of the "Old Ones" is one of the best-conceived monsters in the Lovecraft mythos, both in terms of their biological description and their complex culture, as discovered in the series of bas-reliefs in the crumbling city. Lovecraft surpassed himself in trying to create a logical species to inhabit his elder world, which conforms with biological possibilities, while still being totally alien in nature. This story also gives the best-described encounter with the loathsome Shoggoths, which are mentioned in several other stories, but only clearly seen by a narrator here. In all, this is a first class tale of high imagination, adventure, and horror.
The next story in the volume is "The Shunned House," which is unusual in the Lovecraft canon in being a modern take on on of the "traditional" monsters - a vampire. The technique of peeling back denial still applies, however, and the narrator begins by suggesting that the unusual number of deaths associated with the house in question may result from mould or dampness or some similar natural cause. When the monster is at last revealed, it is original in both appearance and nature, based as usual on Lovecraft's understanding of advanced science, not on European folklore or gothic romances.
The third tale is "The Dreams in the Witch-House," probably one of HPL's best-loved short stories, and one in which the Old Ones from "Mountains" put in a cameo appearance. It is a story of a young mathematics student who discovers that certain angles allow one to defy the known laws of physics and travel through the fourth dimension to other points in the space-time continuum. This discovery unfortunately attracts the attention of another such traveler - a hideous crone who used to live in the very house where he lives and who has made blasphemous pacts with those dwelling in Outer realms. Again, we watch as Gilman is slowly forced to reject mundane explanations for his situation and begins to appreciate the horror of what he has unleashed upon himself.
The final (very) short story is "The Statement of Randoplh Carter," which may have been Lovecraft's one attempt to intermingle humor with his particular style of horror. It describes a late-night visit by two occult researchers to an abandoned graveyard and the unknown Thing which one of them sees and which speaks to the other. Denial takes the form of a faulty memory here, allowing the story to move ahead rapidly to its climax with minimal attempts at alternate explanations.
This book may not be the best introduction to HPL's work, as the main story requires attention and devotion of time, but it is an excellent representation of both the most mature and a few of the most simple of his stories.
August 1, 2022
A review from 11 years ago and now reading it again, I hope something better analysis will be added soon.
Lovecraft is a writer highly skilled in imagination, intelligence and words. This is not for me a scary story but how can I describe it but a cerebal adventure of unknown worlds and creation. I find when I read his work I always have to take note of words to look up in a dictionary. The story explains about an area that has been discovered and this is the account of the discovery and findings.
Excerpt.
"Here sprawled a palaeogean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Commorion and Uzuldaroum; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-human blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib in the land of Manr, and the Nameless Coty of Arabia Deserta."
Also he says "hellish Archean organisms."
October 7, 2022
William Dyer, a professor at Arkham's Miskatonic University recalls his chilling findings during his scientific expedition to Antartica with a team of researchers. William and his team uncovered ancient ruins and fossils within the innermost unexplored caves, mountains and frozen wastes never before seen. The creation of the world, the races that ruled before prehistoric times, the many wars waged between cosmic beings from across the vast universe, the minuscule role humans play in the grand scheme of all existence. All this is revealed and more within the Mountains of Madness.
A spectacular addition to the Cthulhu Mythos. It presents the Old Ones from a perspective that we've never seen them before. It almost humanizes them and makes us want to empathize with them despite the immense dread, disgust and mystery that often surrounds them. There is also the fact of how real this story feels. It feels like less of a story and more of a scientific research paper that documents legitimate history that actually happened. One of Lovecraft's best and most visually impressive stories, rich with depth and lore regarding the many beings he spent his entire life creating.
The collection also features other great tales such as Dreams in the Witch House and The Shunned House.
My rating: 4/5
A spectacular addition to the Cthulhu Mythos. It presents the Old Ones from a perspective that we've never seen them before. It almost humanizes them and makes us want to empathize with them despite the immense dread, disgust and mystery that often surrounds them. There is also the fact of how real this story feels. It feels like less of a story and more of a scientific research paper that documents legitimate history that actually happened. One of Lovecraft's best and most visually impressive stories, rich with depth and lore regarding the many beings he spent his entire life creating.
The collection also features other great tales such as Dreams in the Witch House and The Shunned House.
My rating: 4/5
August 22, 2007
Can't get enough of those non-Euclidean horrors. At the Mountain of Madness is about Arctic explorers discovering a huge abandoned alien city. The descriptions of the Elder Ones makes me think I could create an realistic illustration, by drawing on starfish, anemones, urchins and clams for body parts. Anyhoo, a great story of majestic terror.
The Shunned House is basically about a vampiric house, although I must give it props for the good sense to include a flame thrower, even though it didn't work.
Dreams in the Witch House was the creepiest of the three. Fortunately, the hubris and obliviousness of Lovecraft's protagonists never fails to crack me up and relieve my suspense. Example: Well, ever since I've moved into this asymmetrical cell that used to be inhabited by a witch that most of Arkham is convinced is still alive, I've been sleep walking and have disturbing dreams. Never mind that I keep catching glimpses of a furry creature, that matches the description of the witches familiar Brown Jenkin or that I can't seem to patch the rat hole in my room, there just has to be a logical scientific explanation for all this...
Sure... just keep telling yourself that.
The Shunned House is basically about a vampiric house, although I must give it props for the good sense to include a flame thrower, even though it didn't work.
Dreams in the Witch House was the creepiest of the three. Fortunately, the hubris and obliviousness of Lovecraft's protagonists never fails to crack me up and relieve my suspense. Example: Well, ever since I've moved into this asymmetrical cell that used to be inhabited by a witch that most of Arkham is convinced is still alive, I've been sleep walking and have disturbing dreams. Never mind that I keep catching glimpses of a furry creature, that matches the description of the witches familiar Brown Jenkin or that I can't seem to patch the rat hole in my room, there just has to be a logical scientific explanation for all this...
Sure... just keep telling yourself that.
October 29, 2007
I really wanted to like this more. The style of writing I couldn't get over though, and his roundabout way of getting to any of the 'horror' was more painful to me than what would befall the characters in these stories. That said I did really like the ideas in the stories though, but again the writing killed it for me, especially all the superlatives that would be added before even the smallest detail of horror was given.
January 2, 2011
A geologist and his team of scientists went to an expedition at the antarctic and found something evil and sinister there. Later, a another group is set to go there on another expedition so the geologist, concerned about their safety, decides to now fully reveal what they know about the place.
I have not read much horror novels, and those which I had read failed to horrify me. This is not an exception. I couldn't even get a single nightmare out of it. Lovecraft, however, was very good at his craft--writing (not love, or lovemaking, at least not to my knowledge) and despite myself, I found the novel interesting and suspenseful (a poor substitute for being horrified, but still...). Maybe it's because the narrator (the geologist) does not go directly laying down the scene, but instead describes what he feels, or what goes inside him, so that the reader's imagination, fueled by it, creates its own horrors. And nothing could be more captivating than an imagined hellhound--
"The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through--perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left."
When Lovecraft decides to finally describe what the narrator saw, he still uses the reader's own eyes and imagination--
"What we did see--for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned--was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's 'thing that should not be'..."
(The outdated science was a turn-off. It was of course not Lovecraft's fault. He died in 1937, the year my father was BORN, so it wouldn't be fair to laugh at his science then as it wouldn't be fair too if people, eighty years from now, would ridicule our science today.)
Maybe it's not the technique, however. Maybe it was because, unknown to the author himself, he was then living a life of ultimate horror and unconsciously this rubbed off on his work. At the back inside cover of the book, under the heading "About the Author" is written:
"H.P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) lived his life in the moody New England that was the setting for his tales. His writings appeared in some of his era's most famous pulp magazines, but as no book of his work was published in his lifetime, Lovecraft died in relative poverty and obscurity. SINCE HIS DEATH he has been recognized as one of the most influential cult horror writers of the twentieth century. His influence on American horror can be detected in the work of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, and many others."
Imagine living a dog's life of deprivation and obscurity from day one up to your last sunrise not knowing that you're actually sitting on a gold mine and all these riches (fame, awards, recognition, money, travel, women, nice clothes, drugs and other similar comforts and luxuries) will be revealed, all fruits of your own labor, only AFTER you've died! The Apocalypse Unknown. Oh the horror, the horror of it all!
(p.s., I read only "At the Mountains of Madness," the "other tales of terror" I didn't).
I have not read much horror novels, and those which I had read failed to horrify me. This is not an exception. I couldn't even get a single nightmare out of it. Lovecraft, however, was very good at his craft--writing (not love, or lovemaking, at least not to my knowledge) and despite myself, I found the novel interesting and suspenseful (a poor substitute for being horrified, but still...). Maybe it's because the narrator (the geologist) does not go directly laying down the scene, but instead describes what he feels, or what goes inside him, so that the reader's imagination, fueled by it, creates its own horrors. And nothing could be more captivating than an imagined hellhound--
"The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through--perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left."
When Lovecraft decides to finally describe what the narrator saw, he still uses the reader's own eyes and imagination--
"What we did see--for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned--was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's 'thing that should not be'..."
(The outdated science was a turn-off. It was of course not Lovecraft's fault. He died in 1937, the year my father was BORN, so it wouldn't be fair to laugh at his science then as it wouldn't be fair too if people, eighty years from now, would ridicule our science today.)
Maybe it's not the technique, however. Maybe it was because, unknown to the author himself, he was then living a life of ultimate horror and unconsciously this rubbed off on his work. At the back inside cover of the book, under the heading "About the Author" is written:
"H.P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) lived his life in the moody New England that was the setting for his tales. His writings appeared in some of his era's most famous pulp magazines, but as no book of his work was published in his lifetime, Lovecraft died in relative poverty and obscurity. SINCE HIS DEATH he has been recognized as one of the most influential cult horror writers of the twentieth century. His influence on American horror can be detected in the work of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, and many others."
Imagine living a dog's life of deprivation and obscurity from day one up to your last sunrise not knowing that you're actually sitting on a gold mine and all these riches (fame, awards, recognition, money, travel, women, nice clothes, drugs and other similar comforts and luxuries) will be revealed, all fruits of your own labor, only AFTER you've died! The Apocalypse Unknown. Oh the horror, the horror of it all!
(p.s., I read only "At the Mountains of Madness," the "other tales of terror" I didn't).
July 11, 2011
H.P. Lovecraft's Achilles heel is dialogue, no doubt. However, At The Mountains of Madness has none, and therefore is simply page after page of what Lovecraft does best: narrate. At the Mountains of Madness is easily one of the most terrifying books I've ever read... and that's saying a lot.
It starts out rather sluggish, with Dyer's descriptions of what technology is being taken on their expedition and what the weather is like and at what longitudes and lattitudes they're stopping bogging down a bit of the narrative. Not to say it's badly written - because it isn't - but for someone who doesn't understand much about archaeological expeditions, it was difficult to get through. However, by the second chapter, it finds its groove and from then on out it is brilliant. The pacing, the horrors, everything. His descriptions of creatures are both helpful and misleading, leaving enough up to imagination that it adds to the anxiety you feel as Dyer and Danforth dig further and further into the mysteries of the Mountains of Madness.
I enjoyed this novella immensely, and would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of horror.
It starts out rather sluggish, with Dyer's descriptions of what technology is being taken on their expedition and what the weather is like and at what longitudes and lattitudes they're stopping bogging down a bit of the narrative. Not to say it's badly written - because it isn't - but for someone who doesn't understand much about archaeological expeditions, it was difficult to get through. However, by the second chapter, it finds its groove and from then on out it is brilliant. The pacing, the horrors, everything. His descriptions of creatures are both helpful and misleading, leaving enough up to imagination that it adds to the anxiety you feel as Dyer and Danforth dig further and further into the mysteries of the Mountains of Madness.
I enjoyed this novella immensely, and would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of horror.
October 31, 2020
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS: ☆☆☆☆... five stars for the captivating first half. Three stars for a repetitious second half.
THE SHUNNED HOUSE: ☆☆☆
THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH-HOUSE: ☆☆☆
THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER: ☆☆☆☆
THE SHUNNED HOUSE: ☆☆☆
THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH-HOUSE: ☆☆☆
THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER: ☆☆☆☆
November 10, 2018
So I couldn't go into the basement for a week after reading this... Would have been longer, but laundry needed to be done. Truly amazing!
October 16, 2017
Nope. This is the second time I've tried Lovecraft, I've given him more than a fair shake, and I'm going with a solid No. Even setting aside the problematic social issues, I just don't like his writing at all. Like many writers who hit on a big idea that births a genre (or mini-genre) he can't actually write.
Here is the thing: he reads like a particularly dry tome written in the Victorian era. I look at his contemporaries and the antiquated language and structure seem even more tortured. I think there were more pages devoted to descriptions of boring equipment, what the expedition packed, and geology than there was actual story. (If I read the word "Cambrian" one more time this book might actually get me to scream, though not for the reasons advertised.) Also, this story is such an ideal example of why "show don't tell" is a writing staple. Again and again I'm told how scary something is, how mind-shakingly terrifying such and such is, oh the horror the horror, and that stands in for actually writing something scary. His writing also suffers from a problem a lot of older sci-fi has where our understanding of science has progressed and made certain things unintentionally funny or absurd. Oh, they have wings so they can flap their way through space? Riiiiiiight. I try to give authors a break on this because it isn't their fault, but it really didn't help matters.
So yeah. Not my bag, and I'm officially giving up on Lovecraft. I know a lot of people love him, and that's fine, but it's not my thing. I'll stick to re-tellings from modern authors if I feel the need to re-visit Lovecraftian horror. The only thing I find scary about Lovecraft are his politics and sweeping popularity.
Sci-fi book club - 10/17
Here is the thing: he reads like a particularly dry tome written in the Victorian era. I look at his contemporaries and the antiquated language and structure seem even more tortured. I think there were more pages devoted to descriptions of boring equipment, what the expedition packed, and geology than there was actual story. (If I read the word "Cambrian" one more time this book might actually get me to scream, though not for the reasons advertised.) Also, this story is such an ideal example of why "show don't tell" is a writing staple. Again and again I'm told how scary something is, how mind-shakingly terrifying such and such is, oh the horror the horror, and that stands in for actually writing something scary. His writing also suffers from a problem a lot of older sci-fi has where our understanding of science has progressed and made certain things unintentionally funny or absurd. Oh, they have wings so they can flap their way through space? Riiiiiiight. I try to give authors a break on this because it isn't their fault, but it really didn't help matters.
So yeah. Not my bag, and I'm officially giving up on Lovecraft. I know a lot of people love him, and that's fine, but it's not my thing. I'll stick to re-tellings from modern authors if I feel the need to re-visit Lovecraftian horror. The only thing I find scary about Lovecraft are his politics and sweeping popularity.
Sci-fi book club - 10/17
August 14, 2009
Provokes vertiginous terror, as it describes in details the discovery of an alien civilization in the middle of antarctic coldness. It continues a tradition of antarctic novels, from Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nanducket", till Jules Verne's "The sphinx of the Ice Fields". Even today feeds the conversation about the Hollow Earth Theory.
I tried to imagine how abysmal the specific alien civilization would be, if existed. The uncanny feeling provoked by all those strange archaeological foundings in antarctic caves, and the alive alien chasing the hero, make the plot passionate and frigtening at the same time.
I tried to imagine how abysmal the specific alien civilization would be, if existed. The uncanny feeling provoked by all those strange archaeological foundings in antarctic caves, and the alive alien chasing the hero, make the plot passionate and frigtening at the same time.
July 9, 2008
Are scary stories more effective when they are read in the dark? Reading this book certainly made me think so. I spent most of my time reading this book's 120-odd pages in broad daylight. Not the scariest setting for a scary book. Maybe that's why I was kind of dissapointed with it.
This being my first H.P. Lovecraft venture, I didn't know what to expect. The first story, "At The Mountains of Madness" is more of a short novel. It deals with a crew of men who go to the Antartic to study the wildnerness. They find something a little more ominous. However, the story isn't all that scary, because for 60 pages all Lovecraft does is describe the history of these "horrible beings". It's all tell and no show. Instead of getting my pants scared off, I'm being bored to death with a fictional history lesson on the background of these "creatures". The story picks up a little steam near the end, but it doesn't make up for the sludgy pace of the story.
One of the trademarks of Lovecraft is his love of overly descriptive, tangled prose. Everything is too horrible to be described, too frightening to be imagined, and nearly every sentence sounds like: "the fetid horror was too vaporous to be described, his entangled limbs, heaving, blocked my mind from encyptioning the dank horrificness". Really, H.P.? Is everything really THAT bad?
Okay, so that last sentence was totally made up. But alot of Lovecraft's prose is cumbersome. He fares better when his stories are shorter. "The Shunned House" and "The Dreams In The Witch House" require the action to move along faster, so some of Lovecraft's more sludgy prose is pared down. When he sticks to smaller subjects, like haunted houses, he shines. He gets everything down to the last, creepy detail. It's when he tried to go epic and broad that he fails.
Besides having problems with his writing style, was the setting I read my book in. It's really hard to be creeped out when you're outside in the baking California heat. But then again, I could read "House of Leaves" in broad daylight and STILL want to go to bed with all the lights on.
This being my first H.P. Lovecraft venture, I didn't know what to expect. The first story, "At The Mountains of Madness" is more of a short novel. It deals with a crew of men who go to the Antartic to study the wildnerness. They find something a little more ominous. However, the story isn't all that scary, because for 60 pages all Lovecraft does is describe the history of these "horrible beings". It's all tell and no show. Instead of getting my pants scared off, I'm being bored to death with a fictional history lesson on the background of these "creatures". The story picks up a little steam near the end, but it doesn't make up for the sludgy pace of the story.
One of the trademarks of Lovecraft is his love of overly descriptive, tangled prose. Everything is too horrible to be described, too frightening to be imagined, and nearly every sentence sounds like: "the fetid horror was too vaporous to be described, his entangled limbs, heaving, blocked my mind from encyptioning the dank horrificness". Really, H.P.? Is everything really THAT bad?
Okay, so that last sentence was totally made up. But alot of Lovecraft's prose is cumbersome. He fares better when his stories are shorter. "The Shunned House" and "The Dreams In The Witch House" require the action to move along faster, so some of Lovecraft's more sludgy prose is pared down. When he sticks to smaller subjects, like haunted houses, he shines. He gets everything down to the last, creepy detail. It's when he tried to go epic and broad that he fails.
Besides having problems with his writing style, was the setting I read my book in. It's really hard to be creeped out when you're outside in the baking California heat. But then again, I could read "House of Leaves" in broad daylight and STILL want to go to bed with all the lights on.
June 12, 2020
At the Mountains of Madness is an unusual Lovecraft work, it's a scientific adventure rather than a nameless horror opus, though there's still no dialogue in this work. I think Lovecraft deliberately keeps the central character's thoughts unvoiced to make one associate closer with that character. It also fits the nature of the story, a manuscript written by the nameless POV character at a later date.
And while there's still reams of purple prose horror, it's tempered with action on a periodic basis and it's not just the typical HPL character fainting type. After they accidentally wake up the ancient aliens and see the horrible mess that remains, they take action against them. Hell, even the penguins attack the damn monsters!
While the ending is ambiguous, everything's OK, FOR NOW, it's more upbeat than the typical HPL ending. Don't worry though, at least one of the expedition member's is left a gibbering mental case, in case you're missing your Lovecraft insanity fix.
Two years after this story was published, John Campbell wrote Who Goes There?, I wonder how much he was inspired by this story.
And while there's still reams of purple prose horror, it's tempered with action on a periodic basis and it's not just the typical HPL character fainting type. After they accidentally wake up the ancient aliens and see the horrible mess that remains, they take action against them. Hell, even the penguins attack the damn monsters!
While the ending is ambiguous, everything's OK, FOR NOW, it's more upbeat than the typical HPL ending. Don't worry though, at least one of the expedition member's is left a gibbering mental case, in case you're missing your Lovecraft insanity fix.
Two years after this story was published, John Campbell wrote Who Goes There?, I wonder how much he was inspired by this story.
March 28, 2015
Not the best of Lovecrat's tales. Quite boring and little interesting.
August 12, 2012
This was my first time reading anything by Lovecraft. One of the most interesting things about the experience is the realization of the influence of his work - from tiny things like Arkham Asylum taking its name from Lovecraft's fictional city of Arkham, to the omnipresence of Lovecraft's character Cthulu as a cultural reference.
I chose this book because I was curious about the title story, which Guillermo del Toro was at one point planning to adapt into a movie. And now having read it, I'd like to see it on the big screen.
Three of the four stories are told in past tense, by narrators that lived through whatever weird events they are retelling, and I (mistakenly) thought that these past-tense tellings would be less likely to be scary, because clearly the narrators survived. That didn't turn out to be true at all, especially in the case of "At The Mountains of Madness". The stories are all filled with dread and suspense, and all somehow connected to scientific and/or mathematical explorations and the inability of the human mind to understand the unknown.
Weird, weird, weird, but interesting and well-worth checking out.
I chose this book because I was curious about the title story, which Guillermo del Toro was at one point planning to adapt into a movie. And now having read it, I'd like to see it on the big screen.
Three of the four stories are told in past tense, by narrators that lived through whatever weird events they are retelling, and I (mistakenly) thought that these past-tense tellings would be less likely to be scary, because clearly the narrators survived. That didn't turn out to be true at all, especially in the case of "At The Mountains of Madness". The stories are all filled with dread and suspense, and all somehow connected to scientific and/or mathematical explorations and the inability of the human mind to understand the unknown.
Weird, weird, weird, but interesting and well-worth checking out.
March 4, 2020
I enjoyed this one a lot. Yes, it's vintage Lovecraft, with multiple uses of terms like "eldritch", "squamous", etc., but the atmosphere he creates in these stories makes the use of such words not only appropriate, but almost mandatory. I really liked The Shunned House best, with At the Mountains of Madness a close second, perhaps tied with The Dreams in the Witch House. I've read, and continue to read, a lot of horror and dark fantasy, and am not bothered by reading it after dark, but The Shunned House came very close to disturbing me.
I'll never be a huge Lovecraft fan, but these stories were really good.
I'll never be a huge Lovecraft fan, but these stories were really good.
September 16, 2007
This book contains the novelette "At the Mountains of Madness", a lonely, creepy work where the Shoggoths dwell. The accompanying short stories are worthwhile as well.
I like Lovecraft's work, but "At the Mountains of Madness" was sometimes too heavy on the description of the surroundings in too much of a mathematical sense. A sketch or two would suffice occasionally.
Having said that, Lovecraft is about the slow horror and the reader's imagination, so it doesn't always lend itself to light reading. The later, shorter tales in this book do qualify as lighter, though.
I like Lovecraft's work, but "At the Mountains of Madness" was sometimes too heavy on the description of the surroundings in too much of a mathematical sense. A sketch or two would suffice occasionally.
Having said that, Lovecraft is about the slow horror and the reader's imagination, so it doesn't always lend itself to light reading. The later, shorter tales in this book do qualify as lighter, though.
October 12, 2016
Erk! I can't love the writing style and aliens are....er, an alien concept to my reading preferences :P Read for the geocaching challenge - tis not easy to find a book set in Antarctica (and obtain it) so this novella (with the other tales) was the best I could do.
November 8, 2021
At the Mountains of Madness • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1936) • novel - 5 Stars
The Shunned House • (1928) • novelette - 5 Stars
The Dreams in the Witch-House • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1933) • novelette - 5 Stars
The Statement of Randolph Carter • [Randolph Carter] • (1920) • short story - 4.5 Stars
The Shunned House • (1928) • novelette - 5 Stars
The Dreams in the Witch-House • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1933) • novelette - 5 Stars
The Statement of Randolph Carter • [Randolph Carter] • (1920) • short story - 4.5 Stars
November 9, 2020
Meu racista favorito.
August 7, 2014
H. P. Lovecraft's "At The Mountains Of Madness" could be the best horror story ever written. For the time period it was written in it is unsurpassed. For originality of the storyline and the sheer terror it inspires it stands next to if not above Stoker's "Dracula", and Stephen King's "The Shining". Lovecraft boldly went where few other writer's dared to follow by creating an entire Universe of unspeakable horrors. The mastery of his chosen craft lies in his ability to hint subliminally at the fears he was writing about, then letting his reader's imagination take over from there. Serious students of the Horror and Supernatural genre who overlook Lovecraft have missed the entire boat.
Read and enjoy this book and Lovecraft's other stories but be careful, the fear you find will be in your own mind.
Read and enjoy this book and Lovecraft's other stories but be careful, the fear you find will be in your own mind.
September 3, 2009
I had to look up some points after reading this. I am very happy that I started with this book instead of jumping into any other of Lovecraft’s works. “The Statement of Randolph Carter” was frightening and the ending was almost comical. I guess this is part of the authors dream cycle that I plan to read.
I also loved reading “The Shunned House”, especially the history of the house. “Dreams in the Witch-House” was fascinating and probably the most frightening of the short stories but it was the title story that made the entire book worth the time. Considering that I've read a great deal by authors who have been influenced by Lovecraft, I was familiar with the story and many of the creatures/characters. Loved it all, highly recommended.
I also loved reading “The Shunned House”, especially the history of the house. “Dreams in the Witch-House” was fascinating and probably the most frightening of the short stories but it was the title story that made the entire book worth the time. Considering that I've read a great deal by authors who have been influenced by Lovecraft, I was familiar with the story and many of the creatures/characters. Loved it all, highly recommended.
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