Witchcraft, the Old Ones, Haunted Houses, and the Undead

books:


	• At the Mountains of Madness: And Other Tales of Terror H. P. Lovecraft Del Rey, 1991 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

1 out of 4 stories and still worth the purchase price

I really liked first story - The Mountains Of Madness. Yes it went on a bit but I really dug the archeological angle to the story and the fear of the survivor of that expedition. I bet that in an age of no sattelites etc, this story on the potential dangers that may lie in uncharted Antartica must have been quite chilling.
There were three other stories in here that were forgetable:
The Shunned House
The Dreams In The Witch House
The statement of Randolph Carter.

Nice introduction

This was my first real foray into Lovecraft's world, and I must say that my response is mixed.

"At the Mountains of Madness" sets up a great scene, but those expecting a tense horror story may be disappointed; much of the novella is descriptive, a kind of extended exposition of the Cthulu mythos. Useful and fascinating, but not really nail-biting; a great beginning and end are strung together by a mediocre middle. Nonetheless, as others have said this is a good introduction to what Lovecraft is all about.

"The Shunned House" suffers the same weakness as "Madness"; it is largely expository, though the climax is worth it.

"The Dreams in the Witch House" is IMO the best story in the book; it wastes no time in building up an atmosphere of otherworldly grotesqueness, and it truly did keep me on the edge of my seat.

Finally, "The Statement of Randolph Carter" is a great example of short, but tense horror writing; it was my second favorite after "Witch House".

So all in all the book was a good buy, and worth the read, though I expected more. However, I have a feeling that his work will grow on me with more experience, so I plan to visit his corpus again.

for more information click here

One of the all-time classic novellas of eldritch horror

What can you say about one of the all-time classic horror novellas by one of the founding fathers of the Eldritch horror genre ?

"At The Mountains of Madness" (henceforth ATMoM), was penned in 1931, and relates the disturbing tale of the ill-fated geological expedition, sent by Miskatonic University, to that most distant, inaccesible, and mysterious of all wastelands ... the frozen depths of Antartica.

Unspeakable horrors and mysteries await them, as well as bizarre discoveries that threaten to turn the entire scientific community on it's head - nightmarish fossils, mindboggling geologic formations, and the remains of an alien civilization that predates humanity by many millions of years, and which were hitherto only hinted at in the most crazed ramblings of exceedingly rare and closely guarded tomes of accursed lore.

ATMoM is a highly recommended, and (in it's day, highly original) tale. It's a fast read, and it's datedness adds to, rather than detracts from, the creepy ambience of the overall story. Better still, the patent on HPL's works have now lapsed, and his entire body of work is now legally in the public domain, and can be read on-line for FREE.

It gets a solid 5 stars from me.

p.s. An interesting footnote from real life: my Uncle served in the US Navy during WWII. After the war, one of the places he was stationed for a while was in Antarctica, back in the 1950's. He's seen, and camped at, some of the places that are portrayed in ATMoM ... including Mt. Erebus, McMurdo Sound, and others. That added an interesting spin for me, when I read it.

[ADDENDUM] For those of you who are already HLP fans, this book lays out the history and origins of "The Old Ones", the Shoggoth servitor race, The Plateau of Leng, and it also makes passing references to the nighmarish mountain-cities of kadath, which are further expounded on in another of HPL's classic novellas, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath".

for more information click here

Witchcraft, the Old Ones, Haunted Houses, and the Undead

H. P. Lovecraft is the father of modern horror. His stories are infused with more style and substance that many modern horror novels of 300+ pages - and most of his stories are short, in the tens of pages. Lovecraft is the master of the eerie and foreboding. A constant sense of dread, uncertainty, and fear of an unknown, unnameable, and indescribable ancient, primordial evil fills the pages of his books. He utilizes a carefully constructed mythology of his own creation, using such myths as the Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and stories of the Elders and Old Ones. His stories have a surreal and dreamlike (or nightmarish!) quality to them.

"At the Mountains of Madness" contains four stories - one of some length, over one 100 pages, and three much smaller works.

The story of the same name as the book is a story of an arctic expedition that discovers the remains of a yet unknown, intelligent extraterrestrial civilization that predates human life on earth. The survivors of this expedition have to face unknown evils lurking below the arctic surface. This is a good story set in a great location. I am a fan of the movie "The Thing" (based on Cambell's "Who Goes There?"), and I love the foreboding setting of the arctic environment. The story is good, but there are better ones.

"The Shunned House" is a story of an old shunned house with a hidden evil in the basement and a secret past. The story is of one man's efforts to unravel the mystery and put to rest the evil presence that dwells there. This is another good story, and creepier than some of the other stories in this book.

"The Dreams of the Witch-house" is a story clearly inspired by Goethe's "Faust" - even mentions witches, a character like Mephistopheles, and Walpurgis Nacht. It's a story about unbridled knowledge and witchcraft - much like "Faust." It tells of an odd room with unusual mathematical and geometric properties that enable the user to travel to other dimensions involving witchcraft. Btw, there is an episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror series based based on this story.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter" is the shortest story in the book, but one of the scariest. True to Lovecraft's style, the evil entity is never really revealed. Your own mind has to imagine the true nature of the horror. The story is about the investigation into a sepulcher by two men in an effort to discover undead beings still living there.

Overall this is a great Lovecraft book, not to be missed by those that love horror and especially Lovecraft fans.

for more information click here

Dark stories and purple prose

This book proves Lovecraft's mastery of the supernatural horror story, not that the point needed proving. These four stories, from novella-length to 6 pages, show Lovecraft's eerie skill at its best: the slow build of creeping terror, all the way to mind-shattering crescendo. Somehow, and this is his true genius, he carries the reader through the building terror, without ever clearly defining its subject. By the time each of lovecraft's stories is told, you probably don't even want light shined into that darkness, for fear that the shape of his demons will be worse than the formless fear.

The first story spans geologic time, when explorers discover beings from the earth's earlier ages. Despite a gory mishap, the surviving scientists insist on tracking the ancients through the inhuman goemetries of a city hidden in the last unexplored wasteland on earth. Then , when the searchers nearly catch up to the deadly creatures in the caverns below the city's ruins, they are turned back by something far darker. If that story builds too slowly for a modern action-junkie, then I recommend the last in this book. In about 6 pages, a man too exhausted with terror to care about his own execution recounts a tale with a startling punchline.

Outside of the B-movie plots and storytelling, the fun of reading Lovecraft lies in the rolling cadences of his language. One could almost use his books as a thesaurus of the eldritch and evil. If there could possibly be a vocabulary of the unspeakable, it would be Lovecraft's. Even if this genre doesn't suit you, it may still be worthwhile to experience the dark blossom of his florid writing.

-- wiredweird

for more information click here

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

hot

not?

What's your opinion?

Write a review and share your thoughts!

recommendations

Alphabet Entertainment (An A to Z guide of things I enjoy) L
Dark Magick For The Modern Magician
THE ULTIMATE BOOK GUIDE
Books I Intend to Read
Fantasy and Horror

search for books
at the mountains, madness, mountains, other, tales, terror

Impressum / about us