One of the all-time classic novellas of eldritch horror

books:


	• At the Mountains of Madness: And Other Tales of Terror H. P. Lovecraft Del Rey, 1991 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 49 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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

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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".

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

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.

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