At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror (1936)

This is my first experience reading Lovecraft - who is touted on the back cover as a forerunner of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. I enjoy the horror genre in spurts and needed a spooky fix for October.

This book is a compilation of short stories. I have to say that the title story "At the Mountains of Madness" was the longest and my least favorite. It felt over-written to me. I was interested in where the story was going, but the lengthy descriptions were distracting. The second story "The Shunned House" was good and mildly creepy. My favorite of these collected tales was the third story "The Dreams in the Witch House"; a story of a mathematician who has 'dreams' of a witch and her familiar while renting a room in the house she once occupied. The fourth ("The Statement of Randolph Carter") is extremely short - almost too short. It's almost as if Lovecraft can't find the balance for the right length of a short horror story.

I am not sure if I will read more Lovecraft based on these short stories, but I did like them overall. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2011/09/review-of-at-mountains-of-madness-and.h... ( )

Surprisingly, I'd never read a Lovecraft book before. A lot of interesting stuff here, though nowadays, our more sophisticated knowledge of Antarctica makes much of it ludicrous (6-foot tall, blind penguins?). Also, while it's a short book, it is way longer than it needed to be

I was not thrilled with "At the Mountains of Madness." The story of an Antarctic expedition that discovers a madness-inducing mountain with horrifying creatures was overwrought. I mean, how many pages do you really need to describe the strange (and again with the madness-inducing) architecture. The story could have done with some serious cutting of redundant paragraphs. But it wasn't entirely without merit and had some moments, where the action moved at enough of a pace to keep me reading.

The second story, "The Shunned House," was better, in part because it was shorter and therefore more concise. Still a lot of overworked descriptions and very little dialog, but the ending image was awesome and one that has sparked my imagination.

"The Dreams in the Witch House" was good, about a man obsessed with a story of an old witch, who claimed to know secret geometries that allowed her to bend dimensional space. Lovecraft clearly loved the theme of insanity-inducing angles and architecture (along with bizarre old ladies, which also appeared in "At the Mountains of Madness," and again with the labored, overworked descriptions.

As for the finale story, "The Statement of Randolph Carter," I won't bother to give a description, and will just say, lame.

I don't find myself eager to read any more of Lovecraft's work (also considering what I've learned about his pervasive racism). Though I will probably also read, "The Call of Cthulhu," because I love the Cthulhu pop-culture cult following that has popped up all over the the internet. ( )

In the title story, a Arctic expedition discovers unspeakable, unimaginably ancient horrors in previously unexplored regions—remnants of an alien civilization that was already ancient when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The horror lies not so much in what is actually there, but in how the author renders it; not with admiration of human pluck and faith in our abilities, not with Star Trek-like courageous curiosity, but with reticence, expressed in elevated language; with a sense of humanity’s smallness and vulnerability; and with a sense that humans may move with safety only in a limited sphere, for the universe is an awful and hostile place. There are parallels with The Lord of the Rings, especially in the breeding and enslavement of evil creatures, the unwise exploration of the deep, and the relative fragility of humankind. The narrator advises: “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.” ( )