I liked the dreamy Randolph Carter stories the best, but the titular tale in this collection pulled back the curtain on the mythos a wee too much for my taste. ( )

This volume contains Lovecraft's two novellas, "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward". For those who love the pulp fiction genre, this represents Lovecraft at the top of his game, with sustained storytelling. For those who dislike the genre, probably pretty tiresome. ( )

I checked this out from the library to get a taste of Lovecraft. It's an okay collection, spoiled mainly by the final four Randolph Carter stories--to be fair, the last story, Through the Gates of the Golden Key, isn't bad, but The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is so dreadfully dull that I took a pause in the middle of it to read another book for a month.

The first four stories, however, are great. And of those, the first two, At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward are outstanding. In fact, the jacket text called the latter "Lovecraft's most precisely-wrought work of horror" and I would have to agree. This collection is worth picking up for those two alone. ( )

Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors. This collection does contain what I consider to be two of his best works, At The Mountains of Madness and the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. It also contains one of his least original works and one of the most irritating, The Dream-Quest for Unknown Kadath. ( )

I'm not a big Lovecraft fan. His stories are predictable, after a fashion, and his descriptive ability leaves much to be desired. Sandy Peterson has accomplished more for the Lovecraft Mythos than old Howie himself could ever have.

All of that aside, "At the Mountains of Madness" has to be, in my opinion, the only thing Lovecraft ever wrote that can be described without using the word "tripe"; it's very well done, and actually requires an amount of attention from the reader.

I know that this was a bit of a snotty review......Sorry.
I just don't like the man; as a person and a writer, he had many shortcomings. ( )