At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft (2014-01-15)

I read it long time ago so I wanted to read it again. The cover image was great but did not like as it was printed. I know I paid attention to the price and not quality and that is what I got. But it's lovecraft after all.

Lovecraft is outstanding and singularly unique, but this story lacks a solid arc and conclusion. Despite this, it's still very much worth reading: the concept and premise are fascinating and quintessential Lovecraft - also, as an academic myself, I enjoyed the first-person perspective from that of a researcher.

It's a quick read, and while I finished the book wanting something more, the kindle edition was so cheap I would recommend giving it a try. (but please do not let this be the only Lovecraft you read!)

As I have never read anything by H.P.Lovecraft this was indeed a treat. What got my attention was the recomendation of my favorite author, Stephen King. I figured if he gave such praise to an author, he must be pretty darn good. To my delight, I most certainly found this to be true. Not only was he "good," he was excellant. I can see why present day authors like King and Koontz say that he was their inspiration. In each story in this book, the suspense builds and builds until the very end and then you receive the shocking ending as well as a little unexpected "twist" thrown in. Completly enjoyable reading.

I do not claim to be a literature aficionado, but I sort of felt like I was in a nightmarish geology lecture that would not end and at the end of which, I would be eviscerated or some other sort of mutilation. Maybe that was the point of this book? I have to admit, I skimmed much of the text about peaks and spires, after about the first 15 pages. The creatures were creative and interesting and the story-line was spooky, but I felt like I was dying a (glacial-paced) death with all the imagery.

Well read and unabridged. Listening to this novella enables one to gain some insight into the flow and poetry of HPL's writing. Rather than being a word hack, I believe his narrative style really worked. Maybe I'm an aural learner...I don't know, but being able to lie back in bed with the lights out, listening to this really drove what I already considered a classic home to me. It's a great audiobook at a great price.

I want a graphic novel. I want a graphic novel. When I want a novel I want a novel. When i want a novel with illustrations, I expect to get one. the store seems to do its best to obscure this point unless I download a sample wasting my space and my time.
Lovecraft is great no matter which but I already have several copies of this story.
If YOU don't know the difference and you work for the store... find out!

This is a frustrating book. Most of it reads like a boring, overlong encyclopedia entry explaining mythical creatures with no action whatsoever. The detail gets mindnumbingly stupid. Do I really want to read about how the Old Ones arranged the furniture in their houses? No, I certainly do not. The overall background given for the ancient creatures is pretty great, though, but then almost nothing is done with it. The narrator misses almost all the limited action and only describes the aftermath aside from a momentary bit of excitement at the end. The general structure is also annoying, but it seems to be how Lovecraft does things in the small number of stories of his I've read. The book is not a description of things as they are happening but instead presented as an after-the-fact recollection of events that happened some time ago. Why does Lovecraft do this? It certainly seems to worsen the flow of things. In this case, it also comes off as kind of idiotic. It's supposedly a plea not to explore further the things he discovered, but if this actually happened and was described this way, there would be a thousand expeditions underway immediately to find out more.

An interesting story, but definitely trapped in its time. (As in, this would not likely get published today.) The word usage (and over-usage) and pacing may strike some as stilted, but if you let it unfold at its deliberate pace, it is worth it. I can definitely see why many have wanted to make this into a movie and I can see why it is stuck in turn-around hell. A necessary read for those who want to understand the history of the genre, but don't be shocked if you are not actually shocked by anything.

I know this is a classic but it was just alright for me. The story is great, so ahead of it's time. I can see it has influenced several modern sci-fi movies. But it was so verbose, and so hard core scifi that it was difficult
To follow all the minute details of what was happening. But I'm glad I read it.

This book reads like a thesaurus exploded. I've been hammering away at this book for almost 3 months now. My Kindle says I just hit 70% of the way through it...and it's not like it's a long book! I downloaded it around Halloween-time...it doesn't make for good Christmas-time reading.

I feel like it's one of those examples of that just because a book or author is influential does not mean they age well.

This book is amazingly awesome the only problem that I had is that it seems someone must have done a report on it as sections are highlighted and marked, Im not sure if that was in the description or not but it isnt too troublesome.

The story start out very well.then it boged down a bit. I lost interest in it . I did finish the book but it was a little bit of a stuggle.if you don't have time to spend buy a book that flows better.

Is this really H.P. Lovecraft's finest piece? Wow. I suppose this was frightening back in the day but by today's standards it's hard to imagine this ever getting a second read by most editors. I plowed through this for historical perspective only. The pace is slow, the tension (if you can call it that) builds equally slowly. We all know where we're going long before we get there which adds to the general level of frustration.

I also thought it was interesting that a primary method that Lovecraft uses to build tension is to repeatedly add horror-story adjectives to otherwise entirely mundane things. Look! there are some cyclopean mountains that rise to blasphemous or horrific proportions. (I guess they're some pretty big mountains). And there are some fearsome, hideous, accursed (insert horror-word here) etchings in the stone that sent the men trembling with their blasphemy. Really? Why is that? What's is so god-awful about them? I need more! Okay, sure, I know that the fear of the unseen is greater than that of the seen (didn't Poe teach us this?), but Lovecraft uses this trope constantly. If you remove these adjectives from the story you're left with a fairly mundane tale of exploration.

Having said all of this - might still be worth reading this if you're a true fan of horror and have not read it already... you know... for historical purposes :)

This was the first book by H. P. Lovecraft I read. It appears to be an attempt to corral all the monsters of horror/superstition, that his previous writings traded on, and give them the imprimatur of science. All the Cthulus and other nasties in Lovecraft's menagerie are here, now as various space-borne immigrants battling each other for supremacy on poor little Earth, with small, homegrown, Man as late blooming development who just don't know what malign powers are sleeping in hidden places, ready to spring up and expunge him. Godzilla vs Rodan vs Alien vs Predator vs bad Thetans, move over and acknowledge the original history of the Battle for Earth. The story turns on an ill-fated (what else) expedition to the heart of Antartica, where mountains to dwarf the Himalayas are found along with evidence of intelligent beings of radial symmetry (think of a starfish crossed with a saguaro and an octopus) who came here about 1 Gyr ago, ruled through the Precambrian age till near the Pleistocene, then lost it. The first half of the story discusses the expedition, with incessant use of foreboding adjectives about everything the protagonists see, hear, and smell. The second half is a march of discovery from one monster to a worse one, to a worser one, on to the ultimate schrek in a hole in the dead city of the radial aliens. And that isn't even as bad as an unnameable badie that howls in a mountain range even higher than the 34k ft. Mountains of Madness the narrator is trying to tell everyone to say clear of. The book is a bit short so I am sure that if Lovecraft pursued this quest a bit longer he would have clarified this entity and its mountains as well, and then found yet another higher, more ominous mountain behind it. There is not too much character development in this novella and a bit of tedium in the recount of the billion year history of space aliens jousting for Earth. Contrast with Snow Crash, which has me hooting silly now.

I'm really sorry. I tried so hard to enjoy this book. But the fact is that this is the longest, most boring, complicated, overdone book I've ever read. Had to go over 2 or 3 times on the same page to get the picture of what Mr. Lovecraft wanted to describe. It's terribly overdone.

If you want something TERROR, you can read "The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym" by Edgar Allan Poe, and believe me, you will get your fix of starvation, murder, cannibalism, sorrow and regret. All in the only "novel" or long story written by Mr. Poe

I WILL READ AGAIN "At the Mountains of Madness", sometime in the near future. Right now I can only say that is a slow, boring read.

Lovecraft or not.

Cheers!!!

One of Lovecraft's best, full of interesting developments, and heavy on the dark and otherworldly descriptions, while not as over the top on thesaurus-busting adjectives as some of his stories. I don't know why some people are having trouble reading this (maybe it's the reader they're using, or maybe the formatting errors have been straightened out since they read it?), but I had no problem reading it as of Aug. 2017.

I couldn't put this book down even though it gave me nightmares! It was better than most of the Lovecraft works I've read so far and it was scary even though it was set in Antarctica which was mostly unexplored and mysterious at the time of the writing. It put me in mind of the movie "The Thing" and I wondered if possibly that story might now have been inspired by "At the Mountains of Madness". If you are a Lovecraft fan, you have to read this one.

Although I enjoyed the story itself, this deluxe edition really didn't do anything for me. The book is 9.5 x 13 which makes it awkward to handle, hard to read and difficult to store. Fernando Duval did the illustrations and are alright at best. Supposed to be limited to 1000 copies. The book is autographed by Duval but not numbered. Not that it would make any difference. Overpriced, stick to the regular hardbound edition unless you are into odd-sized books.

I was always told, "don't waste your time on Lovecraft" and I had difficulty finding him in Rhode Island Libraries so I never bothered. I enjoyed AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS very much. I like the implications that ...we are not the first !

Considering all the fans of Lovecraft and popularity of Cthlulhu, I was surprised at how boring I found this book. Although this is all that I've read of Lovecraft, and I may read more, I have to say that I prefer the stories of his contemporary and creator of Conan, Robert E. Howard.

Illustrated? That's a joke, a series of maybe 9 disjointed, unlabeled, and maybe unaffiliated(?) pieces of clip art. Don't spend the extra buck expecting to see anything depicting lovecrafts descriptions. Google image search instead.

Dude what the eff?! I was inexplicably perplexed by this book. I know that it is a work of classic, atmospheric horror, but it just isn't for me. I am thankful for Lovecraft and all that he inspired but I just couldn't get into this.

I am not sure what the furor is over H. P. Lovecraft, or this short story "At the Mountains of Madness". The writing is a mix of current and antiquated English. Lovecraft fixes on a word (for example, "decadent") and uses it over and over again. If you've got nothing better to do with your reading, get this. But he is by no means a current day Edgar Allan Poe.

First of all, beware that this book looks like someone printed a file off the Internet without bothering to proofread it. Having said that, I don't for the life of me understand why Lovecraft has as much of a following as he does. His style is so turgid, with so many excessively long descriptions and useless details, and then in many scenes characters are horrified by things that are suddenly too incredible to be described.

All the hype that I had read and heard about it,just didn't measure up. I was disappointed at how repetitive it was, the long drawn out descriptions that added up to nothing,the first person narrative that was devoid of any sort of suspence with no dialogue throughout. It was comparable to something that was written by a high-school student without a Thesaurus. This is the longest it's ever taken me to read a couple hundred pages.....

I found Lovecraft's writing to be dry, boring and fairly difficult to immerse myself in. I've been told that this was not the best place to start in regards to his writing, but I don't think I'll be giving him another go.

The first thing you'll notice when picking up this issue of H.P. Lovecraft's cult classic is that there's some kind of yeti and a weird portal on the cover. Clearly the illustrator read something different than the rest of us.

I don't know if I'm to judge the content of the book itself, but I think not; it would be kind of odd to rate the writing of a book with stars, so I'll give it 5 stars for being a book in the condition I expected.

I'm reserving my perceptions on the writing until I read it a few times; for now, it feels like Hawthorne mixed with Joyce

Perhaps it's a result of being written in the 1930s, but this is the most un-horrible horror book I have read to date. The story spends far too much time speculating on what might have happened, and traveling around to discover what happened. For the most part, nothing happens in this book. It would have been much more effective written as a very short story.

Apparently you have to be a Lovecraft fan to really enjoy this book. This was my first and last Lovecraft reading. It was so detailed and so bogged down with technical terms and archaic wordage that by the time he actually got to the part where he described the "monster", I couldn't have cared less. The really scary thing was how the story dragged on and on and how often I had to stop and look up a word I had never even seen before. As an example, the narrator and his companion find some beings drenched in green ichor and there is an unexplained fetor so they run past Permian Age palimpasest carvings to escape from something that lived in the Cyclopean water city that he didn't want to describe because he would risk seeming puerile. I am generally a wimp when reading horror stories and this book was so tedious that the only thing that horrified me was the thought it would never end. I only gave it two stars because it was written in 1935 and maybe that's how horror stories were written then.

This is a terrific book, but unfortunately, this cheap, newly printed edition has a tacky cover design that completely undermines the entire structure and concept of this fiction classic. I dont mean to get too far into this issue, just trust me and buy another edition...

If you thought reading HG Wells was a chore, wait until you read this! My God, GET TO THE POINT! Paragraphs and pages of superfluous babbling just to describe something that could be summed up in a single sentence!

It was good at first with suspense but kind of just dragged on after that. It's an older book so the author writes like a 19th Century author (odd English like founding father's wrote the constitution). Ha! I'd pass on this book

Over the years, I have seen dozens of anthologies and collections containing Lovecraft's fiction, all the way from mass-market paperbacks (such as this Ballantine edition circa 1971) to hardbacks collecting all his work. For someone who hasn't immersed themselves in this material, it could be difficult to know what collection is best suited. This particular edition has went through several incarnations, all with the same material but different covers. Its contents:

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
THE SHUNNED HOUSE
THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE
THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is one of Lovecraft's few long stories--a novella that ties in with the mythos of Elder Gods who ruled the Earth before mankind, and are always on the verge of returning. THE SHUNNED HOUSE takes place in a familiar horror situation (the haunted house), but with a distinctly Lovecraftian flair. DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE is a bit of an amalgamation, with Lovecraft plumbing the witchcraft history of puritan New England and tying it to his Mythos; and THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER, while not obviously humorous, did strike me as funny in a morbid way, as it probably will other fans of Lovecraft's style.

Personally, I think DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE is the far superior work in this limited collection, though AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS certainly has its charms. The problem, to me, with the longer work is that in all of Lovecraft's stories (if they affect you at all), he was forced to walk a fine balance between creeping dread and suspense, while at the same time keeping the reader immersed in his narrative--and while reading MOUNTAINS, at times, my attention would wander, breaking the spell he was able to maintain in his shorter fiction. Part of the reason for my wandering attention is that I'm just not as captivated by these stories as I was at one time. I still have a very high regard for them--especially considering how chilling I thought they were at one time--but I think familiarity has dulled some of my appreciation. Anyway--the longer story here demanded suspension of disbelief for too long for it to achieve the same sort of nightmarish effect it might have had I read it years ago.

All that makes me wish that I had read it then, when I was much more susceptible to Lovecraft's snares. I'm pretty sure that I hadn't read any of these four stories before, so it was fun to go back to them, but I think half the fun was remembering the way I felt when I first discovered him as a teenager. Still, I think these are as good a representation of his best work as any of my other favorites--the problem is in the packaging. Unless one is a vintage paperback collector, there's no reason that I can see for seeking out this Ballantine edition with the rat-face cover, or any other mass-market editions with the same title. Kindle readers have a plethora of choices, most of which collect all of Lovecraft's stories. Book readers, on the other hand, may feel overwhelmed at all the choices. Here are just a few of the editions available, though they seem to be some of the best options to me, based on the selection of stories.

Those who want the author's entire output might best look to H.P. Lovecraft Complete Fiction

Penguin Classics puts out two Lovecraft collection--though one without the other feels too incompleteThe Dreams in the Witch House: And Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics) and The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Dreams of Terror and Death: The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft] is, as its title suggests, focused on Lovecraft's dream stories rather than some of his more outré horror.

Even the Library of America gets in on the Lovecraft craze--[[ASIN:1931082723 H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America), which does include all four stories from this thin paperback, as well as many other classics, but seems a bit pricey.

Though there's no way to look inside, H. P. Lovecraft: Great Tales of Horror (Fall River Classics) looks like one of the best collections currently around for the Lovecraft beginner. I've looked at these at Barnes & Noble, and while the hardback may not be as quality as the complete fiction listed above, I think price and selection of stories make this one the one to look for, IF you aren't interested in all of the author's work.

This book started off great. The first chapter sets the story up to be really interesting and you're waiting for it to take off. However, by Chapter 6, I was bored to death. I had never read a Lovecraft novel but always heard good things. However, while the writing here is really good, it is incredibly, painstakingly, and minutely detailed. So much so that it's just overkill and it just brings the story to a grinding halt. It's as if our boy HP was constantly rifling through a thesaurus looking for yet another adjective to use to describe ancient stone dwellings, etc. An editor could trim this a bit so that the story doesn't suffer. It's not an 'attention span' problem, it's just that so much detail is completely unnecessary and it becomes distracting. I'm thinking that it should come with a 6 pack of 5-Hour Energy drinks. It reads as a "this is what happened" rather than a story that's going on as you read it. Almost like some kind of report or something. Pretty dull.

The Modern Library edition (2005) calls itself "definitive," which one would assume means that their edition leaves nothing to be desired. This is far from the case. Being Lovecraft's most complex tale, written as if it were a scientific paper, "At the Mountains of Madness" is very difficult to read or understand without footnotes. Yet there are none to be found. Contrast this with the 111 footnotes to the story contained in Penguin Classics' "The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Stories" (2001). Plus, Modern Library could have included some recent, revelatory essays by Lovecraft scholars about "Mountains," since it isn't long enough to fill an entire book. Instead, they opt for yet another reprinting of Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," which is irrelevant to the story and easily available elsewhere.

The only good decision was the cover photo, which captures the mood of "Mountains" perfectly. But I'd still recommend the Penguin title over this.

I decided to try a Lovecraft book after hearing my son talk about them for years. Reviews on the store were mixed but favorable enough for me to give it a shot. I made it about a quarter of the way in and just couldn't read anymore. I like sci-fi but Lovecraft's style of writing annoys me and this story line has been done so many times that it's too predictable. Others may find this to be a great book but it was a dud for me.

Review originally published at:

This book narrates the strange events during an expedition to extract minerals in the Antarctic. The members of the expedition find strange creatures and the places where they dwelled. Unfortunately not all of them make it back.

I always like to review classics. I was especially interested in this one, since I remember 'The Call of Cthulhu and other weird stories' with great fondness. Lovecraft has a unique talent for suspense and scare his readers without showing but just suggesting. His descriptions are very powerful in evoking horrendous feelings in the reader. He uses a rich language, while keeping his style scientific.

Having this upfront, I want to clarify that I think Lovecraft's style works best for shorter works, like the ones  he is most prolific at. The part about exploring the old city felt really long without having much new information. We also have to take into account that the book was originally published in 1936, and writing style has suffered an evolution since then. I find other styles aging better but we cannot deny that Lovecraft's writings are unique.

Another issue I found is that, despite Lovecraft's abilities in suggesting without showing, here we get an ample report about the creatures they found. It would have been nice to see these creatures in action, but then it would not have been Lovecraft.

The characters were not very developed, and everything is shown from the point of view of the same person. The book is written like if it were a diary, so this explains the lack of character's depth.

Even though these minor issues, Lovecraft's prose kept me hooked and intrigued, which I consider a success, since I understand these were part of his main goals.

Ron Welch's narration was superb. I find difficult to narrate diaries written in a scientific way, to make them compelling and inflict the right amount of emotion to certain parts. And Ron Welch has made it here. The audio production was also correct. I am not able to review Welch's voice range since the book is written from the point of view of just one character.

I received a free copy of this book in audio format from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I knew almost nothing about At the Mountains of Madness before starting it. Basically I knew that it was by Lovecraft and it was the story of a scientific expedition to Antarctica and the horrors they found there....see, almost nothing. After reading the novella, I read up on it a little more because I wanted to know where it fit in with some of Lovecraft's other stories. This book is one of his later works, written 5 years after his more famous Call of Cthulhu. I was curious about the publication chronology of his stories because, similar to some of his other stories, there is a great effort given to the scholarly veracity of his tale. Specifically, this story involves researchers from the Miskatonic University (as referenced in many of his other stories) and references some of his other writings as well known books present in the university library. The Cthulhu Mythos and the "Elder Things" is well known by the characters in this story and it is presumed to be well known to other researchers and readers of this report.

The story is told hesitantly by a member of an expedition to Antarctica that happened in ~1930 and made some amazing discoveries. The narrator, William Dyer, explains that the reader is likely aware of some of the official reports that came by means of wireless transmissions during the early portions of the expedition but very few people know the entire story. Dyer says that he would much rather let the true story remain hidden forever but he feels like it must be told now in an effort to prevent subsequent expeditions from trying to pick up where his left off. He is afraid that additional expeditions will encounter the same sort of disasters as happened to him or, worse yet, they could set in motion larger scale horrors to the world.

Lovecraft, through Dyer, gives a very detailed account of the expedition in a manner that is both very scholarly and very accessible. Specific and minute descriptions are given of the purpose of the expedition, the tools and processes to be used and the findings made by the team through their various samplings and experiments. The group consists of geologists, biologists and other scholars with high-tech equipment used to bore deep into the frozen wasteland and excavate samples in the hopes of studying rock, soil, plant and animal fossils, etc. They have numerous small airplanes at their disposal as well as dogsled teams.

**

[CAUTION: minor plot spoilers -- Skip the next ~2 paragraphs to avoid the spoilers]

**

One day, a team of researchers led by Professor Lake makes a scouting expedition inland via airplane to identify good locations. Over the radio, they describe a massive mountain range with strange formations high up that seem somewhat unnatural. After landing, they discover the remains of some ancient life form with both animal and plant characteristics. They set up camp and begin studying the specimens, sending reports via radio to Dyer's team back near the coast. The reports are met with growing curiosity and excitement. Lake also indicates that his sled dogs seem hatefully distrustful of the specimens and have been barking and snarling ever since discovery. Sometime through the night radio contact is lost and Dyer's team back on the coast nervously waits to decide what to do next, hopeful that perhaps a storm or other natural occurrence is to blame for lost communication.

**

[CAUTION: slightly larger plot spoilers]

**

The next day Dyer flies to find Lake's team and determine what happened. When they arrive, they find Lake's camp in ruins; most of the men and dogs are violently dead while others are missing. Some of the ancient life forms have been ritualistically buried under star-shaped mounds. The remaining ancient life forms are missing. In the center of the camp they find a man and a dog laid out as though undergoing what appears to have been an autopsy or biological dissection experiment. Ever the scientists they don't want to jump hastily to any conclusion and so, in spite of the horrific scene and any fear they may have, they set out to find the missing man. Dyer and a fellow researcher named Danforth fly a plane up into the mountains and discover that the formations seen by Lake and his team proved to be buildings from some ancient civilization. They find a place to land and begin exploring the city. The huge buildings are filled with statues and ancient carvings through which they gain some knowledge of the history and makeup of this ancient civilization. They recognize similarities to the stories they've read in the Necromonicon and other books talking about Elder Things and the Cthulhu.

**

[END OF SPOILERS]

**

In terms of a horror novel, this book is not a "slasher" story filled with a ton of action or gore. The scenes of destruction and violence happen "off screen" such that the reader is presented with an almost clinical or crime-scene description of the area rather than an action packed sequence outlining the struggles. Dyer frequently asserts to the reader that the horrors he encountered are too terrible and should not be shared with humanity but that he will share what he can in an effort to prevent others from experiencing the horror he discovered. There is a feeling of foreboding and suspense but it's was kept at a distance by Dyer's desire to shelter the reader and by the overly scientific tone of the writing.

Having read some, but not all of Lovecraft's stories, I found this novella especially interesting. It went into significant detail on the Cthulhu mythos and the history of the Elder Ones. It detailed their arrival on Earth, the inner workings of their cultures and civilizations. I don't know how much of this is outlined in his other stories. Based on previous stories I've read, this felt like the most complete almost "end-to-end" history I'd seen...perhaps it pieces together elements created in his other books. And yet, it still leaves a lot unknown and left to further exploration. Dyer and Danforth made many discoveries and unraveled many threads but the final horrors they faced were still left somewhat nebulous and there was much they were unable to explore.

Overall I enjoyed this story. I've expressed before that I'm not a big fan of the overly graphic or gory horror genre with its sometimes overly violent tendencies. As such, I found this particular "horror" story right in my wheelhouse. I will admit that it was a little dry at times but it's short enough that it was easy enough to keep pushing through. I'm really enjoying exploring Lovecraft's imaginative worlds and seeing the influence he made on future storytelling.

***
3.5 out of 5 stars

From a teenage student!: Hp Lovecraft has truly created a horror masterpiece in this novel, it is written with a clear image in mind, but not at the loss of any complexity. It's twists and turns always came with a great impact (I usually see twists coming from a mile away, but not in this book). This isn't even considering the amount of world building this book has which is phenomenal, showing a vivid world, while still living much to be discovered and desired. I can't wait to continue his works and dive deeper into this world filled with horrors and a wonderful history. I would recommend this book to any and all who enjoy Poe or King (as Poe influenced Lovecraft and Lovecraft influenced King) truly a masterpiece well worth your time and money.

Highly reminiscent of "The House on the Borderland," written by Lovecraft's predecessor, William Hope Hodgeson. In both, humanity runs up against ancient evils; in this instance, the narrator is part of an Antarctic expedition, which discovers an abandoned city of the Old Ones.

It's sort of a who's who of Lovecraft. References to his other works fly hot and fast, giving readers the suggestion that his terrible mythos could all be in one fictional universe.

While I can't see myself reading or listening to this story again, it was enjoyable enough. My biggest complaint is that it falls to the particular rambling storytelling style that's very typical of Lovecraft's time period. As if everyone is being paid by the word, and they only have so many good ideas to write upon, so they'd better drag things out.

Available as a free audio production from Tales to Terrify.

H. P. Lovecraft lived from 1890 to 1937. This Modern Library edition includes Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness [1931] and Supernatural Horror in Literature [1925-27]. The copyright page mentions that these editions were “edited and prepared by J. T. Joshi.” The book also includes a Chronology of the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, from the non-extant “The Noble Eavesdropper” [1897?] to “The Night Ocean” (with R. H. Barlow) [1936]. The Introduction is by China Miévelle.

Supernatural Horror in Literature is given the dates 1925 to 1927 (Biographical Note: page vi), and when comparing these years with the development of Lovecraft’s fiction in the Chronology, we see “The Call of Cthulhu” written in 1926, and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” written in 1927, immediately following “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”. So Lovecraft’s work on Supernatural Horror in Literature very likely inspired his later fiction. It may have been more useful to Lovecraft to write this than it is for us to read it. It does tell us what he felt was worth mentioning, and it gives us some sense of how he evaluated other authors; but it doesn’t go deep.

As an aside, it may be interesting for those who don’t know this: that MS Word’s spell checker sees ‘Cthulhu’ as a properly spelled word. I’ll mention here also that I believe Lovecraft or his recent editor Joshi misapplies semi-colons at times in this work. See, for example, page 166, eight lines from the last, and page 168, two, four and twelve lines from the last. This continues on page 169, four and eight lines from the first. I’ll leave the rest for others to discover. Once a reader reads with an eye to semi-colon placement in Lovecraft, a shadowy, creeping dismay overcomes one. I wonder if there have been debates among Lovecraft aficionados about the semi-colon in his texts. Perhaps there is a survey even now in press – A Critical Examination of the Semi-Colon in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft: An Arkham Roundtable Discussion, edited by Abel Punctilious, Wilmarth Professor of Literature at Miskatonic University.

At the Mountains of Madness [1931] tells of the unfolding discovery by an expedition to the Antarctic that intelligent beings predating the existence of humans lived there prior to the coming of the ice. The narrator, leader of the Miskatonic University Expedition, which made the discovery, has written this report in warning. “If the plain signs of surviving elder horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the inner arctic – or at least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman, aeon-cursed desolation – the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immeasurable evils will not be mine.” (39) “Certain lingering influences in that unknown antarctic [sic] world of disordered time and alien natural law make it imperative that further exploration be discouraged.” (59)

Section VII of the report summarizes the “salient high lights [sic]” of what the author learned about these ancient non-human beings, which he calls “the Old Ones”. The “full story, so far deciphered,” was announced within the report to appear in “an official bulletin of Miskatonic University”, which see for further details. This section also refers to other non-human beings “shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu” which warred against the Old Ones. (63)

At the Mountains of Madness will frustrate readers looking for a storyline with characters, conflict, and resolution of plot. Lovecraft is only interested in his developing mythological history of the cosmos.

“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.” (101)

Only 10 years after the publication of this book Europe had been nearly completely destroyed, the Soviet Union controlled most of the east, America controlled the rest, the atom had been split, and the technology needed to take men to the moon only needed perfecting. Computers, radar, jet engines, women in the workplace, a Jewish state inside Palestine, the neutering of any meaningful monarchies in England and Japan ... a total change in civilization. All within about 10 years.

There's a scene near the end of this book that stood out for me more than almost any other and that is when they first hear and them come upon those albino penguins. The image is at first somewhat comical, then a little sad, too. The scene stood out for me because those penguins seemed to make for a wonderful metaphor for our own existence - blind, pale, helpless, easily frightened chattel to be trampled over by far, far greater powers. The birds were totally indifferent to their surroundings, utterly incapable of comprehending their fate or that anything of any greater importance was going on around them, aside from the inconvenience of being disturbed.

I felt as if Lovecraft had somehow felt the pulse of the times and was able to create a vision of what we as a species were about to do to ourselves during the late 1930's and into the 1940's. That dread that is on every page of the book is palpable and captures what some, but not nearly enough people, must have felt when visiting Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia before war broke out: a terrible helpless feeling of unease all around that nobody could escape from and a feeling that tragedy was about to happen again.

And the book's warning to all future adventures to leave well enough alone and to not explore to deep into regions that are best left unexplored, though a theme that crops up in science fiction very often, is more than just a trope here. Lovecraft seems to be intuiting the dangers of man meddling with things he can't control by foreshadowing nuclear war with those terrible visions beyond the mountains. Lovecraft is saying that the old way of life will forever change if man proceeds on its current course, that poking our noses where they don't belong will, though not unleash the darkest horrors of the ancient universe, somehow corrupt us from within.

Lovecraft is saying that science and reason can only take us so far before we get lost in a labyrinth of confusion, causing us to splinter as a society and species, forcing us from one extreme to the other, slowly eroding our own sense of self and art and culture, that all the greatest learning will eventually lead to an even greater forgetting; a forgetting of ourselves. Lovecraft seems quite content to stay put, to not pass that terrible boundary we charged right over in the 10 years after this book was written.

It's very pessimistic in its conclusion, however, I can't say I blame him either; he knew which way the wind was blowing. And I should be careful in reading too much into this book because after all he was trying to just write a damn entertaining page turner with some first-rate horror that Hollywood is still trying to copy to this day (either great films like Carpenter's 'The Thing' and Darabount's 'The Mist', or failures such as Ridley Scott's beautiful but deeply flawed 'Prometheus'). Yet the best stories, the ones that resonate with each generation are more than just fun reads, there does have to be something more to the pie than just a pretty pie crust.

Lovecraft writes very simply, clearly, and is a master at teasing out splinters of information at just the right time as to build the for boding. And even when there is really not much actually happening, he still manages to fascinate, such as the telling of the strangeness of the Old Ones and their life on early, ancient Earth. He doesn't bog us down with needless emotional scenes, rather, he uses Danforth as the emotional sounding-board to juxtapose with Dyer's cool, clinical, detachment. The rest is all supreme imagination and, honestly, horror so well written that I was genuinely scared and kept looking over my shoulder. It's really quite uncanny.

But there is much more here than a writer's wonderful imagination creating a mythos just for fun, Lovecraft has tapped into a vein that still resonates because he not only knows how to write a great story, but also because he knows what frightens us and because he intuited so much of what was just about to happen to the world in the coming years. Lovecraft is sort of a mile marker, a sign post, a line in the sand on which one side is all that came before and on the other is all that he warned humanity not to cross over less it destroy itself.

And so here were are looking back at a base camp we can never return to; only madness awaits us ahead.

At the Mountains of Madness is considered a horror story, but it could just as easily be classified as science fiction. The unnamed narrator is a scientist; the novella itself is his report of a scientific expedition. The narrator struggles to maintain a researcher's detachment and objectivity, rather than flying to wild conjecture. This cool, professional tone makes the suspense all the greater as the tale builds to its climax.

Lovecraft published At the Mountains of Madness in 1931 at a time when most of Antarctica was still unexplored and unknown. The story is the report of an expedition to penetrate a small portion of that unexplored vastness to take core samples for geological and paleontological study. The team uses aircraft to penetrate hundreds of miles into the interior at a bound. There they find a previously unknown range of mountains higher than the Himalayas. Behind and beneath those mountains lies a vast and terrible secret that brings death and madness as it stands all their previous scientific knowledge on its head.

At the Mountains of Madness is not horror in the popular sense. There is nothing supernatural in it. It won't make you afraid of things that go bump in the night. Its horror is more philosophical than corporeal, more like Shelley's Frankenstein than Stoker's Dracula. It is the manifestation of the void that science opens up when it overturns our comfortable assumptions. The story is, I believe, a response to the cumulative upsettings of previously fixed ideas by such as Darwin, Freud and Einstein. What make it horror rather than science fiction is the narrator's final reaction: stay away, explore no further, we can't bear to know any more.

The narration of this classic Lovecraft book took me a little while to adjust to, but once I did I was drawn in. Ron Welch has a little slower pacing than I normally like, but the depth and character he adds to the story sucked me in after about 30 minutes. I found myself getting lost in his languid reading because the energy and enthusiasm in his voice conveyed the story so well. I would recommend this story and this version to anyone who is interested in Lovecraft or stories like this.

I received a free copy of this audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left my review.

I saw this new dust jacket illustration and groaned in dismay. How could Arkham House do this to Lovecraft, give him a jacket illustration that looks like it belongs on a horror comic cover? Thankfully, I have the editions with those fabulous and beautiful and eerie jacket illustrations by Raymond Bayless. Ah well, once you open the book, you are in one of the finest realms of all time. A photo of Lovecraft is opposite the title page, and he looks so severe, with his dark eyes and his oddly-clamped mouth. The eyes look haunted, as if they have looked on secret terror.

In "A Note on the Texts," editor S. T. Joshi explains the process of his correcting the texts of hundreds of errors introduced by earlier editors. For "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," "The Dreams in the Witch House," "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Keys" the surviving autograph manuscripts in Lovecraft's handwriting served as major textual source. The introduction for the book was written by James Turner, is informative and moving.

The contents of the book has been questioned by some, but I rather like it. First we have Lovecraft's two longest works of fiction, "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." They are followed by two very singular haunted house tales, "The Shunned House" and "The Dreams in the Witch House." The book ends with four tales of Randolph Carter (whom some have said in Lovecraft's fictive alter-ego), "The Statement of Randolph Carter," "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," "The Silver Key," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" is my favourite tale by Lovecraft (S. T. Joshi has worked on a definitive annotated text that will hopefully be published as single volume this year). It astonishes me that this work is, as we have it, an unrevised first draught. The story mesmerizes from first page to last. It contains some of the creepiest passages of pure horror that I have ever read. "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" was also left unpublished and unrevised at the time of Lovecraft's death. It is an exercise in pure phantasy, with moments of fascinating weirdness in the horror tradition.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter" was entirely based on a dream, and it remains an extremely popular tale, especially with amateur film-makers -- there have been several delightful film adaptations shewn at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon. It is a simple tale that contains a fabulous Gothic atmosphere that is peculiar to Lovecraft's early works, such as "The Hound" and "The Unnamable"; and, much later, "Pickman's Model."

Too many unimaginative and clueless "critics" have taken Lovecraft to task for what they call his "art-for-art's sake" pose. The worst assault that I have seen came from Lin Carter, in his LOVECRAFT: A LOOK BEHIND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS. Reacting to a letter that HPL wrote to Frank Long in which Lovecraft laments writing for "a boarish Publick," Carter responds, "In that passage you have much of what I would call the worst of Lovecraft, his weakness and his folly: . . . the ludicrous self-delusion of thinking himself an 'artist' . . ." This clueless attitude is also expressed by de Camp in his biography of Lovecraft, in which he condemns HPL for his "pose" as an artist. In his intelligent introduction to this Arkham House book, Jim Turner addresses this.

"If indeed Lovecraft had become a more positive, socially minded man after his New York experience, evidence of this emergent humanization should be apparent in the macabre fiction. His imaginative tales had never been an idle divertissement for Lovecraft but rather rose from an inner compulsion: 'Art is not what one resolves to say, but what insists on saying itself through one,' he explained in a 1934 letter. 'The only elements concerned are the artist and the emotions within him . . . Real literary composition is the only thing . . . I take seriously in life.'"

Lovecraft had fun writing his weird tales, no doubt -- but their composition was far more than a matter of fun. HPL was an extremely serious artist, one who strove for perfection in his work. He did not always achieve that perfection, but he often came close. I find it incredible that Lin Carter and Sprague de Camp and other ignorant critics cannot see for themselves, in works such as AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS or THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD, or even in something as simple as "The Silver Key," Lovecraft's very serious "artistic" intent and marvelous achievement.

This Arkham House book also includes the early "The Statement of Randolph Carter," which is one of Lovecraft's stories that had its roots in his vivid dreaming. Writes S. T. Joshi, "This story, as is well known, is an almost exact transcript of a dream that Lovecraft had in December 1919, as recorded in a letter of December 11. In the dream, however, the setting seems to be New England; in the story Lovecraft has apparently transferred the locale to Florida, if the mentions of the Gainesville Pike and Big Cypress Swamp are any indication. Lovecraft introduces Randolph Carter in this tale; his colleague, Harley Warren, is a stand-in for Samuel Loveman, the poet and amateur journalist, who figured in Lovecraft's dream. Lovecraft also introduces the element of the 'forbidden book'." The book mention'd in this tale, many agree, is not the Necronomicon. AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS publishes four of the Randolph Carter tales: "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (1919), "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1926-27), "The Silver Key" (1926), and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (1932-33). The last tale is a collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price.

This is an excellent collection of some of the finest writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Two of the long works (THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD and THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH) were never polished or published during Lovecraft's lifetime, and thus we have them in rough draft form. Still, the haunting novel of dark sorcery in Providence stands as one of HPL's great masterpieces.

H. P. Lovecraft is considered the father of modern supernatural horror stories, and I can see why from this novella. This is the first "modern" horror story I've read and it held my attention throughout. I don't know that it will inspire me to read more recent horror fiction, but I expect to read more from Lovecraft. His style and plot acknowledge the influence of Poe, and this leads to my one criticism: the power of the horror of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is in no small part due to what is left unknown, and that the horror is of the earth. Lovecraft's narrator, on the other hand, while writing as if he's leaving much unknown, reveals quite a lot; and the horror itself is extraterrestrial in origin (though its arrival predated humans by millions of years). I find this less horrific than if the horror is plausible in the world we know - the more familiar the sources of the horror, the more horrific, since it puts it closer to our doorstep. In this way, Lovecraft's invented mythology is not as powerful a source of horror as are, for example, the vampire legends used by Stoker, or the "golem" as reinvented by Shelley. Nevertheless, At the Mountains of Madness is an eerie and entertaining story.

This is not one of Lovecraft's most popular works, most likely because it lacks the aura of Innsmouth and Arkham and the creatures mentioned in those seaside towns. At the Mountains of Madness takes place in Antarctica, a frozen wasteland -- or, well, they thought it was Antarctica, a frozen wasteland. Essentially, a scientific expedition to the southernmost continent makes a surprising, culturally unique, world-historical discovery there. Ah...but it is Lovecraft's consummate skill as a writer to build an environment out of nothing, and to make it so ultimately menacing in every detail. Once the geography of the place is established, a pall of dread hangs over every word, right to the final sentence. Very few novels of the fantastic create such a total story environment, but Lovecraft did it with strict continuity. It is one of the most well-written works of fiction he produced, and when you read this terrifying story, you'll understand why he is considered a master of modern horror / fantasy fiction.

I'd seen somewhere recently that his story "Mountains of Madness" was the base upon which the movie "The Thing" was created. John Carpenter's 1980's remake was the first hardcore horror movie I ever saw as a kid, and still lives in a dark, shadowy, and very cold place in my memories.

"Mountains of Madness" was written in the '30s. The early 20th century represented a golden age of exploration and discovery. Both poles were "captured"; jungle pyramids and ancient hideaways were discovered galore. Newspapers, newsreels and books were filled with adventure and the promise of something new that tended to be very old. It's in this context that Lovecraft's narrator visits Antarctica and makes a discovery of something of incomparably ancient. It tells the previously untold story of an Antarctic scientific mission gone horribly wrong and is crafted from the perspective of a scientist who was involved in the mission and who's desperate to warn off future efforts to investigate the strange goings-on.

A fascination and passion with exploration and discovery comes clearly through Lovecraft's writing. Lovecraft repeatedly refers to the "Cyclopean" sized objects in the Antarctic...a term used by Hiram Bingham in describing the first Inca-carved stone blocks he discovered in Peru. He even compares one of the ancient discoveries as looking like Machu Picchu.

The richly detailed story is thick with mood- and scene-setting. The story builds slowly and Lovecraft incorporates well-timed and teasing foreshadowing that frames a downright creepy story. More than once, I found myself jumping with shock at a startling noise when reading the story alone at night.

Lovecraft's myth-building is very realistic, and goes a long way to feed the terrifically detailed story which builds the characters well and includes deftly developed foreshadowing that intensifies the drama and tension while avoiding details that give too much away. This terrific story is creepy, moody and satisfyingly scary.

At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror collects H. P. Lovecraft's eponymous novella (originally published in 1936) and three short stories: "The Shunned House" (1937), "The Dreams in the Witch-House" (1933), and "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (1920).

In At the Mountains of Madness, an Antarctic survey team discovers the ruins of an ancient city, whose creators have conveniently left an easily-deciphered complete history of their civilization illustrated on the walls. This is one of Lovecraft's later works, and in it, he substantially demythologizes his Cthulhu mythos, which previously had often featured a supernatural focus but here receives a rather thorough science fiction explanation.

If you've read any quantity of Lovecraft before, you'll find this novella fairly predictable. And if you've read a lot of Lovecraft, you realize you can't go anywhere in his world without stumbling over some infestation of trans-worldly evil.

This is one of Lovecraft's longer works, and it's a bit of a slow builder, although it does pick up nicely as it goes. Lovecraft's strength here is the usual one: atmosphere. Because of its isolation and severe environment, Antarctica lends itself particularly well to horror, and on top of that Lovecraft does a great job of depicting the atmosphere of the lost city.

The three short stories here have considerably more in common with one another than with Mountains, and they feel like padding to make this volume book-length (Additionally, this volume's stupid cover has nothing to do with any of the stories within). But briefly, "The Shunned House" takes too long to get going and falls somewhat flat once it does, "The Dreams in the Witch-House," something of a thematic bridge between the other two stories, is a disjointed mess, and "The Statement of Randolph Carter" is a vintage second-hand account of lurking horrors.

At the Mountains of Madness is hardly Lovecraft's best story, but it may be some of the best atmosphere he's ever done. I recommend the novella, whether you get it with extra mediocre stories or not.

Despite his tooth-jarring overuse of adjectives such as "hideous" and "grotesque", and despite his utter lack of understanding of the occult symbolism he uses to decorate his stories, Lovecraft is the one horror writer I can read. Horror is the lowest common denominator of fiction, but unlike contemporary garbage such as King or Barker, Lovecraft is much more than a genre writer. He is as much a fantasist as anything, though not quite up to the level of his fellow Weird Tales writers Howard and Smith (who incidentally gets a mention in this book).

While there is much to recommend in Lovecraft's private philosophy, which would of course be considered politically incorrect today, the materialist aspect of his beliefs prevented him from reaching the higher rung of consciousness and literary achievement that his hero Lord Dunsany sat at. However, we should judge an artist by his best work, and in "At the Mountains of Madness", Lovecraft totally goes beyond what he is normally capable of and gives us a masterpiece. This one has the atmosphere that must have surrounded the early explorers of the tombs of the pharaohs, only multiplied to the cosmic scale. Lovecraft's creative side sometimes goes to the places his conscious personality could not, and it does so here - he succeeds almost in spite of himself in taking us to all those places we most long to be (though they are located inside of us, not in outer space, and the universe is perhaps more benevolent that Lovecraft thought).

There are some other good Lovecraft tales scattered throughout his collections, but this is the one story by Lovecraft that you simply must read. Everything he does well is here distilled into its essence. Easily the best horror novel of all time.

HPL's At the Mountains of Madness is my favorite work by the master. It took me a few years out of my teens to warm up to it and now I think it's brilliant. I have, however, innumerable books that have the text of the novella so perhaps the last thing I needed was another edition. But when I saw this 1990 release from Donald M. Grant Publisher for sale I know I couldn't resist. In all respects it is a beautiful production, and its crowning glory is the very generous selection of illustrations of the text by Brazilian artist Fernando Duval. It's wintery weather as I sit down in my easy chair to read, and Mr. Duval's art add immeasurably to my enjoyment of the words, helping to bring Lovecraft's vivid imagery to life. 1000 copies were released so there is always a copy somewhere that's for sale. If you want to sample it a bit, do a google image search for Fernando Duval with the title of the book, and you can see some of his art. I know it is rather pricey now but if you are a serious aficionado of Lovecraftian art, you simply have to add this to your collection.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the epitome of an "acquired taste." His prose is dense to point of being crunchy, his pacing is all over the place, his characterizations pedantic (there are few women, and most of the protagonists are quite similar to the author), and some actions and plot points fail the "dumb test." In other words, if people in a horror movie did the things they do here, you'd be yelling at the screen. And yet, once you forgive the author these flaws, you'll find yourself in the grip of some of the best cosmic horror and dark fantasy stories ever told. Lovecraft introduces concepts that are baffling in their intellectual magnitude, from the ideas of extra-terrestrials as eternal primeval forces, humanity as an error caused by failed experiments in the creation of higher lifeforms, a sympathetic vegetable race capable of supreme art and sentience, and much more. The horror here is not of the "boo" variety, it is existential. Stories range from the gothic parable (The Outsider), to science fiction (The Colour Out of Space), to rural dystopia (The Dunwich Horror), to the simply non-classifiable (The Shadow Out of Time). Some of the stories here, while fantastic, are so "out there" for the first-time reader that I fear the compounded effect of all of them would be hard to process without some serious effort. But still, these stories are unforgettable, disturbing, provokingly intelligent and even beautiful. There's a lot to enjoy here, and the only thing I can add to the new fans of Lovecraft is this: I envy you.

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".

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the epitome of an "acquired taste." His prose is dense to point of being crunchy, his pacing is all over the place, his characterizations pedantic (there are few women, and most of the protagonists are quite similar to the author), and some actions and plot points fail the "dumb test." In other words, if people in a horror movie did the things they do here, you'd be yelling at the screen. And yet, once you forgive the author these flaws, you'll find yourself in the grip of some of the best cosmic horror and dark fantasy stories ever told. Lovecraft introduces concepts that are baffling in their intellectual magnitude, from the ideas of extra-terrestrials as eternal primeval forces, humanity as an error caused by failed experiments in the creation of higher lifeforms, a sympathetic vegetable race capable of supreme art and sentience, and much more. The horror here is not of the "boo" variety, it is existential. Stories range from the gothic parable (The Outsider), to science fiction (The Colour Out of Space), to rural dystopia (The Dunwich Horror), to the simply non-classifiable (The Shadow Out of Time). Some of the stories here, while fantastic, are so "out there" for the first-time reader that I fear the compounded effect of all of them would be hard to process without some serious effort. But still, these stories are unforgettable, disturbing, provokingly intelligent and even beautiful. There's a lot to enjoy here, and the only thing I can add to the new fans of Lovecraft is this: I envy you.

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".

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

Lovescraft's ideology was not to write horror. It was to impress the mind with the sense of awe and wonder, to impugn upon it that there are ineffable, unfathomable things lurking in the universe, things that we cannot analyze and understand. Naturally, since humans tend to be afraid of the unknown, Lovecraft's reasoning led him to the use of terror as the conveyer of awe. One who reads Lovecraft just for the sake of seeing a few characters get eaten or dismembered is avoiding the best parts. In theory one reads Lovecraft to become disturbed. To expand his mind beyond what is considered human, to break out of the bounds of placidity and decadence, self-assuredness and security, and to feel it in his heart of hearts that humans are not the masters of the world.
At the Mountains of Madness sits proudly as one of Lovecraft's greatest achievements. It is a tale of time immemorial and of an incredible civilization that came to Earth long before it was populated. A truly stellar read that leads one to thinking where exactly humanity's evolution will lead. One of the greatest features of Lovecraft's horror is that all of his stories are interwoven into a single nighmarish parchment- at the mountains of madness is no exception: it includes a number of references to both Cthulhu and the quasi-real "Necronomicon".
Oddly enough, the other stories included in this selection (especially Shunned House, probably because it is about what one might probably call a vampire - in the pre-Dracula sense of the word) don't seem to be quite as deep and absorbing as the first.
Nevertheless, if you care for a new view of the world around you, one where you do not dominate - please, read this book. I myself am too far gone...

H.P. Lovecraft’s “mountains of madness” was recommend to my by another the store client and after reading the first pages I was thrilled by the eerie reminiscence of “the thing”. According to the same customer the novel “who goes there” by was partly “inspired” by Lovecraft’s tale. One element being the iconic frenzy of the dogs at the presence of eon old remains of bizarre creatures that might have started life on earth.

The style of writing feels a bit “démodé”, which I personally like and which reminds me of that of E.A. Poe or H.G Wells. I didn’t realize at the beginning that the novel dated from the 30’s. In fact, the tale benefits from its scarce technological references which gives the account a timeless quality.

The events that unfold during the expedition to the Antarctic are rendered as a sober account by one of the survivors.
The horrors are mostly insinuated and even that with apparent reluctance. The stated intention of the account is to discourage further explorations. Details are revealed gradually which builts up suspense by leaving it to the reader’s imagination figuring out the horrors that might be...

"At the Mountains of Madness" is far and away the best of H. P. Lovecraft's tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Once upon a time I would have thought "The Haunter of the Dark" was the best, but I heared Rod Serling explain once that Lovecraft wrote that particular short story as something of a in-joke (the victim is "really" author Robert Bloch; the two were taking turns killing each other off in stories). However, this novella has a scope and intensity that goes beyond any of Lovecraft's short stories.
I have always thought that "At the Mountains of Madness" would make a great film, even though I shudder at what Hollywood would do with its tendency to rely on special effects, the lessons of "The Blair Witch Project," "The Others," and "The Mothman Prophecies" to the contrary. However, I must admit that I notice Lovecraft's story contains elements of two of my all time top-10 science fiction/horror films, "The Thing From Another Planet" and "Five Million Years to Earth" (a.k.a. "Quatermass and the Pit"); think the claustrophobic arctic environment of the former and the discover of eldritch demons from the latter. Here we have an expedition from Miskatonic University that makes a startling discover buried beneath the snow of strange ancient creatures. When the expedition is slaughtered and the creates they found are taken away, a search team makes the grave mistake of following the trail to an immense ruined city.
I am sure I do not have to tell you how big of a mistake this ends up being.
I can remember staying up late at night reading this story, completing captivated and descending into terror step by step along with the doomed protagonists of the story. "The Mountains of Madness" achieves a level of pure terror that I never found in Poe. I am at a total loss to explain why generations of horror readers have to be reintroduced to Lovecraft's writings. But nobody ever promise fair and then you die.
I notice there are three other Lovecraft short stories in this volume. That is certainly nice, but you buy this one for the title story. "At the Mountains of Madness" is not the first Lovecraft story you want to read, because you really need to have a feel for the Cthulhu Mythos before you sit down to enjoy this one. But when you are ready for the ultimate Lovecraft story, there is no doubt this is the one.

"...ever hear tell of a shoggoth?..."
When I first read these words in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," my reaction was: Huh? I've been trying to find out what a shoggoth is ever since, and why they inspire such terror. "At the Mountains of Madness" reveals everything about these creatures, as well as unveiling a rather unusual chapter of the Earth's history.
Sure, Lovecraft was good at gut-wrenching terror, but I like him best when he writes about fantastical, otherwordly encounters. That's why "Mountains" is one of my favorites, along with "The Shadow out of Time." Written back when Antarctica was still largely unexplored, the story chronicles the adventures of a research team from Miskatonic University in Arkham, and their discovery of a deserted alien city millions of years old. Seems Humans aren't the only ones to populate Earth....but what if the former inhabitants aren't entirely gone?
Great story, truly. The shoggoths are certainly worthy of insanity -- don't read this while eating Jell-O.
As for the other three stories in this book..."The Shunned House" was pretty good, but not great. It's a stand-alone story -- no "Iä"s here. "The Dreams in the Witch-House" was quite good; nice and creepy. It even had a reference to "Mountains." Slick. "The Statement of Randolph Carter" is really short and doesn't explain itself at all. Maybe "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," which features Randolph Carter, has more info...I should read that next.
I think this book is worth the price, even though it's cheaply printed. As a hopeless Lovecraft fan, I'm glad to have learned more about the Cthulhu Mythos -- which, by the way, are at least as twisted and intricate as the X-Files conspiracy. Ah, insane genius! Heh, heh, heh....

Lovecraft was the master of contrasting the microroom with macroroom and this is his masterpiece. Antarctic explorers are exploring a mountain range beyond the Transantarctic range. What they find there destroys their sanity. So far typical Lovecraft stuff. But in no other story is his worldview so well-presented. We have the cosy, predictable, and logical world of the scientists. They are exploring the unknown, but they expect it to fit into their worldview, they just want to expand their microroom, the world they know. Instead, they find the totally unexpected, the unexplainable, the bizarre, the diseased, and, instead, they have to redefine the macroroom, their place in the universe, and, in extension, so does the reader. We turn from being the crown of creation to gnats in a hurricane, or one fly in a cloud of flies buzzing around a rotting elephant carcass.
The mountainranges described are borders. The Transantractic range defines the limit of the known, the Mountains of Madness defines the limit of sanity, and shockingly, at the end of the story, it is hinted at an even further mountain range - the border to what? We are afraid to ask.
Lovecraft's style, as even his most ardent fans know, leaves much to be desired. He was not a great author, but he was a storyteller. He also understood the contrast between our ordered modern society and the unknown, or the unknowable, or insane, as no other author.
This is perhaps his most complex story. It can be interpreted in many ways: what is our place in the universe? What laws govern the universe? What happens when we delve into the unknown? Is it an allegory on the subconscious? How can we claim that we posses all the answers, or even questions? etc.
It should be no surprise that the book is an almost must with modern Antarctic explorers. Another thing that tends to forgotten is that Lovecraft wrote at the same time as Kafka, and in many ways they are exploring the same territory.

Find this and many other reviews at Geekritique.net!

At the Mountains of Madness, one of Lovecraft's longest tales, is haunting yet familiar. Familiar in that, since it's publication, we've seen many knockoffs and themes stolen from its premise. The story made popular the concept of ancient astronauts, or those who came to earth and interacted/interfered with pre-human history. And using Antarctica as a means to explore horror is nothing new today either. It's films like Prometheus that make it very unlikely we'll see an adaption of this story onscreen any time soon, which is a shame. But at the time of this novella's writing, in 1931, all of these notions were essentially unheard of, making this a true classic.

The story is told in first person, following a chronicling of a previous expedition undertaken by the narrator himself, Geologist William Dyer. This previous expedition was one of drilling down into the ice of Antarctica to study the geologic and archaeologic record hidden underneath. Dyer and another, Danforth, stay behind as an advance party heads forth to their next drill site, led by Professor Lake, and they make some outrageous discoveries. Not only do they find a massive mountain range that tops even the peaks of the Himalayas, but beyond it they find the ruins of an ancient civilization predating even the earliest possible evolutionary understanding. They even find lifeforms (preserved in ice) that are unearthly in the extreme. Lake's party stays with their findings overnight, and the next day Dyer and Danforth never hear from them. We later find that a mass-slaughtering of (nearly) the entire team occurred overnight. Dyer and Danforth investigate, to their increasing horror.

One of the novellas biggest mistakes is also one of its greatest triumphs. This is being written as a brief retelling (by Dyer) of the horrors unearthed on their Antarctica expedition, to deter all future travellers and expeditions. It does feel incredibly realistic in its sincerity, and never once are you broken from the idea that you're supposed to be reading this as if it were an account trying to convince you not to go to the ice continent. But as it's told in first person in this setting, you're never surprised by what you read. The narrator is constantly prefacing each horror, bracing you so that you are only sufficiently frazzled, instead of truly horrified. In this way alone does the story fail for me.

The book sometimes gives too much exposition, and its hard to believe Dyer and Danforth were able to decipher and understand so much of these creatures from the pictographs and murals still preserved on the walls of this ancient civilization. But it is all remarkably creative. Lovecraft goes to great lengths to help explain his Elder Gods and Old Ones mythology in this novella, and that's a bit refreshing. He touches upon his fictional in-universe novel, the Necronomicon, a little - which is probably one of the greatest unanswered mysteries in literary history - as well as the Cthulhu mythos.

Any fans of Lovecraft's work must read this novella. It's brilliant. It deserves a movie.

What a strange, freaky story. This was my first H. P. Lovecraft and it will not be my last. At times it got a little dry and tedious and very science-y but wow, this is horror! I could see it playing out in my mind. The whole Old Ones' story was very interesting and you could feel the fear in Edward Hermann's voice. He did a great job narrating. Fascinating, bone-chilling stuff. Lovecraft and Poe are the leaders of horror!

A nice edition of what is probably Lovecraft's longest successful work. This novella occupies about 100 pages of the text and has all the features made Lovecraft the archetype of modern horror writing. Worth reading even if you don't like this genre because of Lovecraft's considerable influence on genre fiction. This book also contains a long essay by Lovecraft on horror fiction which is of considerable interest to Lovecraft fans and of modest interest to others. There is an excellent introduction by the British writer China Mieville which places Lovecraft's horror writing very nicely in the context of his life and intellectual preoccupations. For those looking for a link between Osvald Spengler and horror fiction, here is the explanation.

HP Lovecraft is the type of writer who is prominent because of his influence on other writers and the importance of his ideas to the genre, rather than for skill in writing. 'At the Mountains of Madness' is a perfect example of this. The ideas of the 'Old Ones' and other elements of the Cthulhu mythos, have had enourmous influence on other horror writers, but the writing itself can be a bit of a chore to wade through.

'At the Mountains of Madness' comprises the bulk of this volume; the other "tales of terror" are: 'The Shunned House', 'The Dreams in the Witch House' and 'The Statement of Randolph Carter'. I actually enjoyed the "The Shunned House' and 'The Dreams of the Witch House' more than 'At the Mountains of Madness' which I think just dragged too much at times.

Lovecraft's style can take some getting used to, but one can't deny the the importance and influence of his ideas.

At the Mountains of Madness is one of Lovecraft's most singular, lengthy, and important pieces of fiction. Set in the cold wastes of Antarctica, it takes us far afield from the mysterious world of Lovecraft's New England yet in close proximity to the mythical framework of his most noted writings. A cadre of scientists from Miskatonic University travels to the coldest continent in order to pursue important geological work, but their mission is quickly transformed by one team's discovery of an ancient cavity housing hordes of scientific specimens at the base of an undiscovered range of weird, majestic mountains. The most important specimens found in the pit are largely intact bodies of terrifically strange creatures having both animal and vegetable characteristics and sporting immense, bat-like wings. As the first team begins a study of the creatures, the other party members rush to the campsite. However, they find only death, destruction, and mystery there when they arrive. Mysterious caves, peculiar shapes, and other incredible aspects of the adjacent mountains leads the expedition leader to dub them "the mountains of madness." Scientific curiosity impels two of the men to fly over those mountains to see what lies on the other side. What they find is an empty, ancient city, which they set out to explore. Statues and strange hieroglyphics lead the men to conclude that this city was once the most revered spot of the Old Ones mentioned in the Necronomicon and the Pnakotic Manuscripts, a city built long before man's first ancestors walked the earth. As they move deeper within the bowels of the city, they discover that it is not quite deserted after all. The story is a masterful one and provides us with a unique viewpoint concerning the race of ancient beings Lovecraft injected into his horror fiction. It can become tedious at times, but these moments are rare. The sense of mystery and trepidation rises consistently throughout, and the ending more than satisfied this particular reader.
There are three stories included alongside At the Mountains of Madness, all of them interesting but not among Lovecraft's greatest creations. "The Shunned House" is basically a ghost story, albeit one featuring Lovecraftian images, themes, and atmosphere. "The Dreams in the Witch-House" is almost stereotypical to some degree--a young man seeks out a place of mystery and dark history in an attempt to gain cosmic knowledge. In this case, the young man is a mathematics student hoping to combine possible ancient knowledge of curved space and time with his powerful mathematical formulae with some hope of transcending the barriers of earth's three dimensions. As can be expected, he soon finds himself in over his head, experiencing terrible things each night at the hands of a supposedly deceased old witch and her horrible rat-like familiar. This story seemed to have great potential, yet I thought it sort of broke down during the latter half, lacking Lovecraft's usual ending flourish and flair. The final story included here is "The Statement of Randolph Carter," which relates a pivotal experience in the life of Randolph Carter, who would become Lovecraft's master of dreams and seeker of Kadath in the ice-cold wastes.
All of these stories are a basic staple of a Lovecraft diet, and At the Mountains of Madness is compulsory reading. These stories can be found elsewhere and in more impressive packages, but this particular book is easy to acquire and relatively inexpensive.

The short novel "At The Mountains of Madness"(1931) by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is one of his most ambitious works in which he utilizes his extensive knowledge of Antarctic exploration, mythology, geology and zoology as a backdrop to his story of an unfathomable encounter with archaic extraterrestrial entities.

Much to his dismay the story was rejected by Weird Tales magazine for, among other things, being too long and not convincing. Eventually it was published in Astounding magazine as a three part serial in 1936. Lovecraft was furious that the editor truncated paragraphs and changed sentences without consulting him. Credit to S.T. Joshi editor of "The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft" for this information on the publishing history.

"At The Mountains of Madness" is a lengthy story complete with the sentence structure, phraseology and arcane word use that Lovecraft aficionados find endearing and casual readers can find nearly impenetrable. For example: "Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible Antarctic wind, whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible."
First time readers should seek out the previously mentioned "The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft" with it's 233 footnotes for this story alone! My third reading of this story was on a Kindle with it's very helpful built in dictionaries.

The other fascinating or frustrating aspect of this story is Lovecraft's extensive references to his other stories, favorite authors, and place names. The Antarctic Expedition is funded by Miskatonic University and wireless reports are published in the Arkham newspaper. The sea party travels on the whalers Miskatonic and the Arkham. Numerous references are made to "The Necronomicon" by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred - "a monstrous book" at the college (Miskatonic) library that describes the "Elder Things" and the "Cthulhu Cult. Nightmare paintings by Clark Ashton Smith are based upon "The Necronomicon". It is what it is; new readers, if so inclined are invited to sign up for many of the on-line courses sponsored by Miskatonic University.

The actual story is deceptively straightforward. I will keep my summary very brief and avoid any spoilers. An advanced party from an Antarctic scientific expedition reports to the expedition leader unbelievable geological and zoology discoveries. Suddenly all radio communications cease. A rescue teams travels to the base camp only to find gruesome remains that defies any logical explanation. The leader and a companion decide to do a little exploration on their own and make a momentous discovery.

Man oh man, homework, I'm telling you that it never ends. I re-read this as homework so that I could read another book. That's not meaning that I didn't like reading it, or that I haven't read it before. I've been reading Lovecraft for over thirty years, and I've read these stories singularly before, in fact, I read the "At The Mountains Of Madness" story only a few years ago. Still, that story was the S. T. Joshi revised version that had been restored from Lovecraft's own manuscripts. I think. This is the Derleth version that originally appeared as an Arkham House hardback.

For those that don't know, Lovecraft was rescued from the obscurity of the under-appreciated pulps by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth. They did this by starting their own publishing house and reprinting his, and other under-appreciated authors in hardcover, allowing libraries to buy and put Arkham House's books and these authors on their shelves. This is the collection that was in and out of print for fifty or so years until S. T. Joshi corrected the texts.

*****But, since I'm not really interested in comparing the texts of the old and the corrected, that past history is neither here or there. This collection contains three short stories and one novella, all of which are some of Lovecraft's better or most important fictions. The first story IS "At The Mountains Of Madness", and what a great title for a story it is. It is also one of the more important of Lovecraft's Mythos stories.

It's also a topical story as Lovecraft based it on current events, as Artic expeditions were getting a lot of headlines during the early parts of the last century. Lovecraft writes his story using these current events as a cornerstone to tell of an expedition funded by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation to go to the Artic in general, and to Mt. Erebus in particular. Lovecraft often used nameless narrators for his stories, and he uses one here. Lovecraft doesn't skimp on details, giving this story a non-fiction feel to it. At times this story almost seems like it was reprinted from the "National Geographic" as the journey from Arkham to Mt. Erebus, the camp set-up, and the trek up the mountain to find the nameless city is described step-by-step, and detail-by-detail. One of the complaints about this story is that there are TOO many details, causing the story to move just too slow. And while the story can hard going at times, all of this detail begins to work for the story as the narrator starts describing the weird geometry and layout of the city, the bizarre murals, and the building dread that the original habitants didn't just leave the city, but were driven out by something even worse than they were. As the story slowly unfolds, we, along with the city's explorers begin to realize that in the darkness, and in these isolated ruins they may not be alone . . .

There is no graphic horror here, it's one of Lovecraft's more quiet horror stories as the horror mostly comes across from the sense of place, the shifting shadows, and the idea that this is a city older than mankind. Yes, it's slow, but those that stick with it will realize why it is one of the more influential Lovecraftian stories. It's telling that this story was originally printed in "Astounding Stories", not "Weird Tales", meaning that Lovecraft was trying to appeal to a different audience than the horror audience that comprised his regular readership.

*****The next story is the ghost story "The Shunned House". Now, Lovecraft could never do anything like anybody else, as his horror stories often read like science fiction stories. The same is here, as Lovecraft drenches this story in a sense of gothic ominousness. There are no stunning apparitions here, just a building creepiness. While the denouement is supposedly based on local legends, it comes across as rather hard to believe, still, this story just gets better every time that it's read.

*****"The Dreams In The Witchhouse" is another story that has a great title that it has to live up to. Walter Gilman is haunted by strange fevered dreams. And he's doing it in one of the worst places to do so, as he's losing his mind in the " . . . legend haunted city of Arkham . . . ". Gilman is also a student at the Miskatonic, and he's rooming in the refurnished old Witchhouse, in the infamous Keziah Mason's room, a notorious witch, who had mysteriously disappeared. Again, Lovecraft is again taking a different riff on the haunted house theme as Gilman starts seeing, dreaming, and experiencing things. This story features one of Lovecraft's more famous creations, and that is Nyarlathotep. A good story, this is the only story that I was unfamiliar with when I read this collection.

*****"The Statement Of Randolph Carter" is a story that I read as a kid, and is perhaps the most traditional of the four stories here. As Lovecraft stand-in Randolph Carter and Harley Warren decide to stick their noses into something that they shouldn't and pay the price for it. They decide to investigate a crypt and despite the fact that the expected happens it is still a shock. "The Statement Of Randolph Carter" was a short ten-page shock horror story that showed that when he wanted to, Lovecraft could do the traditional. So if you are a fan of Robert Bloch's short stories with their snappy last lines, then you will like this one. "The Statement Of Randolph Carter" is more than a gag story as this story has a high re-readable factor with the twist ending always able to deliver, despite knowing how the story was going to end.

Lovecraft didn't write much dialogue in his stories, as his stories were mostly told in straight narrative making them tough going at times for modern readers who are more used to the quicker paced storytelling of today. Only "The Shunned House" is a stand-alone story, as the three other stories are part of his famous Mythos Cycle, although "The Statement Of Randolph Carter" may be borderline, but knowing Lovecraft, we know what lurks beneath Lovecraft's graveyards. If you like Lovecraft and you haven't read this collection, then you're missing out, even if this collection has one of the ugliest covers that I have ever seen on a paperback. Shot from the forehead down with a bubble lens it shows a man's face with a false bulging eye on one side of the face, and an eyepatch on the other side. Ugh!

It's impossible to really grade these stories. In one form or another they're classics, major or minor, but I loved them, and after all this time, they're essentially critic proof. It's also ironic that for an author that still gets no respect from some academics, his material are NOW TAUGHT IN COLLEGES! Ha! Looks like Lovecraft has had the last laugh, if he were alive he'd be amused. Still . . . I personally give them, and this collection, but not this collection's cover, five stars, and essential for Lovecraftians.

Do not buy this book, if you take just 5 minutes to go through the reviews you'll see a lot of the exact same things being written in a different way. The seller has created fake reviews in order to get you to buy this horrible copy which thanks to one user who uploaded a photo you can see what the actual print looks like. I almost bought this but thanks to the comments its obvious more than half of the reviews are by the seller. If you love and respect lovecrafts workings, do not let people like this profit off his name. DO. NOT. BUY.

H.P. Lovecraft possessed a truly unique voice and vision. There is perhaps no better example of his art than "At the Mountains of Madness," the superb short novel which is accompanied by three shorter tales in this volume.
The story of an antarctic expedition whose members uncover a shocking ancient mystery, "At the Mountains of Madness" incorporates many of Lovecraft's trademark themes and techniques. The short novel blends elements of mystery, science fiction, and horror with a subtle satire of academia. Lovers of literature will appreciate Lovecraft's references to Edgar Allan Poe.
"At the Mountains of Madness" is also a gripping adventure story, as we follow the narrator into a forgotten world of monstrous landscapes and equally monstrous creatures. Lovecraft's unique prose style--at once elegantly learned and primally disturbing--contributes greatly to the narrative. There has never been a writer quite like Lovecraft, and this brilliant short novel remains one of his best works.

I will not try to write a complete review, since I see that there are already 17 reviews available here, several of fine quality.

This edition is of great interest because it issues from Arkham House. Arkham House publishing was founded by August Derleth, a protege of H.P. Lovecraft who himself wrote a rather large volume of pastiche material using the Cthulhu mythos of Lovecraft. One motive of Derleth's in founding Arkham House publishing was to find a medium to reissue all the writings of Lovecraft, since many were confined to the pulps like Weird Tales that had first printed them.

I recently purchased this book. The quality of the book is excellent. The print is clear and easy to read. The bookbinding quality is just excellent. This may explain why the book is not particularly cheap.

As for the contents, readers may be glad to know that this book contains much of the very finest writing Lovecraft produced. The short novels were written following Lovecraft's return from his years living in New York, and follow the breakup of his marriage. This "period" of about a decade marked the finest of Lovecraft's writings. In my opinion -- arguably -- "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" are the best works in the Lovecraft canon. A few other words might come up to them, but nothing's better.

Those who find Lovecraft interesting should also check out the writings of August Derleth that incorporate Lovecraft's "Cthulhu mythos." There is also a board game entitled "Arkham Horror" which attempts to recreate the scary Lovecraft universe on your card table. Whacky as this sounds, the game is fun to play.

So have at it! Scare yourselves silly! I love this sort of material myself.

This was one of the most horribly boring boring books I've ever read. It takes forever to get to the good part and then it is over just as it gets interesting. I wanted to read it because Guillermo Del Toro is involved in a project to make this into movie, but now not only have I wasted my life, but I've also totally lost interest in this movie.

I recommend this as the best one-volume introduction to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. If you finish this single volume you will be familiar with the atmosphere and the terminology of a large part of the Cthulhu Mythos. That's probably why this particular edition has remained in print so long. After _The Dunwich Horror_, it was my introduction to Lovecraft.
In the first story, "At the Mountains of Madness", you find yourself immediately immersed in the world of the Necronomicon, Miskantonic University, and the cosmic pantheon of the Cthulhu Cult and the Elder Things.
The second tale, "The Shunned House", shows what the master could do with a more conventional horror story. It is one of the best stories of a cursed house and family ever written.
The third story, "Dreams in the Witch House", serves as an excellent introduction to the cursed city of Arkham, though there are also strong elements of Miskantonic, the Necronomicon, and the speculations of fourth dimensional connections between our own world and "the farthest stars of the transgalactic gulfs."
Finally, there is "The Statement of Randolph Carter", which may be the most perfect short horror story ever written.
Of course if you are really hooked and want all the details about Lovecraft's world, then get the _Encyclopedia Cthulhiana_, that is if you are lucky enough to find a copy....

For whatever reason, and I have no ready theory for why it should be so, Horror has proven to be one of the most novel and enduring of America's literary forms. From Washington Irving and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems, to The Turn of the Screw (Henry James' only worthwhile work), on to the great pulp writers like Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, right on up to the overrated but ridiculously successful Stephen King and the innovative but underappreciated Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon, we just keep churning out great horror writers and stories.
HP Lovecraft earned his place in this company with his supremely creepy short fiction, which injected both intergalactic elements and the mythos that he created involving the dread text of the Necronomicon. At the Mountains of Madness is perhaps his finest work and is obviously the forerunner of such subsequent horror staples as The Thing and Alien. It tells the story of a doomed party of Antarctic explorers who uncover the remains of a lost civilization, the Old Ones. Turns out, these Old Ones bioengineered the Earth, but were vanquished by their own creations, who have now been reawakened by these unwitting explorers.
Lovecraft's writing is mannered and affected, which may keep him from a mass audience, but it retains a certain gothic power and he continues to be a cult favorite.
GRADE: B+

I read "Mountains of Madness" a few years ago and very much enjoyed it. I believe it may have been my first Lovecraft book. The whole concept of evil aliens on Earth during our pre-history was a new concept for me as a reader. Lovecraft certainly presented it in a spooky way. It certainly reminds you of the fact that we weren't always the dominant species on the planet.

There are two things that have occurred in recent years that make "Mountains of Madness" seem eeriely prophetic:

- First, Lovecraft portrays Antarctica as the site of first landing by alien life. And where did NASA find the meteorite that proved the existence of life on Mars? You guessed it...Antarctica.

- Second, Lovecraft talks about the aliens retreating from their Antarctic city on the surface to one within a lake that is deep underground. Within the last few years, scientists have discovered Lake Vostok, which exists several miles beneath the Antarctic ice. The ice above it is several million years old.

I think the highest rating I give books on the store is four stars. The only reason I am giving this book three is that I do agree with some of the other reviewers that Lovecraft's language does slow you down a bit. Luckily, the concept of the story more than compensates for this.

What with so many different Lovecraft collections out there, it may be helpful to prospective buyers to know what's actually in this one:
[By S. T. Joshi:] A Note on the Texts; [by T.E.D. Klein:] A Dreamer's Tales [an introductory essay by perhaps the best living American author of supernatural horror fiction]; [fiction by Lovecraft:] The Tomb [short story]; Dagon [short story]; Polaris [short story]; Beyond the Wall of Sleep [short story]; The White Ship [short story]; The Doom That Came to Sarnath [short story]; The Tree [short story]; The Cats of Ulthar [short story]; The Temple [short story]; Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family [short story]; Celephaïs [short story]; From Beyond [short story]; The Nameless City [short story]; The Quest of Iranon [short story]; The Moon-Bog [short story]; The Other Gods [short story]; Herbert West-Reanimator [a collected magazine serial]; Hypnos [short story]; The Hound [short story]; The Lurking Fear [short story]; The Unnamable [short story]; The Festival [short story]; Under the Pyramids [short story ghostwritten for Harry Houdini]; The Horror at Red Hook [short story]; He [short story]; The Strange High House in the Mist [short story]; The Evil Clergyman [Lovecraft's recounting of one of his dreams, extracted from one of his letters]; In the Walls of Eryx [short story written in collaboration with Kenneth Sterling]; The Beast in the Cave [short story]; The Alchemist [short story]; The Transition of Juan Romero [short story]; The Street [prose poem]; Poetry and the Gods [short story ghostwritten for Anna Helen Crofts]; Azathoth [an uncompleted fiction draft]; The Descendant [an uncompleted fiction draft]; The Book [an uncompleted fiction draft]; Supernatural Horror in Literature [a monograph]; [by Joshi:] Index to Supernatural Horror in Literature; Chronology of the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft
Most of this volume features shorter and less well-known fiction by Lovecraft, including a little best-overlooked juvenalia, though it also has some of his much-anthologized hits, as with "Dagon" and "Herbert West- Reanimator". Many of these stories are early fantasies, influenced by Edgar Allan Poe at his most fantastical and the early Lord Dunsany, of very mixed quality, as is this collection overall. Still, there are some underrated gems among the less known stories: "The Tomb", for instance, is a subtly poignant depiction of despair, loneliness, and frustration. What's really called for in the reader is attentiveness to the emotional atmosphere woven by these texts: Try to go through each of them slowly, without interruption, in a single reading, without disruptive background noise. Read this way, even a bungled story like "The Temple" spins the kind of disturbing emotional effect Lovecraft sought to convey.
This is the third volume in a series of four by Arkham House Publishers, Inc., presenting the nearly complete fiction of Lovecraft. (The others, in order, are: THE DUNWICH HORROR AND OTHERS; AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS AND OTHER NOVELS; and THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM AND OTHER REVISIONS.) Almost all the remaining prose fiction can found in a later Arkham House title, MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS, also by Lovecraft. All five books are visually attractive, textually researched (though I quarrel with some of Joshi's textual editing decisions), and belong on the bookshelf of every serious Lovecraft reader.

Lovecraft is considered a seminal figure in the horror/sci-fi genres and this is apparently one of the main reasons. I can see why. It is a very modern story in the sense of the use of science (at least as it was known at that time) to create a realistic world. He is at pains to make the expedition at the center of the story sound as realistic as possible. I understand there was a movie version in the works, and even Tom Cruise may have become involved. But it was shelved when Prometheus came out, since it was a very similar plot (except it took place in space rather than Antarctica. Still, that shows how modern Lovecraft's vision was, that it was too much like a 2012 movie.

What made this such hard going as a read was the archaic writing style Lovecraft has. I would guess that even in his day it was considered Old School, a Victorian throwback. Look at not just the major literary figures of his day (Hemingway, etc.) but even the genre writers like Hammett and Cain. The good ones employed a much terser, much more muscular prose. What also hurts is the lack of dialogue, which reduces the drama and makes this read--literally--like an academic paper.

This is an adventure that I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't recreated every ten years since the publication of the book. This is a great taste of Lovecraft's ability to assist the reader's imagination in conjuring up the darkest and most depraved creatures in the universe. The pace was quick and the suspense and anticipation were gripping.

I first read these stories years ago while spending the summer with a friend in rural Arkansas. The house had no electricity so we read late at night by kerosene lamp. I can still remember the feelings that these pieces evoked and how hard it was to go to sleep in the dark afteward. Now, even as an adult, reading in a comfortabley lighted room, these stories still scare the hell out of me.
There has never been another writer like Lovecraft. His stories are oblique and suggestive and the reader's own mind provides much of the horror. He understood what lurked just beneath the civilized veneer of our consiousness and he manages to tease it out so well.
This is fiction for those who like to feel their skin crawl. Simply the best of its kind ever.

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.

Lovecraft has a unique way of writing, and is very descriptive. Although quite slow, it's still a very interesting read as he builds the story up. As always, his stories have a very creepy feeling to them, almost as if something is going to jump out at you from the dark.

One of the most amazing things I have ever read, made even more intriguing because I could not get it out of my mind that this book was written in 1936. It begins as a paleontological study set in Antarctica. Lovecraft writes almost as if this is a scientific documentary. It is convincing enough that within the first 20 pages I was researching what little was known about Antarctica in the 1930s and I was questioning what was known about paleontology at the time. The next 20 pages I was researching fictional citations of the Cthulhu Mythos and the Necronomicon. This book is ground breaking on so many levels.

`At the Mountains of Madness' is nonstop fascinating discovery. Every single page is a thrill and every single page builds, like a documentary, knowledge of this alien world on a mostly unknown continent - at the time of the writing - on our very planet.

This Modern Library Classics edition contains an introduction by China Mieville. I hope nobody tries to read the introduction before reading 'At the Mountains of Madness', but what a pairing is this story and Mielville's introduction. Mielville marvels at Lovecraft's art then takes Lovecraft, the man, apart. I love that these two pieces were put together. I closed the book at 1:30AM after reading the introduction and was sleepless for 2 hours despicably inspired. It is sickening and amazing to be human in all its variety. Beautiful.

After reading the autobiography of my favorite Guitar Player, http://www.the store.com/Relentless-Memoir-Yngwie-J-Malmsteen-ebook/dp/B00DNL2VC8/, I thought it would be fun to read a novel by H.P. Lovecraft, as Yngwie had read the entire Lovecraft collection by the time he was twelve. He gave the works credit as one of the sources for his early imagery.

As Wikipedia states that Lovecraft was an influential writer of horror fiction, I looked forward to a scary and entertaining story. Unfortunately, I was neither frightened nor entertained.

To his credit, Lovecraft works very hard to describe scenery, whether real or surreal. He tries to get the reader engulfed in his world by meticulously detailing the characters and their surroundings—he even tries to invoke the sense of smell, describing things such as “unexplainable foetors.” At the Mountains of Madness is complete with extraterrestrials and their relationships with the “Shoggoth” creatures that they created to serve them.

Unfortunately, I was unable to “get into” Lovecraft’s world. I found the story very boring and couldn’t wait for it to end. The plot is good but the storytelling is not. Learning about the history of an entire civilization through the narrator’s interpretation of hieroglyphic murals is very hard to take!

In addition, the At the Mountains of Madness is replete with an annoying recurring theme: The narrator tells the audience that he does not want to describe the horror that transpired, but for the sake of humanity, he is obligated to. There was no reason for me to have to have read, “I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint rather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in order to justify my course in discouraging further exploration.” I got the point the first time you came to that place! This passage reminds me of “filler” in a college writing assignment that has a minimum word count. There are other examples of similarly themed unnecessary text, such as, “Let me try to state the thing without flinching.” Just tell the story!

At the Mountains of Madness is written in an archaic style. I’m assuming that the writing style conforms to the time – it was written in 1931. Some readers may dislike this – I didn't mind; in fact I learned some vocabulary.

A good story but bad storytelling.

As some of the other reviews indicate, there's not much new here, beyond Melville's introduction, but the key words are "Modern Library" - along with the Penguin editions of Mr. Joshi's corrected texts and the startling admission of Lovecraft into the Library of America in 2005, this book puts HPL that much further into the canon of American literature and further from the generally cult status that's restricted interest in his work among other readers and critics. It seems a little odd that ML chose "Mountains" rather than "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," which is arguably closer to a novel as most readers understand the term - more unified and complex in its narrative layout, with none of the tangential Mythos references one finds here. Let's hope they add "Ward" to their list, maybe in tandem with "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath," which certainly deserves more attention from readers of fantasy

Lovecraft is certainly one of the the best horror writers of all time, and these are some of his best tales. Indeed, I would consider At the Mountains of Madness his most finely wrought story. It's one of the few stories that has stayed continually with me since the first time I read it (15 years ago now? ). Without giving too much away, the basic plot deals with a Antarctic research mission gone awry. As a researcher now myself, I occasionally travels to remote and solitary field sites. I must admit that it's the Mountains of Madness that I think of when it's been overlong since I've heard from a base camp or from a research party. Overall, you can't go wrong with this one. A true classic.

After finishing "At the mountain of madness" is not difficult to understand H.P Lovecraft's own vision of the world. A vision which by no means can be considered demented or uncanny. The idea of an old civilization thousands of million of years before mankind is something that may seem fantastic to some but no one can deny completely. This is the whole theme of Lovecraft's stories and this is what keeps them so interesting and at the same time so appealing. I would recomend this book to anyone who is not completely convinced of the story of the world that books like to tell. The oldest fear of mankind is fear of the unknown, fear of the OLD ONES...

I happen to own the set of paperbacks of which this is part. They are poorly edited, and ill printed on crummy paper. It also happens that the set prints several stories twice, and forgets some of HPL's not so minor works. A publisher who gives this kind of treatment to a writer and to prospective customers doesn't deserve your money.
this volume's best redeeming feature is the inclusion of two of my favorite HPL tales : "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Statement of Randolph Carter" but in the light of the existence of better edited, printed and organized collections, this falls short of being enough for me to recommend it
If you like HPL, or just want to discover his works, do yourself and the publishing industry a favor, get your book somewhere else, there are some better collections and omnibuses around, just waiting for you.

I enjoy "weird" stories--there is nothing like leaving the comfortable (or boring) world of our daily life to explore something unusual. "Mountains" was my first exposure to Lovecraft and it was interesting to see how small our world has become in so few years. Antarctica no longer has the power to evoke terror and exploration is as simple as having the first available satellite take a picture. In my opinion, this alone is a great argument for space exploration--people need a frontier, if only to dream of getting away from where they are at. Good scary stories now require you to dig holes into the Lunar surface or to hie out to Jupiter or some such celestial location where the creepy alien lifeforms wait to pounce on the unsuspecting.

This little volume provides an excellent roadmap to Lovecraft's work--this guy was seriously afraid of the dark or, for that matter, anything unfamiliar or foreign. James Cameron tried a very similar tale with the Abyss and it worked because we really didn't know much about the deep sea and could easily buy into the hidden world theme. Cameron's work suffered the same fate as has "Mountains of Madness" and in a much shorter time. In only a few short years our understanding of the deep sea has vastly increased, thereby removing much of the mystery that could previously be evoked simply by a grave reference to the deep dark depths.

What must it have been like to live in a world so unfamiliar? What is left for our explorers to find? Are we really reduced to merely trying to outdo each other in finding different ways to circumnavigate? The loss of the ability to tell a deliciously creepy tale is one of the unexpected costs of discovery. Fortunately, good authors will never lose the ability to take us to interesting places.

Reading "At the Mountains of Madness", I can't keep myself from visualizing it as a '30s era serial (or maybe an Indiana Jones type modern film). These scientists as explorers encountering new and terrible things were surely the inspiration for the film "The Thing" (or should that be films, plural?). This is the story I use to hook my friends on HPL, the horror, drama, and tension are all there, with enough pure adventure to pull you through your first encounter with HPL's mythos.

This marks my premier venture into the world of Lovecraft. I've been longing to read this for a while, and I was both disappointed and pleasantly surprised; the good bits are the language, which is both varied and interesting, plus the eldritch feeling that hangs o'er the entire work. The bad things, is that this is a work that feels like reading an architect magazine crossed with Edgar Allan Poe. I'm guessing Lovecraft fans may want to crucify me for that.

Still, I read an annotated version of this book; Leslie S. Klinger has done a great job with annotating both the Sherlock Holmes tales and the "Sandman" stories, the latter by Neil Gaiman, and he continues in that vein throughout this relatively short story.

A man goes to Antarctica and finds some scary stuff. There's a synopsis for you. I shan't spoil anything for you, but I think it's safe to say that the film "Alien" and "The Thing" both have been heavily inspired by this tome.

I got tired of reading a bunch of "and the spires towards the skies from the unfathomable architecture of the Old Ones from 50 million years ago are scary" stuff, almost over and over again, so that didn't scare me; however, Lovecraft's way of weaving a gloomy, haunting atmosphere at the start of this book is admirable; he almost goes deep, headlong into describing landscapes and the recurring so much that it really hits home, when he goes into the oeuvre.

All in all, not my cup of tea, and it bored the pants off me from time to time, but it was at the very least well-written with a lot of nods to different cultures. And yes, I'd pick up the annotated-by-Leslie-S.-Klinger-version if I were you.

I think William Roberts epic narration is perfectly wonderful! Compared to other horribly flat narrations of HP Lovecrafts masterpieces Roberts really goddam nails it! All the grandiose horrorscapes that Lovecraft intended is fantstically evoked by William. I love you William.
If dark ambient music was used in the all right places and used alot this would be a masterpiece
Technically speaking, i dont know why this is but Naxos records this in such a way that there are jumps of 3 syllables evry 3 minutes which ruins almost evrything. i dont know why naxos record the way they do. no other audio cd ive listened to does the jumping and i listen to alot
SO TRY AND GET A version without the jumps and glitches.
otherwise its wonderful

I typed out a big lampooning review full of witty jabs at this novella. I've decided not to post it, because lampooning does no good. I'm denying my urge to vent.

Instead, I'll keep it simple. At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft is based on an interesting idea. One that might float through anyone's mind while sitting outside on a clear night, looking to the stars and pondering humanity's place in the universe; however, that idea is not developed. The complaint that is easily the largest, though, is the tendency for Lovecraft to ramble in this book. Oh, and how he rambles. Of the 110 pages that comprise this novella, I'd estimate 75+ to be composed exclusively of geometrical descriptions of rock formations, details on antarctic topography, and explanations of basic architectural shapes. The amount of sheer redundancy is astounding. I enjoyed the first couple chapters, but then it started rambling and never stopped.

Lovecraft fans will likely say "it's part of the style, he's making an atmosphere. You just don't get it or understand it." My favorite genre is Victorian Gothic novels, and Poe is my favorite author; trust me, I love lush detail and a read that paints an atmosphere. At the Mountains of Madness does not paint an atmosphere, it plods on in an almost scientifically meticulous yet mechanically drab fashion. It felt almost like he had a short story, and turned it into a novella by cramming in a huge amount of superficial descriptive text as filler.

I've cut out other less significant criticisms of the writing quality, and will end this review by saying this was the first Lovecraft work I've read. I should have started with a popular short story of his; prior to reading this, I did not realize that short stories were his forte and what most of his writing consisted of. I do not judge his ability as a writer based on this single work, but I highly recommend that anyone who is not already die hard Lovecraft fan avoid this novella.

"At the Mountains of Madness" still proves an engaging, tense read over 70 years after its initial publication. The one issue some may have with the story is the lack of dialogue throughout its pages, but with vivid description and playing with the sense of the unknown and mysterious, the story provides a gripping, self-building story that is sure to please most who read it.

I found this book at a used paperback shop for 10 cents about 15 yrs. ago, it is simply the most horrifying stuff I have have ever seen or read, that includes Poe, Kellerman, King, Koontz,"Silence of the Lambs", slasher flix or whatever. It is not an easy read, Poe had a big vocabulary but Lovecraft's was a lot bigger. It's worth it though,there are elements of science fiction, prehistorical speculation, a sense of where science/technology was leading, and how the terrors within the human mind cannot be conquered by it's materialistic accomplishments. This is the most disturbing book I have ever read, I'm an admirer of Poe but this is on a whole other level. This is literary terror in a pure intellectual form, Lovecraft makes Stephen King, Jonathan Kellerman, and Dean Koontz look like babes in a sandbox, fighting over who can dissect a corpse into the most parts with the latest , greatest B&D tools. Sorry, dudes, Lovecraft beat you to the punch about a hundred years ago.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." - H. P. Lovecraft.

_At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition_ republished by The Modern Library Classics contains three principle parts: a short introduction to H. P. Lovecraft and the story by China Mieville, the story "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft, and Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Fiction". H. P. Lovecraft was an eccentric writer of weird fiction whose bizarre horror stories continue to both fascinate and repel. Lovecraft himself was a man of contradictions, an avowed materialist and atheist who wrote on superstition, the occult, and the supernatural, an aristocratic ultra-conservative who eventually embraced socialism, a racialist and elitist who found other races, miscegenation, and immigrants abhorrent, yet who married a Jew, and an ardent follower of the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler regarding "the decline of the West". As China Mieville notes in his introduction, his tale "At the Mountains of Madness" reveals many of these elements.

"At the Mountains of Madness" first published in 1931 is the tale of several scientific explorers who are visiting Antarctica. Lovecraft long harbored a fascination with this southernmost continent, and this tale reveals his scientific knowledge regarding geology, climatology, and paleontology. While exploring Antarctica, the scientists discover the remains of vaguely amphibious creatures which cause them to conjure up memories of various occult texts including the dread _Necronomicon_ and weird tales penned by authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft's good friend. The _Necronomicon_ by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazared is entirely an invention of Lovecraft's which first appeared in his tale "The Hound". The explorers also encounter the ruins of a lost civilization, where they find the remains of "the Old Ones". As China Mieville explains in his preface, Lovecraft reveals the influence of Spengler here, whose _Decline of the West_ showed how civilizations entered a stage of decline. While there, they also encounter certain monstrous penguin creatures and a slave race of shoggoths. Lovecraft who feared the rise of the masses regarded the shoggoths, a race of slave-like creatures of "the Old Ones" as the ultimate abomination. Lovecraft's paranoia of other races was particularly intense and led to his creation of stories of nihilistic cosmic horror. While many find this paranoia repulsive, few will disagree that it provides his stories with an edge that makes them unique in all of literature. This tale was obviously influenced by Edgar Allen Poe, who Lovecraft very much admired, whose _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_ also featured a mythicized southern pole and provided the maddening sound heard by the explorers "Tekeli-li".

"Supernatural Horror in Literature" is Lovecraft's essay outlining the history of supernatural and weird fiction and showing the influences on his own fiction and thought. I am particularly grateful that this essay was included in this edition, because it provides a fascinating overview of the literature which served as the primary inspiration for Lovecraft's own fiction. In this essay, Lovecraft who was an avowed materialist begins by explaining how fear and superstition play an important role in the life and history of man. He notes the primitive cults and religions which incorporated supernatural elements in their beliefs. Lovecraft next turns his attention to "The Dawn of the Horror-Tale". Here, he explains the various sources of the horror tale in folklore and magic as well as medieval literature. Next, Lovecraft writes of the development of these elements into "The Early Gothic Novel". Here, he mentions the novels of such famous Gothic writers as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe whose stories provided the basis for Gothic novels. Lovecraft also writes of the apex and the aftermath of Gothic fiction, as the form developed and finally collapsed upon itself. Next, Lovecraft turns to "Spectral Literature on the Continent", where he outlines some of the European ghost stories. Lovecraft devotes a separate section on the master Edgar Allen Poe, whose fiction played such an important role in the formation of Lovecraft's own. According to Lovecraft, Poe was the fist to realize that a more objective view of the characters provided the horror tale with greater appeal. Lovecraft next turns his attention to "The Weird Tradition in America", noting the influence of writers such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The influence of the puritans in America and the witch trials that occurred in the colonial days provides much inspiration for the writings of weird tales, and in particular for Lovecraft's own stories. Lovecraft next turns his attention to "The Weird Tradition in the British Isles", where he notes the influence of Celtic folklore and the Irish ghost story. Finally, Lovecraft turns his attention to "The Modern Masters", these are the writers who influenced him to the greatest extent. The writers that Lovecraft includes in this category are Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and Montague Rhodes James. William Hope Hodgson was also to have a great influence on Lovecraft, which he notes in his section on the British writers. This essay provides a fascinating look at the source of much of Lovecraft's fiction, the tradition of supernatural horror.

Lovecraft's weird tales continue to fascinate and disturb the modern reader. This book provides an excellent edition of one of those tales as well as an important essay of his which reveals the influences on his stories.

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. Happy Halloween!

I read this mostly because I wanted to experience what other people have said about Lovecraft. It would be an understatement to say that it took a lot of willpower to make myself finish this book. My criticisms: 1) I could get past his over-use of archaic terms, but as I read I became more and more irritated by the unnecessarily lengthy descriptions of everything, especially the terrain and structures. The story could have easily been half as long. 2) He also seemed to rely on essentially just saying something was horrifying, rather than just showing what the narrator saw and felt. Like saying "these horrific peaks," when there was no reason the reader should think they were anything but mountains. It's the equivalent of putting scary music in a movie scene to create tension where none would exist otherwise. 3) SPOILER - I was a bit annoyed at the way the narrator was able to translate the alien history that would have only been possible from stacks of books and days of reading - all from some stone pictures on the wall. I simply couldn't accept it. 3 stars instead of 2 because Lovecraft is certainly a good writer, and I understand that it's an old story for a different time.

The prime flaw of most genre fiction is that its prose execution never matches the vitality of the conceptual core. And so it is with Lovecraft's fiction, and in particular with this novella, which first saw the light of day in a chopped up version in the sf pulp magazine Astounding. The images and ideas lie there with seductive power: ice blowing through the Antarctic abyss, ominous mountains towering above, a derelict and seemingly abandoned city of unbelievable age, and bewildered men wandering through this maze with emotions that flicker among disgust, fascination, and dread. But it never quite works as it should, given Lovecraft's penchant for repetition, tortuous locution, and narrative hemming and hawing. Early on, the reader has a good guess as to how matters really sit, and in the meantime must bear with the author's endless recounting of yet another chamber with still more bas-reliefs that somehow allow the characters to draw ever more incredibly detailed conclusions about the history of the alien Old Ones, even to the point of deciding that their starry heads bore socialist ideals. And yet there is no denying the compelling nature of HPL's imagination. If only he had been more attuned to the modernist prose of his own century rather than the measured, somewhat musty forms of previous ones. Worth reading, but as others may have noted, from the Library of America collection, which is the best one volume assembly of Lovecraftian works, if one is going to stop at owning just one book by the old gentleman.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a sickly child who early suffered from night terrors--a dream state in which the dreamer cannot awaken himself from a bad dream. Many scholars believe these night terrors gradually motivated him to write, and that he drew from them in the creation of his stories, many of which were published in well-known magazines of the day. But like his predecessor Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft found it impossible to support himself as a writer, and he gradually slipped into ever-deepening poverty. He died of a combination of cancer, Bright's disease, and (shockingly) malnutrition, unable to purchase food and unwilling to resort to charity.

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is one of Lovecraft's longer pieces, running approximately one hundred pages. It is the story of an expedition to the anarctic by a group of scientists who hope to take new core samples of ice and earth. In the process, a member of the group finds an odd fossil that leads him to push his party far from the home base. His discoveries continue, fascinating discoveries, strange and disturbing discoveries--and then the radio goes silent. At this point, narrator and geologist Dr. William Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth rush to the new encampment only to find absolute chaos and carnage, possibly caused by one of the men going unexpectedly mad, but also possibly caused by something the men unearthed in their exploration. As Dyer and Danforth continue to explore, they discover the ruins of a great city and, from carvings in the city, piece together a history of ancient alien invasion. They are unprepared for the possibility that any of these ancient aliens might still be alive and remarkably lethal, or that something even worse might exist on the other side of the mountain range.

Lovecraft was not what you might call a "natural born writer." His works are wordy and his construction painful. There is seldom much plot or character development, and it is rare to find much in the way of dialogue in any of his stories. He gives you page after page of narrative description. All the same, when at his best, Lovecraft could quickly lead you through a series of seemingly unrelated and increasingly uneasy images--and then, when you reach the final page, suddenly sucker punch you in a way that makes your blood run cold, as any reader of the infamous "Pickman's Model" can tell you. Trouble is, the format works extremely well in very short work but very poorly in long ones, with AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS a case in point. It is a famous work, but when Lovecraft is stretched to this length he becomes incredibly repetitive and often predictable. You can easily skip the first dozen pages and then read only every third paragraph until you get about two-thirds of the way into the work. When you reach the end you are so exhausted by Lovecraft's uphill style that the final punch is less likely to terrorize than cause a sigh of relief that the thing is finished and over.

If you are interested in Lovecraft, you would do much, much better to begin with his shorter works and push the handful of longer ones, perhaps best described by the word "novellas," to the back of the list. And that includes AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS. I give this particular edition points for an excellent introduction and for its inclusion of Lovecraft's own essay on "weird fiction," a piece that is almost as long as the story itself. Even so, this one is pretty much for established fans only.

GFT, the store Reviewer

The only word that can describe H.P. Lovecraft's concept of universal horror and his unique writing style is "increcible." HP Lovecraft's work, "At the Mountains of Madness," reveals the true history of earth, when the Old Ones built their cyclopean city, deep in the arctic. There are three other very good stories in the book, as well. "The Shunned House" is you classic haunted house story, with a Cthulhoid twist that Lovecraft is famous for. "Dreams in the Witch-House" is very much like "At the Mountains of Madness," for in goes into a bit of detail about the true first inhabitants of this world, the elder things. The bottom line is, BUY THIS BOOK.

I can understand why this is the granddaddy of sci-fi horror, but in running along that vein it's pretty tame. I can only imagine how frightening this must have been to read in the 30s, however, as it was fresh and chilling at that time. I'm looking forward to reading through more of Lovecraft's other work, and hopefully one of his other stories will grab me.

I read At the Mountains of Madness when I was a teenager, and promptly forgot what the story was about. 40 years later, I suffered through an audiobook of the story. I wanted to understand what all the fuss is with the Cthulhu mythos.
Lovecraft's writing style is overwrought and painfully amateurish, which doesn't make up for the fact that he forgot to tell an entertaining story.
I've read that Lovecraft was influenced by Poe, but if I recall correctly, Poe said that one necessity to writing a good story was to pare away anything that didn't advance the plot. Lovecraft ignores this by plunging into an incredibly tedious exposition on the history of the Old Ones' conquest of Earth, just as things are beginning to happen to the Antarctic expedition. This section reminded me of something that a Lovecraft fanboy might write as a back story. At best, it belongs in an appendix to the story, for the benefit of those who just have to know what the Old Ones ate for breakfast. It does nothing to support the ostensible purpose of the story, which is to entertain me by horrifying me!
Another irritating aspect of Lovecraft's style is his wont of simply declaring that something is horrifying, or foreboding, without going to the trouble of supporting his declaration via his narrative. This is lazy writing. Show me why, instead.
If I never see the words pre-cambrian, cyclopean, or necronomican again, it will be too soon.
I fail to understand why Lovecraft is so celebrated.

(excerpt) read the full review from Geek Sandwich at: [...]

The story is masterfully crafted by H.P. Lovecraft, long considered one of the most prolific horror writers of the 20th century. He is credited as the father of a literary philosophy called "cosmicism" or "cosmic horror". The principles of this philosophy are a common element in Lovecraft's fiction, stating that human life is utterly small and insignificant in comparison to the cosmic forces and alien entities in the universe. It is devoid of divine influence and strongly emphasizes the frailty of mankind. Lovecraft once wrote: "...the human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists."

Such provides the groundwork for "At the Mountains of Madness". As the main character and his companion descend deeper and deeper into the sprawling alien city, their beliefs and even their sense of reality are slowly ripped to shreds. Towards the end of the story, the character Danforth has an incomprehensible vision which ultimately causes him to go mad, thus the story's foreboding title.

If you've never read Lovecraft before, be prepared for large paragraphs with hardly any dialogue at all. Lovecraft never really dealt much with the conversations of men in his stories. Indeed, he might have felt that they were meaningless in the face of the cosmic forces that surrounded his characters. Instead, he favored detailed description so as to envelop the reader in the narrative and bring the horror to life as best he could.

As The Dream Quest for Unknown Kadath is Lovecraft's most magical work, At the Mountains of Maddness is his most compelling science-fiction novel. Suggested no doubt by Byrd's expeditions, it plunges even further and deeper into a vista of the past, of space, and of chilling dread. And then-- we're at South Station Under! A master.

well, this book is wierd, unpredictable and creepy... a good reading.
just to make clear: i'm from isreal and not native to the inglish languge.
yet even so, after managing to read the over descriptional begining, i culdn't stop reading.
summing up: a good book, if you can hundle the difficult words and ignore the total lack of dialouge. also a great start for new lovecraft readers.

This is a great full length story -- not a short story. Most Lovecraft stories are too short for him to really develop his characters, but this one is quite different. It is in the class of H.Rider Haggard's "She" and A. Merritt's "The Face in the Abyss." A modern similar story is Emerson's "The Riddle of Cthulhu" that delves into the Lovecraft Mythos.

When I was a young man I read all of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's books that I could get my hands on. I read them all; except Herbert West Reanimator (never could find this in the used books store). At the Mountains of Madness is one of the scariest. It's so horrifying and blood-chilling; I'm afraid to read it again.

I loved this book. For me, I was not really terrified, but I just love Myths and things like that, so I just kept on reading and loved every minute of it. However, I would find a different book that contains these stories because I was only half way through At the Mountains of Madness when the pages started to come off of the Spine of the book. But trust me, you will be missing out on a great read if you do not read these stories.

Five stars for the Stories
One star for the Book's quality

I'm a big fan of HPL and try to get everything out by him. But i must say that there are many better one-volume introduction to HPL out there right now. Try The Call of Cthulhu (Penguin Modern Classics) The Call of Cthulhu (Penguin Modern Classics) This is imho the best introduction to HPL.
The stories get 5 stars, this volume gets 2.

"At the Mountains of Madness" is good and "Dreams in the Witch-House", but the real gem in this collection is the three page story "The Statement of Randolph Carter". Other reviewers have discussed its plot, so I won't say much except that I think Harley Warren, the one in the story who doesn't come up alive, is one of Lovecraft's best characters. He is portrayed very vividly and comes off as a man who is infused with an insatiable curiosity, but at the same time realizes that what he is pursuing his dangerous to himself. He also shows him as a self-sacrificial character who sacrificed his life for Carter.

Three cheers for you, Harley Warren, and for Mr. Lovecraft who brought him to life!

Let's be real--Lovecraft was a pulp writer, and though much of his imagery may seem to today's reader to be hack in that many of his monstrosities are only hinted at (my favorite tale is "The Unnamable" in which he parodies his own descriptions of his monsters), it scared the hell out of readers in the 30s and 40s. This is one of my personal favorites of his, only hinting at the Cthulhu mythos, and somewhat of a primer for the pantheon of other tales. Do I recommend it? Only highly, along with any other Lovecraft you can get yer hands on. Go for it.

In At the Mountains of Madness there is both a lot to admire and to find fault with. Conceptually, the story is great; Lovecraft takes a group of scientists and archeologists to the Antarctic, that desolate and mysterious region of our planet, where they stumble upon the ancient relics of an abandoned city hitherto completely unknown to mankind. The problem is the execution of the story. The nature of the fear that permeates the book is the base human fear of the unknown and Lovecraft often effectively evokes this fear through ominous implications in the detailed, pragmatic narrative. However, even for its short length, the reading can be very trying. The sheer amount of detail spent on describing the scientists' findings, while adding to the sense of realism and dry fact employed throughout the story (which is necessary for the scientists' incredible discoveries to be believable), slows down the story so much that it loses its momentum, ceasing to be effective. Particularly in the second half, the story suffers from too much repetition and description.

At the Mountains of Madness does have its moments, however. The book's opening immediately sets the mood for what is to follow. Dyer, the geologist that narrates the story as a warning to others to cease exploration in the Antarctic, brings an air of immediacy to the terrible sights he has witnessed by appealing urgently to the reader to forsake natural curiosity for the good and safety of the world. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and in particular his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (which is mentioned in the book more than once), Lovecraft has rendered his story all the more terrifying by emphasizing the unknown with the loneliness and biting cold of the Antarctic expanse, so that when Lovecraft hints at the unknowable horrors of an ancient civilization, sending shivers up your spine, you can literally feel chills.

Out of all the books I have ever read only this and 'Sunset Song' have been the most overwritten. In what could be potentially and entralling read, Lovecraft ruins 'At the Mountains of Madness' with outrageously pointless over-description and straying too far off the point. One might argue that he's building up suspense and only 'hinting' at certain terrors but nothing scared or interested me. Plus he repeats himself over and over and leaves gaping plot holes (What happened to Lake? What of the rest of the men back at the camp? How on earth did they transport planes down there?). Tho conveniently for him his fictional (?) creation of the Necronomicon helps him along with his dull tale.
Who is telling the story? It's told in the first person perspective but he never gives his name. Plus there is no dialogue in this book either. There isn't any decent character development or anyone to side with. And the ending is one of the biggest anti-climaxes I have ever read. That's once we actually get to it! In the last 3rd Lovecraft spends a shocking amount of time on very far-fetched contrivences, it's hard to believe.
It's obvious tho that John Carpenter based his movie 'The Thing' more on this than on the original movie that it is supposed to be a remake of. The creatures described as 'Shoggoths' are definitely what inspired Rob Bottin's creation in said movie. Tho they aren't scary in this book I must stress.
This print also included a story called 'The Shunned House' which I think is more entertaining despite the lack of dialogue again. Tho this time the character is polite enough to tell you his name. It's an interesting story with some great potential tho once again the ending is a let down.
'Dreams in the Witch House' is another first-person story which again uses the Necronomicon as a hokey plot device. It's a boring story.
'The Statement of Randolph Carter' is a smart little tale which ends this short anthology with more wit than the rest of it put together.
In short, if you are new to Lovecraft then I wouldn't suggest ATMOM. It's only for die-hard fans or true horror enthusiasts. It may well have been revolutionary and scary in it's day but now it's just dull and boring.

Do not buy this edition. It is a very poor copy to say the least. Within the first 10 pages there are numerous misspellings and a paragraph break in the middle of a character's name. For example
"... Frank H.
Pabode of the engineering department..."

There is no copyright information, not sure if this work is old enough to be an exclusion. Either way it is very obviously a terrible version of this work. I do not recommend it. There are other copies for the same price that don't confuse you along the way.

The ARTC is okay but basically an amateur theater company, so you know they're rather melodramatic. So if you want to save about 4 bucks, get this one, but if you want something with quality, get the one on sjlume narrated by Barry Schwam, both the (almost 5 hour long) audio book and the ebook in pdf, epub or kindle format packaged together for inexpensive.

This is one of Lovecraft's best known works, and just about the only one that hasn't - yet - been turned into a feature film. Well, Guilermo Del Toro and James Cameron were set to produce it, but Universal wouldn't green light it for them. So they are out and Mihai and Sparks are in, producing an original film version out of their own production platform sjlume. So they also released an original downloadable audio book version of At The Mountains Of Madness packaged with an ebook in Kindle MOBI, epub and pdf format, also available at sjlume. The audio book was narrated by voice over artist Barry Schwam, directed by Shadow Mihai.

So if you want this classic work in audio format (its almost 5 hours long), go to sjlume, because they don't carry it on Amazaon.

...I thought his use of language was very layered and rich, if not even quite dated. It took me a couple chapters just to get the lingo down. I think the writing style here is quite dry and the story is only maddening in the sense that it bored my socks off. I kept reading with the expectation that it would pick up, and when I got 95% done I was expecting some fantastically creepy ending that would make up for such monotonous content. Again, I was disappointed. This book might give a 6yr old the chills but it certainly didn't do it for me, nor did it entertain me.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is kinda sorta a bad writer, and he kinda sorta throws obscure pre-revolutionary era words at the reader which amount to an elaborate nothingness, and his bizarrenesses are kinda sorta the things a sexually repressed thirteen year old would think up, but I kinda sorta like him anyway! I'd recommend L. Sprague de Camp's biography of him, if it wasn't out of print. (Oh yeah, I should mention that despite what the title of this review says, Lovecraft was (probably) not insane . . . just a little eccentric.)

The only reason I actually purchased this particular book was that I found it in an old comic book store for half price. I have always loved this story. However, the size of this book makes it akward to store on your average bookshelf. The artwork is ok, but nothing to get overly excited about.

This was a very freaky and disturbing book. I think it is kind of cool how a lot of his stories tie in with the ancient book 'Necronomicon'. Many of the 'fictional' monsters in Lovecraft's works, such as the Cthulu, are monsters that the Necronomicon tells you how to 'supposedly!!' conjure up. It's also kinda cool how you can connect the covers of all his books to form a mural of disturbing sights. Greaaat book!

funny how subjective art is. my copy of this book has this blurb by michael chabon on the front cover: "one of the greatest short novels in american literature, and a key text in my own understanding of what literature can do." wow. weird thing is; by the time i finished this book i was bored (and it's only 99 pages long!). great idea: acients from outer space living down under in antartica, but the novel suffers from that typical genre defect; no character development at all. the narrator is simply the generic voice that 99% of these old (supposed classic) genre pieces are told through. not a single character is anything other than a cardboard cutout designed (barely) to move the narrative along. now if character development matters not at all to you, and you simply want a story, then this might be for you. no doubt about it, lots of effort went into this novella. mr lovecraft had lots of geological terminology conquered, and knew a lot of big words, he simply wasn't interested in making real people a reader (who wants that sort of thing) could possibly relate to or care about. i actually enjoyed the essay on supernatural horror in literature at the end of this book more than i did the novella itself. also, i would like to mention the introduction by china mieville. talk about over-intellectualizing a silly little story, mr mieville takes the cake here. so much effort, so much usage of big words and terms and references to historical theory, all to defend the fact that one likes pulp fiction! relax mr mieville. it's okay to like trite, thrilling little tales. you don't have to become harold bloom as a defense mechanism to hide your feelings of inadequacy because you like this stuff. gee whiz.

This is one of the most poorly written books I have ever had the misfortune to read. I kept pushing on, hoping that as some point it would get better. Boy was that a mistake. Most of it made no sense at all and the rest just wasn't worth reading. A minimalist story line that might provide some small plot for a half-hour TV program that airs at 3 AM. Please tell me this was written as a joke or possibly by a high school junior who was intent on driving his instructor insane. Normally I archive all of the books I read on my Kindle. This was the first one I actually erased.

Honestly. Apart from being, without a Cthullu-shaped-shadow of a doubt, the most repetitive writer ever, his stuff is just mindbogglingly dull. And I've read them all, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Bloch, M.R. James, etc ... I used to be a fan of this kind of thing in my teen years, and lapped it up, but for some curious reason, in the country where I grew up, you couldn't get hold of Lovecraft in the early 80's. I think that there might have even been some weird attempt not to disseminate the works of Lovecraft, so that one would have to know a real specialist to find them, as I know that there was with the works of Aleister Crowley in that country. Anyway, one can only hope that the people behind this policy were protecting young impressionable minds from the horrors that Lovecraft inflicted on the language, and not from the occultish nature of his abominations.
Read anything else but Lovecraft. Dig yourself a hole in the ground in a graveyard and have a friend shovel some dirt on you and read the shapes in the ensuing mulch in your eye, but stay far away from Mr. Lovecraft. Unless you happen to like pointless, unbelievable, ham-fisted drivel by the 100 pages or so ....
Other than that, he's the same type of writer as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Excuse me a moment, I need to get back on my chair.....
Anyone comparing Lovecraft to Poe, is frankly, crazier than Lovecraft, and that's saying something....

I really like science Fiction and horror and I found this book on a list of the 'scariest books of all time'. [...]
I hate to be cruel, but I found it to be the most boring book of all time! I stuck at it because I kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting for something to actually happen. But it never really did. And not in the clever, suspense-filled way... but in the "why isn't anything actually happening?" kind of way. Eek...sorry, I wanted so badly to like it.

Honestly. Apart from being, without a Cthullu-shaped-shadow of a doubt, the most repetitive writer ever, his stuff is just mindbogglingly dull. And I've read them all, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Bloch, M.R. James, etc ... I used to be a fan of this kind of thing in my teen years, and lapped it up, but for some curious reason, in the country where I grew up, you couldn't get hold of Lovecraft in the early 80's. I think that there might have even been some weird attempt not to disseminate the works of Lovecraft, so that one would have to know a real specialist to find them, as I know that there was with the works of Aleister Crowley in that country. Anyway, one can only hope that the people behind this policy were protecting young impressionable minds from the horrors that Lovecraft inflicted on the language, and not from the occultish nature of his abominations.
Read anything else but Lovecraft. Dig yourself a hole in the ground in a graveyard and have a friend shovel some dirt on you and read the shapes in the ensuing mulch in your eye, but stay far away from Mr. Lovecraft. Unless you happen to like pointless, unbelievable, ham-fisted drivel by the 100 pages or so ....
Other than that, he's the same type of writer as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Excuse me a moment, I need to get back on my chair.....
Anyone comparing Lovecraft to Poe, is frankly, crazier than Lovecraft, and that's saying something....

I really like science Fiction and horror and I found this book on a list of the 'scariest books of all time'. [...]
I hate to be cruel, but I found it to be the most boring book of all time! I stuck at it because I kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting for something to actually happen. But it never really did. And not in the clever, suspense-filled way... but in the "why isn't anything actually happening?" kind of way. Eek...sorry, I wanted so badly to like it.