Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Title: At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
Author: H.P. Lovecraft
First published: 1939/1943/1964 (original stories) & 1971 (this edition)
Dates read: 08. 06. – 02. 07. 2023
Category: first-time read, horror, own book, classics, 20 Books of Summer 2023
Rating: 3.5/5
The book in five words or less: polar horror with unexpected intertextuality

My thoughts:

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Lovecraft over the last couple of years, and At the Mountains of Madness has been on my list almost since the beginning – the reason, of course, being that it is part of the polar horror canon that I’ve slowly been making my way through since 2019.

Now that I’ve finally read the novella, I can say that it was worth my time and a solid example of the polar horror genre, although I wouldn’t say that it’s a new favourite. There are, however, a lot of stylistic devices that I’ve come to expect and love: An Antarctic setting full of harsh, empty, and uninhabitable landscapes, a haunting, foreboding atmosphere full of hints of dark things to come, and characters whose excitement about scientific discovery quickly turns into horror when they realize they’ve stumbled into something much larger and older than they. I also liked how Lovecraft uses contemporary science and technological devices to establish the veracity of the – very fictional – tale he’s telling (the detail about fossils and geology is impressive), and how deep his world-building goes (literally and figuratively). That said, I’m still not fully sold on Lovecraft’s particular brand of cosmic horror, possibly because his entities are too specific for my taste, and because I haven’t dived deep enough into the whole Cthulhu mythos for the namedropping and hints to work on me. Nevertheless, reading At the Mountains of Madness did feel educational and often amusing, mostly because of Lovecraft’s nods to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

(There’s also a whole essay in this about Lovecraft’s concept of civilization and decline and decay, but I’ll spare you that one; this isn’t a literature seminar, after all. 😉)

My edition of this polar horror classic also contains The Shunned House, The Dreams in the Witch-House and The Statement of Randolph Carter, and out of the four, At the Mountains of Madness was definitely my favourite. I found both The Shunned House and The Statement of Randolph Carter solid horror stories about old and dangerous entities coming back to haunt the living, but The Dreams in the Witch-House was a bit too drawn out and vague for my taste.

Read if you like: cosmic horror, fossils, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or Jules Verne’s Le sphinxe des glaces, caves and caverns, science fiction expeditions