At The Mountains of Madness - Book Review

Title: At The Mountains of Madness

Author: H.P. Lovecraft

Published: 1936

Format Read: Paperback (2005 reprint with introduction by China Mieville)

The story is written in the first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalaya.

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I picked up this Lovecraft classic as a follow-up to Ascension. The story followed a familiar path, a scientific exploration of mountains and Arctic conditions that reveals untold horrors. This was my first Lovecraft read, and I can now see why his writing is so highly regarded.

The foreword in the print I read highlights what makes Lovecraft novels unique: “Traditionally, genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo - one which the protagonists frantically scrabble to preserve. By contrast, Lovecraft’s horror is not intrusion but of realization. The world has always been bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging the fact.”.

Whereas Ascension is a battle against evils being thrown against our group of scientists, Mountains of Madness is the continuous revealing of the horrible world that has lain in hibernation. To this end, I found myself more hooked into the progressive disclosure of the nature of the evil. I also found this style of writing to be more suspenseful than Ascension, especially near the end when our group descends into the caves.

All said, this was a good, short read. It’s obvious the influence this work had on Ascension and it served well as an introduction into Lovecraft’s work.