Name: At the Mountains of Madness
Rating: 3.666666666666667 (96 reviews)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Authoritative editions of great classics of world literature feature introductions by acclaimed writers, meticulous translations of foreign literature, commentary by distinguished writers and critics, biographical notes, and a comprehensive Reading Group Guide bound into each volume.

At the Mountains of Madness

H. P. Lovecraft

At the mountains of madness

One of lovecrafts finest, building in apprehension and terror ‘til the end, while tying in to many of his other works 

Othello 

Nick Perronteau

and other tales of terror

Michael Springer

** spoiler alert **
           To save you time, I shall summarize this novelette for you. If the subject comes up at a cocktail party, (1) pretend you've really read it, (2) find cooler cocktail parties. But, really, this has some INTENSE spoilers. 

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (Now with additions to satisfy the whiners)

Okay, so, there's like TEN scientists, and it doesn't matter what their names are, because none of them have personalities. For the purposes of making this more exciting, lets say their names are Michael, Eh!, Jacob, Ceridwen, Caris, Jason, Manny, Brian and Aerin. And, by the way, now would be the appropriate time to turn all the lights off, except for maybe a few candles to get a spooky mood going.

Okay, so! Our brave crew of scientists are going down to the South Pole to study something Scientific. Lets imagine it's the effects of global warming. They're gonna check to see how much more ice has melted, and whether or not the penguins are sweating to death and whatnot. But, when we get down there to the pole, there's a big snow-storm! Some of us are kinda big pussies, so we don't want to fly to the research site and maybe die on the way, so we let the most courageous ones go first. So Ceridwen, Brian, Jason, and Eh! all hop into the plane and fly into the snowy sky. 

We cowards are all hanging around and playing Mario Kart and arguing about whether Jay-Z is the new Frank Sinatra, and, if so, whether Beyonce is Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr. We're waiting on messages, but we're all on T-Mobile, and you can't even get service in fucking KANSAS CITY on T-Mobile, so you aren't getting SHIT at the south pole. Every now and then, though, our associates manage to get a text message through to us. The first one is all like, 

WEIRD BUILDINGS, REMINISCENT OF ROERICH PAINTINGS, ALSO OF CHAPTERS FROM THAT OH-SO-HARD TO LOCATE TOME, THE NECRONOMICON, WRITTEN BY THAT CRAFTY FOREIGNER, ABDUL AL HAZZAD BIN LADEN. 

And we're all like, "Yeah, I remember that old, impossible to find tome. I was flipping through its shadow-laden pages for no reason whatsoever this one time. So, there's general agreement: sounds like Necronomicon, chapter 5: "On Scary Arctic Architecture and Other Scary Things Too."

Meanwhile, Ceridwen was building a small hospital with her bare hands, crafting perfect rectangular bricks out of snow. Jason, who was practicing his quickdrawing skills, said, "Do you want any help with that?" 
"Nope," Ceridwen said. "It's just a small hospital; it shouldn't take me too long."
Meanwhile, Eh! was standing in a snowdrift in deep meditation. Focusing her qi energy, she pitched a ball of focused, dense air forward, and used it to explode the head off of a snowman that Brian was making. 
"Stop doing your ninja moves on my snowmen, Eh!" Brian said. "That's the fifth snowman you've ruined!" 
With a shrug, Eh! turns toward a high plateau of ice and begins focusing her qi once again. With another blast of air, she caused an avalanche of frozen ice shards that levelled the rest of Brian's snowman army.
 
Back in cowardville, the phone vibrates again, and says WE FOUND SOME FREAKY, HALF-VEGETABLE-HALF-ANIMALS THAT SEEM PERFECTLY FROZEN. WE'RE GONNA DESCRIBE THEM FOR LIKE 1000 WORDS, BUT YOU AREN'T GONNA HAVE A FUCKING CLUE WHAT WE'RE SAYING, and then they do. When they're done describing the strange beasts, they say, WE'RE KINDA FREAKED OUT, IT LOOKS LIKE SOME STRANGE ANCIENT RACE HAS LIVED HERE IN THE PAST. WE ALL AGREE IT SOUNDS LIKE THE "ANCIENT ONES" FROM THE NECRONOMICON, CHAPTER 7.

Now, we were all excited about the scientific possibilites, so much so that Jacob thoughtfully scratched his ironic beard, and Caris jizzed in his pants. We waited, and we waited, but no more texts arrived. 

Then, finally, we got one last message:

AAAAAAARRRRRGH! ICK. DEAD.

And we were skeptical about exactly what this means, so we all loaded into the other helicopter. (The arctic storm had lessened, btw.) We flew out there to the research site, and we saw the penguins were indeed sweating to death. But, more importantly, we saw the strange, arctic structures that immediately reminded us of our undergrad perusals of that old, lost and forgotten tome, and also the Roerich painting. (This comparison to Roerich is VERY important: if my imitation were even more close to the original, it would sound more like this:

Roerich, Roerich Roerich. Roerich? Roerich, Roerich Necronomicon Roerich!

[image error]

But, in my efforts to entertain, I will omit much of the Roerich-ing.)

Even more importantly than these strange ancient structures (Roerich) was what we then saw: the mutilated bodies of our erstwhile comrades! Brian was all over the campsite in gloopy red chunks, like someone had broken a pinata filled with raw sirloin. Ceridwen lay with huge bites out of her, as if some large beast had been noshing on her. And, stranger still, Jason's body was in the very small hospital Ceridwen had built with her bare hands. It appeared a surgery had been done on him, very carefully inspecting all of his insides, but leaving him mostly intact. Part of his body was missing, cut away with amazing precision, as if by a laser. 

Anyway, this was all incredibly frightening, and we couldn't imagine what had happened to our unfortunate comrades. But we were on a set schedule, so we went to doing our work. 

We went in to check out the strange buildings, and Manny is all like, "I'm going to go off alone this way and see what I can find," and we're like, "Okay, whatev." A few minutes later, as we walk with our torches through the very very unpleasantly dark hallways, we hear Manny scream. Like a girl. Then silence.

We pressed on. 

Strange pictures were scattered around the walls of these inner chambers, pictures of those strange creatures from the Necronomicon. The pictures told a story of how the creatures came to earth, and how they created life as we know it as a cure for their boredom, and how they grew people in a big bowl, kind of like sea monkeys. 

We passed through vast chambers, many of them, for like pages and pages...I mean, hours and hours. By the time we were done looking at all the wall murals, several more of our party had died from boredom. 

Jacob was walking along with the torch, and he was like, "Is that one of those ancient whatchamacallits?" And it was: recently dead, looking like it has died out of pure fright. Then, we heard a deep, throaty cackle from down one of the chambers.

Brad said, "What the shit was that?" 

And I was all like, "I didn't know you were here, Brad!"

And he was like, *shrug*. 

"It sounds like some tremendous bird!" Jacob said.

"Like a really big chicken!" I said. 

We noticed a great, foul-smelling fog coming from the darkness before us, like we were buried in a pile of high school gym socks filled with dog poop. We started running and shrieking through the dark, dank, dark corridors. Turkeys are fucking dangerous as hell, and this thing sounded even bigger.

For some stupid reason, Caris was all like, "Let's simultaneously turn and look and see what's back there, looming up from the stenchy darkness!"

So we did. And it wasn't just a chicken. It was scarier than that. It was a big blob of protoplasm flowing forward, with an endless supply of eyeballs and mouths rising to its surface, the mouths howling out in that frightening "cluck, cluck, cluck."

We came to a chamber with some penguin babies in it, and we started field-goal kicking them back into the darkness, hoping to slow down the onset of that protoplasmic horror from the depths of earth's coldest and darkest recesses. 

It didn't slow the thing down, so we tripped Brad. Then, Caris tripped on a pocket of strangely dense air. Jacob and I kept running.



I smelled feces, and I had a suspicion about what just happened in Jacob's pants. Behind us, behind that wall of rancid fog, we could hear that blob of ancient unknowable soulless funkiness devouring Brad and Caris, and they moaned with pain and horror as they sank into it and were quickly digested. 

Finally, we got back outside and ran to the helicopter. Aerin was snoozing in the pilot's seat. We shook her awake and said, "Step on it!" 

The helicopter lifted into the air, and Aerin was like, "It smells like you guys stepped in shit." And I said, "It was Jacob," and he said, "Way to narc me out," and I was like, "Dude, it's not a big mystery, maybe next time we go investigate ancient evils you should wear a diaper." He was upset, and, in an attempt to distract himself from the embarassing situation, looked over his shoulder at the receding mountains...and glimpsed something so petrifyingly horrific, so vast and abysmally bleak, horror that Jacob may never fully recover emotionally, and might only speak in sentence fragments for the rest of his life:

"The spires. . . of doom. . . . the ancient blood of souls forgotten. . . the peaks of apocalypse birth. . . the cluttered geography of darkness. . . "

Not to mention he shat himself again.

Colleen

3 Stars

Lovecraft is one of the premiere names in Horror writing. And The Mountains of Madness is considered by many to be one of the best Horror stories ever written. While I can see the influence that this story has had on many works, it won’t be going on my favorites list. Lovecraft’s writing style is excellent, and he builds the atmosphere and tension well. But the story does drag on a bit. And considering how long the buildup was, the ending felt anticlimactic. 
 
Like most classic Gothic horror stories, the writing focused on building atmosphere. It’s a story of psychological suspense rather than modern day horror that tends to rely more on gore and violence.


  “I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.”

This is the story of a scientific expedition to Antarctica that goes horribly wrong. The bleak isolation of the setting certainly helped build the atmosphere. While the scientific details certainly add credence to the setting, they also bog the story down after a while. Considering how short this story is, a big percentage of it is scientific minutia. At some point it went from a slow buildup to drawn-out drag. The slow story would have been ok if the ending hadn’t been so anticlimactic. I won’t give away what happened, but it just didn’t have enough oomph. 

If you like your horror stories slow and suspenseful, prefer classics, or are a big Lovecraft fan, then you might like The Mountains of Madness. If you prefer your horror gory and fast-paced then this probably isn’t for you.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 3 Stars
Writing Style: 4 Stars
Characters and Character Development: 3 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 3 Stars
Level of Captivation: 3 Stars
Originality: 4 Stars

As others have said, skipping sections seems almost necessary and the payment by words is painfully clear. It is a lot of content to fit into a short story but the overly descriptive nature of things fails to create any real atmosphere. 

The story itself is incredibly good, however, and cuts well through science fiction and horror. 

Chris G

As others have said, skipping sections seems almost necessary and the payment by words is painfully clear. It is a lot of content to fit into a short story but the overly descriptive nature of things fails to create any real atmosphere. 

The story itself is incredibly good, however, and cuts well through science fiction and horror. 

Kayla Ndife

I can't say this is one of my favorite things I've ever read. I skipped whole sections that were talking about rocks and drills in the beginning, and toward the end I started skipping whole sections because they were referencing things I had no knowledge of whatsoever. 

The creepiness picked up about 80% of the way through, but when they were talking about the history of the Old Ones, I have no idea how they would have discerned all of that from sculpture, and then when they were running from the caverns, I had no idea what it was they were running from or why they were so terrified.

This really did not compare, on a level of horror, with what I've read by Stephen King, which I find very odd. Maybe other stories by Lovecraft are better than this, but it will be a while before I try them.

Alfredo santos

Interesante, divertido, corto. Sin embargo no senti que el miedo era proporcional a:
1) la fama de HP Lovecraft como maestro de lo macabro/terrorifico
2) a la prosa en la que cada enunciado dice "terrorifico", cuando no es tan terrorifico
3) el nombre del libro no siento que cuadre tanto con la historia.

At the Mountains of Madness is a novella by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The story has inadvertently popularized the concept of ancient astronauts, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology". The story is told in first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor at 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, scholars from Miskatonic University led by Dyer discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas. A smaller advance group, led by Professor Lake, discovered and crossed the mountains and found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens are badly damaged and the others uncannily pristine. Their highly evolved features are problematic: their stratum location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale much too early for such features to have naturally evolved. When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their last known location to investigate. Lake's camp is devastated, and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and another dog are unaccounted for. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and one specimen buried under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on an unnamed man and a dog. Dyer elects to close off the area from which they took their samples. Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer walls of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien compared with any human architecture. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, the builders of this lost civilization are dubbed the "Elder Things". By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things through interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals: The Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "Shoggoths", biological entities created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. As more buildings are explored, a fantastic vista opens of the history of races beyond the scope of man's understanding, including the Elder Things' conflicts with the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-go, who arrived on Earth some time after the Elder Things themselves.

Amazing story, but poorly executed. It felt as if the author refused to go in depth on the interesting parts and was stuck in describing the landscapes and alien-built civilizations. 

Gaby

Initially rejected by Lovecraft's publisher, 'At The Mountains of Madness' is now considered a classic of the horror genre. The disturbing, nightmarish story of a journey through Antarctica and a discovery of secrets hidden in a frozen mountain range has influenced writers and film-makers for decades.

Rick Powell

Lovecraft could write, that's for sure, and there's more existential dread in a single paragraph of his than in any recent Stephen King. Even when the prose goes purple, the terror is still there.

t the Mountains of Madness is a novella by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and originally serialized in the February, March and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections since Lovecraft's death.Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi describes the novella as representing the decisive "demythology" of the Cthulhu Mythos by reinterpreting Lovecraft's earlier supernatural stories in a science fiction paradigm.

A Fantastic Story of Fiction Horror (Annotated) By

At The Mountain of Madness

baku

In the illustrated AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS VOL.1, artist, Francois Baranger, acclaimed for his work as a concept designer for cinema and video games, has performed the incredible task of reimagining one of H.P. Lovecraft's most classic and horrific tales into visual art--Landscapes of frozen wastes, unspeakable creatures millions of years old found in an abnormal state of conservation, strange geometric structures at the top of black mountains. Words cannot do the visuals justice. It is a book with images to pour over.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum

Christopher Wheeler

H P Lovecraft

At the Mountains of Madness is a novella that details the events of a disastrous expedition to the Antarctic continent in September of 1930 and what was found there by a group of explorers led by the narrator, Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University. Throughout the story, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring another group of explorers who wish to return to the continent. This book has 112 pages in the PDF version, and was originally published in 1936.

At the Mountains of Madness

Reviews

Highlights