Howard Phillips Lovecraft

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At the Mountains of Madness

H. P. Lovecraft

To that flash of semivision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted us . . . ' An expedition to Antarctica goes horribly wrong as a group of explorers stumbles upon some mysterious ancient ruins, with devastating consequences. At the Mountains of Madness ranks among Lovecraft's most terrifying novellas, and is a firm favourite among fans of classic horror. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

Laura Dobie

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.

Perhaps we were mad- for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit - albeit in a less extreme form - in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half paralysed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.

If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last - even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.

Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature's laws. Thenceforward ne ten of us - but the student Danforth and myself above all others - were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could.

I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long death.

At the mountains of madness

Nick Perronteau

I liked the idea of the book, but unfortunately the descriptions were very lengthy and long-winded and made the book seem much larger than it is 

Lili

A slow burner which paints a vivid picture of another world and civilisation, and the perils of exploration and self-sabotaging curiosity. What is implied and left unseen or unsaid unsettles the reader far more than any description, and hints at a terror that should be left undiscovered.

Mitch Stewart

An amazing idea told in the most boring fashion. Save yourself the trouble and just read the wikipedia summary, it will be more exciting that way.

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.

dimmie

literally one of the best things ive ever readoh my god. adding all his stuff to my cart asap

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.

suspiria

betimleme, betimleme, betimleme, teknik bilgiler ve yeniden betimleme. bir roman bu kadar ruhsuz yazılabilir. gerçekten konu çok güzel hatta eskiler'in tarihçesinin anlatıldığı bölüm fena sayılmazdı ama gerçekten çok donuk. bir romanın akıcı olması veya olmaması o romanı güzel yapmaz, romanın kendi içinde bulunduğu şartlarını kullanabilmesi romanı güzel yapar. bu roman bunu yapamamış, kendini gerçekleştirememiş. sevmeyi gerçekten istedim ama sevemedim

H.P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) es el autor de los saberes prohibidos y de los libros malditos; su lenguaje, barroco y obsesivo, es una sugerencia de la fascinación por el terror. Considerado como uno de los grandes innovadores dentro del género de terror creando una mitología propia, apartandose de las tematicas tradicionales hasta el momento, introduciendo elementos de la ciencia ficción. En este volumen de cuentos podrá encontrar lo siguientes relatos del maestro del terror: En las montañas de la locura.

En las montañas de la locura

Tania Santos Ferro

Excelente libro. Mantiene la idea de que en este mundo hay muchos misterios por revelar todavía. 
Me encanta Lovecraft.

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.

Larisa Maria 

I feel so stupid for barely understanding anything. For me it got so confusing and i felt so bored all the time while listening to it.

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

Elene

"The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were slow in gaining prominence; hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only because of their abnormal height.

Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish varius bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curius sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality. 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, separeteness, desolation and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world."

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.

H P Lovecraft

A small advance group, led by Professor Lake, discovers the remains of fourteen prehistoric life-forms, previously unknown to science, and also unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens have been badly damaged, while another eight have been preserved in pristine condition. The specimens' stratum places them far too early on the geologic time scale for the features of the specimens to have evolved. Some fossils of Cambrian age show signs of the use of tools to carve a specimen for food.When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party, Dyer and his colleagues investigate. Lake's camp is devastated, with the majority of men and dogs slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and one of the dogs are absent. Near the expedition's campsite, they find six star-shaped snow mounds with one specimen under each. They also discover that the better preserved life-forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on both an unnamed man and a dog. The missing man is suspected of having gone utterly insane and having killed and mutilated all the others.H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Intellectually precocious but sensitive, Lovecraft had begun composing rudimentary horror tales and had begun to be overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety by the age of eight. In early adulthood he was established in a reclusive 'nightbird' lifestyle without occupation or pursuit of romantic adventures. In 1913 his conduct of a long running controversy in the letters page of a story magazine led to his being invited to participate in an amateur journalism association. Encouraged, he started circulating his stories; he was 31 at the time of his first publication in a professional magazine, within a few years he was a regular contributor to newly founded Weird Tales magazine.

Large Print

At The Mountains Of Madness

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

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

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