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Aug 12, 2011

Stephen rated it:

6.0 stars. As I was experiencing Lovecraft’s supremely awesome, nightmarish masterpiece, At the Mountains of Madness (ATMOM), it really struck me for the first time that he was a tremendously literate writer. I have been a fan of Lovecraft for a long time and have always been gaga for his bizarre imaginative stories. However, what jumped out at me on this reading of ATMOM was how impressively Lovecraft enhances the sense of dread that hangs over his stories through the colorful, melo More...

29 comments like (53 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

D_Davis rated it:

On the surface, At the Mountains of Madness should be something that I detest.

I am a fan of brevity, and Lovecraft is the master of purple-prose, saying in impossibly-dense paragraphs what other authors would say in sentences.

I am a fan of showing, and Lovecraft's tales tend to be the ultimate in telling, using the passive voice to tell, tell, tell.

I am a fan of contextual plot, and Lovecraft unleashes one of the hugest loads of INFODUMP ever unloaded, even gi More...

8 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jan 19, 2012

Silvia rated it:

This is my first taste of Lovecraft and I am hooked. This story takes place in the Antarctic and the story is told by a unnamed geologist who is part of an expedition team. They split into two teams, one stays at the base camp (the narrator being part of that team), and the other team flies through the harsh weather to higher ground.

The later team finds an undiscovered range of mountains that send awe and fear through the men. Their plane fails and they make an emergency landing amo More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Erin rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Jamil rated it:

from the China Miéville introduction:

"Lovecraft's is not a fiction of carefully structured plot so much as of ineluctable unfolding: it is a literature of the inevitability of weird.
"'My reason for writing stories,' Lovecraft says, 'is to give myself the satisfaction of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy...' Story is not the point: the point is wonder, which for Lovecraft goes hand in hand with horror, because, he claims, 'fear is our deepest and strongest e More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Ben rated it:

I will be brief, since I don't read much horror and am generally ignorant of Lovecraft's work, so I won't try to make a general statement based on this one story.

At the Mountains of Madness itself was OK, not great. Lovecraft is far more concerned with describing the extinct society of the Old Ones and their struggles with surviving Earth than injecting genuine dread into the story. It left little impression on me.

I liked the introduction by China Miéville better than t More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 23, 2011

Kibisis rated it:

Una ricerca continua. Col pretesto di una spedizione in Antartico Lovecraft ci accompagna negli angoli più angusti e inesplorati della coscienza umana. Si scende in luoghi oscuri... "Avevano scoperto una caverna. All'inizio della perforazione, l'arenaria aveva ceduto il posto a una venatura di calcare comancico, pieno di minuti cefalopodi fossili, coralli, echinoidi e spirifere, più qualche sporadica traccia di di spugna silicea e di ossa di vertebrati marini, quest'ultime probabilmente di More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Jamie rated it:

never before has such an exciting story been told in such a dull way.

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Andrew rated it:

What a great story. A scientist discovers an ancient and unnameable evil buried in the Antarctic. It is a setup familiar to anyone who has read Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (or seen the two very good movies based on that story), but Lovecraft's approach is both more subtle and more broad. The drama of the story does not come from confronting or overcoming a specific threat. Instead, it is built up through discovery--almost pure exposition, in much the same way that Arthur C. Clarke use More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

jess rated it:

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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Melinda rated it:

"...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 book would make a great movie, in my More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Raja99 rated it:

I only read the title story at this time; my rating is for it.

I read this for the first time a few months back, for the HardSF Yahoogroup. I found it a bit painful to reread now; the flaws seemed magnified.

This "definitive edition" adds quite a bit of text, which unfortunately makes it seem like "more description, less action".

Style issues aside, this is a very important and influential book with some terrific ideas. It seems to me that Joh More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 17, 2011

Thaddeus.lewis added it

An expidition to Antartica of a team of Geologists. On their team the main character is William Dryer. The team of Geologists split up to make two seperate camps for storing items and what not, on one of the teams expiditons of a camp site, they come across a mountain range that is even taller then the himalayas, finding a spot on the mountain range they make camp. Dryer and his team went and found a camp site in a diffrent area, when the word of the mountain range was found the entire second wa More...

0 comments like

Oct 17, 2011

Chelsea rated it:

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0 comments like

Oct 16, 2011

Candice rated it:

Woah, I'm shocked! Some of my favorite science fiction and fantasy books don't even get two chapters of a chance with some people. But this hard-core sci-fi classic has a readership to success rate that is incredible.

What I'm trying to say is that this is a dry read to an A.D.D. nation and I'm surprised that so many have gotten all the way through the book (yes, I know it's only like 100 pages) and have rated it so high!

That being said, the story is told with no dialogue More...

0 comments like

Sep 15, 2011

Brian rated it:

I'll start by saying, this is my first reading of a title within the "dark, supernatural, elder monster horror" genre and by default my first Lovecraft reading. So, I admit: I don't have the experience or background of a seasoned H.P. fan. That might be frustrating or refreshing, depending upon where you fall on the fanboy spectrum. Without further preface...

This title was--eerie. Not scary, but definitely eerie. The rigid commitment to the memoir/flashback, first person More...

0 comments like

Jan 24, 2012

Jesse rated it:

Tediously painful. So much detail, so little action, and almost no emotion in the book. The first sentence of chapter 6 'It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry' Unfortunately the rest of the book described the cumbrous, detailed, consecutive account of their wonderings inside the cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry. I found the writing too dry and dull.

This is a summary of More...

0 comments like

Dec 11, 2011

Daniel rated it:

First time revisiting Lovecraft since I was ~15.

It's remarkable that the influence of this novel is neglected - it's not iconic like The Call of Cthulu and The Shadow Out of Time, but in structure and in the hard-science sensibility it reads indistinguishably from the most modern science fiction. Decades before everyone was spurting over Asimov making up Several Interesting And Philosophically Challenging Robot Rules For Robots, Lovecraft was writing a form of horror / science fiction More...

0 comments like

Oct 01, 2011

Michael rated it:

I've been aware of Lovecraft as a cultural phenomenon for quite some time - as a meme, the ideas of Chthulu and the Old Ones, and the Lovecraftian conception of madness, have been kicking around the internet for years now, so I decided to pop into the actual source text to see what the fuss was about.

I found Lovecraft, as a writer, to do so many things that writers today are trained not to do. I don't, for instance, believe there is a single line of narrative dialog uttered in this More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 20, 2011

Amber rated it:

Tired of not really getting an idea of what those monsters look like because Lovecraft's protagonists keep going insane as soon as they catch a glimpse of it? Curious about the origins of the Old Ones? Shoggoths? Want to know what makes Shoggoths so terrible that even horrors from beyond the stars are terrified of them? This is the read for you.

The narrator of this one can sometimes be vague, evasive, dancing around the point, all over the place, and takes forever to tell us what's rea More...

0 comments like

Dec 14, 2011

Angie rated it:

A definite classic that proves to have been run through the genre blender long before there was one--this one story is a mix of hard science fiction (pedantic, almost), and fantastic recitation of Earth's true first inhabitants and their wars and culture, and a story that despite some clunky moments manages to terrify.

Oh, and then it is metafictional. The imagined narrator mentions the imaginary "Necromicon" and the so-and-so author's "dreaded" stories of the c More...

0 comments like

Oct 07, 2011

Sean rated it:

This book was briefly introduced to me as being one of the good ones from the father of modern horror literature, H.P. Lovecraft. From what little I heard of it I expected it to be quite frightening, but as it turns out I was affected by it in nearly the opposite manner. This book would be more accurately described in my eyes as an ominous science fiction story of both the terror and the exhilaration that can come from the discovery of the unknown. Written in a style of prose that probably fit n More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Lorina rated it:

I’ve come to H.P. Lovecraft (1890 to 1937) rather late, driven to his work by a colleague who insisted my own writing style mirrored Lovecraft’s.

The novella in question, At the Mountains of Madness, ranks among the elite of the pioneering cannon of horror literature, and indeed Lovecraft is said to be the inspiration behind such modern day horror-writing greats as Stephen King.

At the heart of this story is the discovery of a race of aliens so ancient it belies belief, by More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Brooke rated it:

As with a lot of classics, the full impact of the story wouldn't have been possible without the introduction (this one written by China Miéville). While the story about discoveries of an alien species in Antarctica is creepy enough, the horror that Lovecraft saw in it makes so much more sense after reading about his political views.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Krista the Krazy Kataloguer rated it:

This was the first Lovecraft book I ever read, and it hooked me on him. I love his descriptions of "eldritch horrors". He gives New England an ancient, mysterious, hoary-with-age feeling. Some of his books, like this one, are halfway between horror and science fiction. Great stuff!

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 20, 2011

Thomas rated it:

Utterly indescribable reading...it's pulsing and squirming prose will leave you staggered and mewling in the corner like a newly-formed Shoggoth.

I recommend this as a "first Lovecraft story" for anyone new to Him. He basically breaks down the whole mythos in fascinating detail, something which (IMHO) makes the earlier stories even better.

NOBODY can curdle the blood in your veins like Lovecraft. His special gift is that you ENJOY the curdling, as he does it wit More...

0 comments like

Sep 17, 2011

Ice rated it:

This is my first taste of H. P. Lovecraft and I have to say that I’m impressed with his vast intellect, frozen but eloquent text, and lifelike description.

The reason I’m not giving this a five star rating is because there isn’t much in the way of story. In fact, the story is only a vehicle for the vast mythos that is the history of the Elder Things.

Where this story fails is that it simply isn’t possible for the main characters to get all the information they report in the More...

0 comments like

Dec 28, 2011

Sher rated it:

Ugh. This is one of the worst books of all time. About half of it was something along the lines of, "Oh this was so horrible that I can't even describe it. No one should ever know about this scene. It is beyond description," and on and on. Then he spends the next 20 pages or so leading up to the description which by that time is anti-climactic. I thought the structure of the writing was flat and uninteresting. I really wanted to like, even love, this book, but I was so disappointed. More...

0 comments like

Aug 12, 2011

Laura rated it:

From BBC Radio 4 Extra

HP Lovecraft's tale of terror read by Richard Coyle, set high in the Antarctic.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Werebot rated it:

This book is cool. I just wish Lovecraft would stop using the word cyclopean. Must everything be cyclopean? Jeez.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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