≫ Download Gratis At the Mountains of Madness The Definitive Edition Modern Library Classics HP Lovecraft China Miéville 0884345733386 Books

At the Mountains of Madness The Definitive Edition Modern Library Classics HP Lovecraft China Miéville 0884345733386 Books

Download As PDF : At the Mountains of Madness The Definitive Edition Modern Library Classics HP Lovecraft China Miéville 0884345733386 Books

At the Mountains of Madness The Definitive Edition Modern Library Classics HP Lovecraft China Miéville 0884345733386 Books

HP Lovecraft is a great writer in so many ways, and his Call of Cthulhu is a classic; however, At The Mountains of Madness doesn't make the grade. The basic problems is his descriptions of the snow covered desolation faced by the Antarctic explorers are endless. Time and again his story wanders off into telling the reader how abandoned the area feels, how lonely, and how fearful. How many times do I have to read how high a mountain range is, or how high the passes are within the mountain range? When he and his partner reach the (ALERT - DON'T READ PAST THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING) snow bound super city we again have repetitive description after description of how the the place looks and feels. Then, somehow, the adventurers are able to read the cryptic symbols left behind by the builders and manage to decipher a very complex history of the place and its inhabitants. Yet, the "writings" are a series of dots or vague pictures carved into the walls.

After all of this the two men manage to enter another set of caverns, or tunnels, where the encounter the ultimate in terror. Well, maybe they did, because the description of the ultimate terror is more than vague.

Finally, we have some far off super vague horror inhabiting a distant mountain range. The same pair who read the history of this civilization cannot read or figure out what terrible secrete the fog shrouded mountains hold. Then, after they return to civilization, they decide to keep all they have seen confidential. As if no one was ever going to find a monstrous city thirty miles wide with tall spires and ramparts.

The mood set by the author is typical of HP Lovecraft. It is spooky beyond all belief. He is very capable of describing places that defy the imagination and giving the story a ghostly feel; however, one doesn't have to run on and on to do that. And the story has to hold together at some level of intelligence. The men doing the exploring are smart, other explorers have gone before them, and their can be no doubt many others will come after them. Trying to hold this place secrete defies logic. Plus, the horror remains in place and there isn't anything saying it can't get out or spread. Wouldn't you want the world to know something exists that can destroy them if not handled properly?

Before the end of the story I was getting a little peeved at the assumptions and the endless stretching out of the story line. So, two stars.

AD2


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At the Mountains of Madness The Definitive Edition Modern Library Classics HP Lovecraft China Miéville 0884345733386 Books Reviews

It was fine. Until about pg.56 when the rest of the story became nothing but a print out of some sort of "chatroom chatter" and modern filenames about some 'Project Gutenberg" and it also later devolved into what seems like a screen-play for some sort of medieval-based play and didn't come back to the story until about page 90 or so. The ENTIRE climax of the story and most of the denouement were not included. Not only do I want a refund, but I want the missing ~30 or so pages for free!
Continuing Arkham House's valiant attempt to collect every scrap of fiction Lovecraft ever committed to paper (in some cases not having any original manuscripts to work from and thus forced to use the text from whatever pulp magazine published it), the second volume of three contains pretty much all the long stuff, with the story count about a quarter of what the first volume was but still like fifty pages longer. Three of the stories clock in over a hundred pages, which raises the question that you have to ask of any writer who seemed to primarily function as a short story writer . . . can they pull off an entire novel? Judging by the evidence here, the answer is a slightly shaky yes.

Lovecraft actually seems almost tailor made for at least novella length as what makes his stories work is the gradually increasing sense of dread and uneasiness that creeps into the tales almost when you're not looking, where a narrator who starts out near-hysterical and makes you think, "Geez buddy, chill out, it's only slime creatures from beyond" by the end has you convinced to start looking over your own shoulder for cities with weird geometries. In short bursts, he doesn't have enough time to establish the mood and while that works better for the EC Comics style horror tales with the twist ending, for a concentrated dose of Lovecraftian terror you need to let the situation play out a bit and go from "this is kind of bad" to "make your peace with your God but there is no God only pitiless oblivion" in terms of atmosphere.

For the most part, he nails it in "At the Mountains of Madness", which features an Antarctic expedition that somehow discovers new mountains taller than anything anyone has seen before and goes downhill from there. The frozen setting feels alien from the get-go and as our intrepid professors explore further and find a new city and the frozen bodies of previous inhabitants it starts getting extremely eerie. What it does here is play to Lovecraft's best strength as a SF/fantasy writer in creating a situation where the rules of morality as understand them simply do not exist and good and evil can't be defined easily or at all. He gives us a glimpse into a drama that has been going on for millions of years without our involvement and then shows why we have no place being anywhere near it. By piling on stranger and stranger events and letting his characters become more unhinged by what they witness it raises the urgency to a near fever pitch so that by the time the weird looking penguins show up you're about as ready to get out of there as the characters are (presumably with your sanity intact, though that isn't a requirement). What's fascinating is how he fits all these extraterrestrial entities together, often calling back to his own works (Cthulhu gets name checked at least once) and giving a real sense that what we see of the universe is only a fraction of what really goes on.

Still, he can get carried away and the section where the narrator sees the entire history of the city and its alien inhabitants sketched on the walls more or less stops the story cold. Maybe it reads better in serial form but it feels like the story nearly stops in the process.

But as good as that story is, it really feels like a very long Lovecraft short story, in which a series of slowly escalating events keeps occurring until something inevitably terrible happens. The other big story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" functions more like an actual novel, moving back and forth in time, developing its characters (even if they seem to be going from confused to more confused) and giving us an actual mystery to puzzle through as a local doctor attempts to figure out why young Charles Dexter Ward seems to have started acting so strangely, giving up all the stuff he used to like, taking on strange mannerisms and keeping some odd stuff in his lab, among other details. Could it have anything to do with his interest in the occult, perhaps causing him to tap into and awaken forces better left alone? Well, it isn't a case of bad fish, let's put it that way.

This one is intriguing because you're basically finding out what's happening at the same time the doctor is, although you have the benefit of being able to jump to the more likely conclusion long before he does only because you know you're reading a supernatural story and thus aren't expecting a normal explanation. The cat and mouse game between Dr Willett and Ward (or whatever Ward's become) with the former trying to figure out what is going on and what it means while the latter attempts to get everything together for whatever bizarre plan he has in mind, is creepy, at least until it becomes clearer to the reader what's happening before Willett has quite gotten there, meaning that the book feels like it runs a little longer than it needs to. It doesn't help that some of it is told in letters written in an extremely archaic style, which can be tiring. But the setpieces pretty much sell this one, the biggest being the exploration Willett takes into the house where Ward is staging his experiments. He outdoes himself in the freaky department here and it almost makes up for the rest of the book at times making you mutter "get to the point already". The story is also notable for having an actual ending instead of simply trailing off into the ether with a vague sense of disquiet.

With the big guns out of the way, the rest of the collection is a slight mixed bag. I liked "The Dreams in the Witch House" (even if no one else seems to) simply for its combination of really strange events that border on the insane (do you like crazed witches? do you like crazed witches that have giant evil rats as best friends? do you like it if both those things try to sacrifice children?) and the escalating sense of doom on the part of the protagonist as you and he realize that he's completely out of his league and simply walking away isn't going to get him out of the woods. It may not add up to much except sheer madness but boy, is that interesting imagery.

Speaking of interesting imagery, the rest of the book is taken up with stories about Randolph Carter, who is supposed to stand in for Lovecraft in some form. The best one is probably "The Statement of Randolph Carter" which seems to be taken from one of the author's dream and is actually short. Meanwhile, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the exact opposite of short and on some level is his attempt to out-Dunsany Lord Dunsany himself (who, according to T.E.D. Klein's introduction in the third volume, Lovecraft at one point had a big manly author-crush on) as Randolph Carter engages on a quest in the world of dreams that takes him through a variety of adventures in strange places. Unfortunately, I found the story more or less tedious . . . he doesn't have the sense of the mythical that Dunsany was able to convey (the closest contemporary equivalent I can think of is John Crowley), nor is his prose as effortlessly adorned as his hero's. Which means that Carter careens slowly from fantastic city to fantastic city without really getting involved anywhere, constantly getting rescued and with none of it adding up to all that much. If this was twenty pages it would be one thing but he insists on chugging on with this for over a hundred pages, with the theme not really even changing. He tries to go to a place, gets to a place and then it's over.

That leaves "The Silver Key" and "Son of the Silver Key" (just kidding, it's really called "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"), both of which feature Carter. The former seems to behold itself a bit more to dream logic, its contemplative as Carter drifts through scenes that may or may not be from his childhood . . . it's a nice mood piece and sets up the next story where a bunch of people are getting ready to divide up his estate while a swami tells everyone that he's still alive and explains what he's been up to. The framing device gives a bit more weight to the anchorless scenes set in the world of dreams and even if the whole thing doesn't have the heft the real mythos stories do, its also not a hundred pages so I can live with it.

Overall, this one is for the people who read volume one and wanted more, with the caveat that the best stuff was definitely in there. Lovecraft is an acquired taste, his prose is even more archaic than other writers even from that time tended to be and a lot of the stories tend to succeed more on atmosphere than anything else. However, that's hard to sustain and doesn't make them real memorable, even when a bunch of tales on the same theme are read right in a row. The title story and "Charles Dexter Ward" are probably essential, with the crazed witch house story and the Randolph Carter stuff acting as nice bonus material. Still, after a reading a number of them you may find that your day is not complete unless Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Which is fair.
This was printed from an archived computer file and no one bothered to proof read it the document. About half way through the book, the story ended in midsentence followed by a bunch of computer file names and addresses which comprised the rest of the book. Don't waste your money!
I'm sure I'll be thrown out of the audiophile club for this. I had never read any Lovecraft but heard a great deal about him. So I dipped my toe in expecting a really terrifying read. Sorry to say, I was very disappointed. Merely using scary words to describe things doesn't make the item or scene frightening. I have been far more frightened by Shirley Jackson, Dean Koontz than this. If you removed all the adjectives inserted to make perfectly ordinary things or scenes, it would be a very ordinary story. Sorry, but that will be my first and last Lovecraft book.
DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. THIS IS A GARBAGE EDITION OF THE HP LOVECRAFT TALE. HALF OF THE BOOK IS A BUNCH OF RANDOM TEXT SEEMINGLY FROM A TEXT FILE. THERE ARE PASSAGES FROM OTHER BOOKS IN THE MIDDLE OF IT, EMAILS, WEBSITE ADDRESSES AND SO MUCH MORE. I MADE THE MISTAKE OF SENDING THIS TO MY PARENTS HOUSE AND DID GET IT UNTIL TODAY SO I COULDN'T CHECK THIS. A WASTE OF MONEY.

DO
NOT
BUY
THIS
HP Lovecraft is a great writer in so many ways, and his Call of Cthulhu is a classic; however, At The Mountains of Madness doesn't make the grade. The basic problems is his descriptions of the snow covered desolation faced by the Antarctic explorers are endless. Time and again his story wanders off into telling the reader how abandoned the area feels, how lonely, and how fearful. How many times do I have to read how high a mountain range is, or how high the passes are within the mountain range? When he and his partner reach the (ALERT - DON'T READ PAST THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING) snow bound super city we again have repetitive description after description of how the the place looks and feels. Then, somehow, the adventurers are able to read the cryptic symbols left behind by the builders and manage to decipher a very complex history of the place and its inhabitants. Yet, the "writings" are a series of dots or vague pictures carved into the walls.

After all of this the two men manage to enter another set of caverns, or tunnels, where the encounter the ultimate in terror. Well, maybe they did, because the description of the ultimate terror is more than vague.

Finally, we have some far off super vague horror inhabiting a distant mountain range. The same pair who read the history of this civilization cannot read or figure out what terrible secrete the fog shrouded mountains hold. Then, after they return to civilization, they decide to keep all they have seen confidential. As if no one was ever going to find a monstrous city thirty miles wide with tall spires and ramparts.

The mood set by the author is typical of HP Lovecraft. It is spooky beyond all belief. He is very capable of describing places that defy the imagination and giving the story a ghostly feel; however, one doesn't have to run on and on to do that. And the story has to hold together at some level of intelligence. The men doing the exploring are smart, other explorers have gone before them, and their can be no doubt many others will come after them. Trying to hold this place secrete defies logic. Plus, the horror remains in place and there isn't anything saying it can't get out or spread. Wouldn't you want the world to know something exists that can destroy them if not handled properly?

Before the end of the story I was getting a little peeved at the assumptions and the endless stretching out of the story line. So, two stars.

AD2