H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness

The Tonnina here to review H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness

The man himself, H.P. Lovecraft

I’ve never read any of Lovecraft’s works, but I’m very familiar with C’thulhu and Yog-sothoth.  I needed to read this tale of terror for my Literature class.  Well, technically I just needed to read a short story and I knew that we had a little book with some of Lovecraft’s short stories.  This was the first story in my little book.  The other stories, which I hope to read eventually too, are The Shunned House, The Dreams in the Witch-House, and the one I REALLY want to read: The Statement of Randolph Carter.  You will probably hear about these tales of terror from me eventually as well.

The cover of the book I have.

So At the Mountains of Madness is a very interesting story.  It’s not really that scary in the sense that you aren’t bombarded with zombies or bloody things.  But it is scary because this place, these mountains, could exist.  

The story is told by a geologist named William Dyer, he’s part of an expedition to Antarctica where they will be exploring more of this continent for prehistoric evidence about how the earth was way back when.  He heads out with many other professors from the Miskatonic University to discover what they can from the barren icy wastes that is Antarctica.

Basically what happens is the team of professors split up.  One group, lead by Professor Lake, ends up finding some strange green soap stones that are not in “normal” shapes.  They are in the shape of a five pointed star, but the tips are broken off.  The expedition turns odd when they find a cavern under the ice filled with… well… Things.  The scientists pull the Things up and try to dissect them and investigate them.  A crazy wind storm happens and Dryer must find what happened to the other team.  When he tells the reader what happened, he basically repeats what he told the men at his camp.  After that he goes into grotesque detail about what they really found at Lake’s camp. From there, the tale gets really “Lovecraftian”.

This does have something to do with the story...

I’m not going to spoil the story for those of you who haven’t read it.  I will say though, there are freaking blind albino penguins in this story.  They are my favorite thing in the book, as weird as that is...  It’s an amazing novella and keep in mind that it’s not gory.  I’m not even a fan of horror, I have an over-active imagination, but this tale didn’t bother me.  I love it.  It’s just scary enough to keep the reader engaged.

One thing I suggest.  DON’T look up photos of the “creatures” in this story until AFTER you’ve read Lake’s description in the book.  Try and imagine what the “creatures” look like before you see the photos that show up on a Yahoo! Images search.  I pictured them a little differently than what I saw online, but they were really REALLY close, which just goes to show how amazing Lovecraft’s writing is.  You can use his words to paint a picture of what you are reading.  I like that a lot about his words. 

I look forward to reading more of Lovecraft’s works, since this was my first introduction to him.  This story is apparently his longest work too.  It’s nice to start with the longest one (only 110 pages in my tiny book) and then go on towards the shorter works.

So check out At the Mountains of Madness sometime. Let me know if you have read it, and what you think of the story!  See you next review!!