Book Review: At the Mountains of Madness (HP Lovecraft)

It takes a lot to scare me, especially in a novel. H.P. Lovecraft's shtick has always crept under my skin with theory alone, and there's myriads of other media that carries over the same tropes of cosmic horror with varying degrees of success. When it comes to the original (and all things original for that matter), there are things to admire, but it's just that--a thing to admire.

Writing itself was different in Lovecraft's day--much more tolerant of telling, not as much showing. With At the Mountains of Madness, the dude expends many many pages to describe this Antarctic expedition in a dry, scholarly voice. He stiffly describes the slow, gradual exploration of desolate ice fields, mountains, and finally an ancient city that shouldn't even exist in our reality. It's at its best when the macabre happens--dead bodies, mutilated animals, stolen and broken supplies, all with no apparent cause...now that's creepy. But the climax of the experience occurs when the characters behold one of these Elder Things and it just freaks them out of their minds.

When the macabre becomes apparent, the story does hold some level of dread, tension, and suspense. I pretty much kept reading because I knew this would pay off with some kind of crazy monster at the end. But to get there, you have to wade through a ton of dry prose that tells (not necessarily shows) the journey, the history of all the things (including the things that should not be), and so on. The only emotions that emerge out of the text is terror, at the end. Which might be the point I suppose--the characters are blank slates that let us experience their terror, but when you spend a hundred pages describing every shape, stone, street of an ancient city, it reads like a textbook. Don't even get me started on the hieroglyph reading, which leads to a massive infodump on the whole genealogy of the Elder Things and all the critters that bleed into other Lovecraft stories (to be fair, the shared-universe aspect of his work is a nice touch).

What attracts me to Lovecraft will always be his core themes: that some things are so far above-and-beyond humanity we can't even comprehend them. To try is to go mad. And those things will crush us, not because they're evil but because we're all just petty insects to them. The vastness of the cosmos and the greater creatures that could exist beyond Earth or the universe is what instills terror, either with a direct confrontation with an abominable Elder Thing, or with the implied effects of their existence (which is scattered with freaky details throughout the whole expedition). It's the themes that define just about every Lovecraft story I've read so far. I'd even go so far to say that most of his stories have the same pattern: characters experience something weird, it lures them into a creepy place, they see a monster, they come out of it mad. Same pattern in this book, just as it is with Call of Cthulhu or The Colour Out of Space and whatnot. Same-but-different.

This is one of those works where I wanted to like it more, but couldn't get past the long, wordy, super-dry prose. I can get behind the idea of it, because this brand of horror is something I admire and do find unsettling. The story is solid, but the execution fell flat for me personally. It's a thing to be admired--studied even. And I'm glad I read it (along with some of the other Lovecraft stories). But it's a vast universe of terror, and I believe Lovecraft's influence has birthed a cosmos of other, more unique, more enjoyable, and maybe even scarier stories.

3/5