At the Mountains of Madness (Howard Phillips Lovecraft)

At the Mountains of Madness
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Naxos Audiobooks
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the wake of Shackleton's awe-inspiring expedition to the southernmost continent, other explorers rushed to make their own marks and explore perhaps the most remote region on Earth. Among these was a relatively minor group funded by a small New England university, hoping their new drilling tools would extract valuable mineral and fossil samples to answer the many questions about ancient life on our planet.
They never expected to find the wonders - and terrors - that haunt the survivors to this day...

REVIEW: H. P. Lovecraft can be a polarizing figure, but his works have left an indelible impression, one whose echoes resonate even now. I figured it was high time I gave his works a try in the original, for all that I'm somewhat ambivalent about "Lovecraftian"-inspired stories I've read.
In many ways, the story definitely reflects its era, particularly in the style and the framing device: it is narrated by an expedition member/survivor, Dyer, as he recounts the harrowing events - events he censored in his initial reports, for reasons that become clear in the telling - in an effort to dissuade further exploration into the Antarctic interior... exploration efforts incited by discoveries he and his team made and reported before they understood just what they had stumbled upon. Even this secondhand account is itself filtered as he sits in a base camp receiving and relating reports from another expedition member who makes the initial discoveries that at first amaze, then puzzle, then doom one branch of the team. There's also quite a lot of dithering and repetition; I think the story would've been been at least a third shorter had Dyer cut out his innumerable hesitations and hemming and hawing and vague foreshadowing and actually spat out what was going on. That said, Lovecraft does successfully convey a growing sense of both awe and dread, as the expedition makes discoveries that repeatedly rewrite history and prehistory... and show just how little humans actually grasp our place in the universe, how unknowable the truly alien can be, how utterly minute we stand against horrors so great that their echoes resonate through our cultures even though the entities that inspired them existed long before our species evolved. There is a true sense of wonder evoked at times, if wonder that slowly twists into something darker and more chilling than the Antarctic mountain winds. The end result is a memorable, if inevitably dated, story, and if I grew somewhat irritated by how it felt it was padding itself out at times, it certainly earns its place as a classic, for all that I don't expect I'll read (or listen to) more of Lovecraft's works.

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