Not for everyone

There is a great deal to this little story, including great description, what I'd call sublime horror, and a rather large dose of social commentary on the time it was written.

Be advised, however, that this story was written in the early 1930's using the literary style of that period. It was a time of great social change, and the concept of science not being able to solve all problems was really being driven home. Fear that the world was becoming a darker place was growing and the future was looked upon with gathering dread. With older works of art, one should recognize that fears tend to change somewhat. Yet Lovecraft knew about the kind of fear that never ends, that corrodes the soul, that destroys lives.

Listeners who wish easy prose and fast action should probably pass on this.

Yet if you appreciate very well written, thoughtful, and suspenseful in the classical sense sort of prose, this little novella is for you.

187 people found this helpful

First Lovecraft

This was my first experience with a Lovecraft story, and I was not disappointed. I'm not usually interested in horror books or movies, but I've enjoyed other books that reference Lovecraft's stories, so I gave this a try when it was up as a Daily Deal here at Audible.

It is a horror story, there's no doubt about that. However, it's very different from the modern sort of horror. This is not a story that's scary from the start, moving from one terror to another. Instead, this is a slow build up of expectation of terror, leading up to the one moment of true horror.

Which even that wasn't all that terrible for me as a modern reader, having been exposed science fiction.

That said, I was aware of the era that book was written, and can imagine what this might have been like to read in that era.

I wasn't looking to be terrified, I was looking for a good story, well told by a great narrator.

I would recommend this book.

146 people found this helpful

excellent reading

This book is vintage, if lengthy, Lovecraft of course. But the narration is a true masterpiece of the craft. Edward Hermann's sense of diction, stress and the sheer literal meaning of the sentences enhances Lovecraft's heavy prose. Excellent.

89 people found this helpful

"Such things did not happen in any normal world"

The disturbing implication of H. P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931/36) is, of course, that our world is abnormal. From its great opening line ("I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why") to its closing shrieks of "Tekeli-li!" Lovecraft's story powerfully explores existential horror marked by the following:

-monstrous forbidden books
-opalescent skies
-imminent marvels
-secrets beyond human penetration
-grotesque squawking penguins
-curious configurations of dots
-tentacles, wings, and obscene odors
-careful butchery and inexpert dissection
-an appalling account of the creation of life on earth
-a pre-human megalopolis
-disturbing gigantism
-alien geometry
-blasphemous antiquity
-communicative bas-reliefs
-cosmic beauty and cosmic horror

The novella is the attempt by Dyer, a professor of geology at Mistaktonic University, to dissuade future scientific expeditions to Antarctica by telling what really happened to the disastrous one he led there in 1930. Dyer begins with practical details about supplies, personnel, and goals, scientific facts about longitude, latitude, temperature, and geology, and generally benign poetic impressions: "Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun." However, after his party reaches "the great unknown continent, and its cryptic world of frozen death," things start getting creepy: "On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins." And when Lake, a Professor of biology, finds a fossil footprint of some advanced life form from a period of earth's history when no advanced life forms existed and becomes obsessed with finding more, things become horribly strange.

Lovecraft's writing may at times strike one as overwrought, with absurd names like Yog-Sothoth, over-used words like mad/ness (34 times in this novella), horror/s (31), strange/ness/ly (29), primal (24), and nameless (21), and plenty of excess verbiage. And those bas-reliefs are too conveniently comprehensible. Nevertheless, if you get into his rhythm, Lovecraft builds a disturbing intensity as Dyer provides more details, leading us through a series of gateways into the ineffable alien past of earth. I found myself writing down whole passages, amused by their outré quality and awed by their rhythm and imagery. At the Mountains of Madness is an excellent story because it builds terror through gradual revelation, so that, though we guess much of what's going on much earlier than Dyer tells us, the point is that he has to nerve himself up to be able to say what he has to say. It's difficult for him. He doesn't want to inflict spiritual torment on humanity and doesn't want to relive his own Rubicon crossing into the madness lurking in the inner reality of life and the world, which "marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external nature and nature's laws." If you stay patient and journey with him through his past expedition, you may experience, if not the same hair-graying terror that Lovecraft is trying to evoke, a compellingly beautiful, disturbing, and strange experience: science fiction horror sublime. (Only Lovecraft could make into figures of horror that comment on the human condition six-foot tall, albino, eyeless penguins living in tunnels leading to the abyss.)

If you become irritated when characters in horror movies enter places they should know better than to enter, Dyer and Danforth may drive you crazy, but they do what they do because of curiosity, and this novella is largely about that human trait: "Half paralyzed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end." Ah, Dyer should know that the more he tries to convince scientists not to explore Antarctica by telling them of his experiences, the more they will flock there.

Edward Hermmann's clarity, restraint, gravitas, and deep, rich voice render Lovecraft's most outlandish names, exotic terms, frustrating delays, and pet words convincing. In a brilliant touch, his moment of greatest emotion comes when Dyer feels some cross-species sympathy: "Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last--what had they done that we would not have done in their place? . . . Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn--whatever they had been, they were men!"

I'd only read a few H. P. Lovecraft stories, ignorantly scorning his work for its pulpy purple prose, nameless, eldritch obsessions, and phobias about size, age, and tentacles. I figured that the worst evil in this world is done by human beings, not by lurking protoplasmic blasphemous alien entities. I only bought the Blackstone audiobook version of At the Mountains of Madness (1931/36) because I could get it cheaply after buying a cheap kindle version. And the novella knocked off my soul-socks, and made me keen to read all of Lovecraft's stories.

79 people found this helpful

Only madness awaits us ahead

Any additional comments?

Only 10 years after the publication of this book Europe had been nearly completely destroyed, the Soviet Union controlled most of the east, America controlled the rest, the atom had been split, and the technology needed to take men to the moon only needed perfecting. Computers, radar, jet engines, women in the workplace, a Jewish state inside Palestine, the neutering of any meaningful monarchies in England and Japan ... a total change in civilization. All within about 10 years.

There's a scene near the end of this book that stood out for me more than almost any other and that is when they first hear and them come upon those albino penguins. The image is at first somewhat comical, then a little sad, too. The scene stood out for me because those penguins seemed to make for a wonderful metaphor for our own existence - blind, pale, helpless, easily frightened chattel to be trampled over by far, far greater powers. The birds were totally indifferent to their surroundings, utterly incapable of comprehending their fate or that anything of any greater importance was going on around them, aside from the inconvenience of being disturbed.

I felt as if Lovecraft had somehow felt the pulse of the times and was able to create a vision of what we as a species were about to do to ourselves during the late 1930's and into the 1940's. That dread that is on every page of the book is palpable and captures what some, but not nearly enough people, must have felt when visiting Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia before war broke out: a terrible helpless feeling of unease all around that nobody could escape from and a feeling that tragedy was about to happen again.

And the book's warning to all future adventures to leave well enough alone and to not explore to deep into regions that are best left unexplored, though a theme that crops up in science fiction very often, is more than just a trope here. Lovecraft seems to be intuiting the dangers of man meddling with things he can't control by foreshadowing nuclear war with those terrible visions beyond the mountains. Lovecraft is saying that the old way of life will forever change if man proceeds on its current course, that poking our noses where they don't belong will, though not unleash the darkest horrors of the ancient universe, somehow corrupt us from within.

Lovecraft is saying that science and reason can only take us so far before we get lost in a labyrinth of confusion, causing us to splinter as a society and species, forcing us from one extreme to the other, slowly eroding our own sense of self and art and culture, that all the greatest learning will eventually lead to an even greater forgetting; a forgetting of ourselves. Lovecraft seems quite content to stay put, to not pass that terrible boundary we charged right over in the 10 years after this book was written.

It's very pessimistic in its conclusion, however, I can't say I blame him either; he knew which way the wind was blowing. And I should be careful in reading too much into this book because after all he was trying to just write a damn entertaining page turner with some first-rate horror that Hollywood is still trying to copy to this day (either great films like Carpenter's 'The Thing' and Darabount's 'The Mist', or failures such as Ridley Scott's beautiful but deeply flawed 'Prometheus'). Yet the best stories, the ones that resonate with each generation are more than just fun reads, there does have to be something more to the pie than just a pretty pie crust.

Lovecraft writes very simply, clearly, and is a master at teasing out splinters of information at just the right time as to build the for boding. And even when there is really not much actually happening, he still manages to fascinate, such as the telling of the strangeness of the Old Ones and their life on early, ancient Earth. He doesn't bog us down with needless emotional scenes, rather, he uses Danforth as the emotional sounding-board to juxtapose with Dyer's cool, clinical, detachment. The rest is all supreme imagination and, honestly, horror so well written that I was genuinely scared and kept looking over my shoulder. It's really quite uncanny.

But there is much more here than a writer's wonderful imagination creating a mythos just for fun, Lovecraft has tapped into a vein that still resonates because he not only knows how to write a great story, but also because he knows what frightens us and because he intuited so much of what was just about to happen to the world in the coming years. Lovecraft is sort of a mile marker, a sign post, a line in the sand on which one side is all that came before and on the other is all that he warned humanity not to cross over less it destroy itself.

And so here were are looking back at a base camp we can never return to; only madness awaits us ahead.

76 people found this helpful

Vague, misty, unspeakable horrors!

Edward Hermann does a wonderful job reading this pseudoscientific yarn of things that go bump in the Antarctic night, about an expedition so shudderingly terrifying to the cool scientists who undertake it, that it must never be repeated. Never! Somewhere in the abyss, deep in the shadows, half glimpsed and indistinctly understood, lives a horrible ancient secret that looks and sounds like a nightmarish... [I won't spoil it] ... derailed. Pustular, foul-smelling, impenetrably dark and evil. Heads rolls and ichor oozes. Fly from the station! Fly you fools, fly!

25 people found this helpful

Classic story of pulp horror and penguins

Either you dig Lovecraft or you don't. The guy had issues and his prose was the purplest, like most pulp writers of his time. But all American fantasy and horror written since the 1930s has been influenced by Lovecraft. Lovecraft himself was heavily influenced by others, of course, and At the Mountains of Madness, one of his most famous works, made explicit reference to Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

This is a novella about a scientific expedition to Antarctica. The Antarctic was even more mysterious and unknown in the 1930s, so it was a perfect place for Lovecraft to situate an ancient, alien city. His narrator, in recounting his perilous journey from which only he and one other explorer/scientist returned, is attempting to discourage others from following in their footsteps, lest they too unearth Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

All the classic Lovecraft tropes are here — alienness incomprehensible to human minds, non-Euclidian geometry, sanity loss, and awful truths about prehistory revealed. The city the scientists discover in the South Pole was once inhabited by a race of creatures from another star, known only as the Old Ones. The Old Ones were scientifically and culturally advanced, and created servants to help them build their great cities. These servants, awful, intelligent monstrosities known as Shoggoths, eventually rebelled against their creators, making this ancient story literally older than mankind.

Surprisingly to me, given Lovecraft's usual xenophobia and characterization of the alien as unknowable and inimical, his narrator displays an almost touching compassion and understanding for the Old Ones, observing that they were simply "men of another age, albeit alien."

In the climax, the awful truth is revealed, there is much slime and carnage, and the narrator narrowly escapes from the terrible underground tunnels of the ancient city of the Old Ones.

You will never see penguins the same way again. Tekeli-li!

23 people found this helpful

Well Read, Good Tale

What made the experience of listening to At the Mountains of Madness [Blackstone Edition] the most enjoyable?

I especially enjoyed Lovecrafts use of the English language, and Mr.Herrman's outstanding read.

What other book might you compare At the Mountains of Madness [Blackstone Edition] to and why?

Like many Poe stories.
Peter Straub.

Which character – as performed by Edward Herrmann – was your favorite?

The narrator

Who was the most memorable character of At the Mountains of Madness [Blackstone Edition] and why?

The narrator. He was an eyewitness to something he hoped no humans would ever see again..while he was reporting events objectively, he was also trying to convey a dire warning.

Any additional comments?

Worth it.

14 people found this helpful

Be warned

Would you try another book from H. P. Lovecraft and/or Edward Herrmann?

Never

Has At the Mountains of Madness [Blackstone Edition] turned you off from other books in this genre?

Probably all HP Lovecraft books.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Boredom

Any additional comments?

This book is like listening to a drooning prof at collage giving a boring lecture.
It is told by one person in a monotone voice.
If you are looking for a good story pass this up. I could not care about any
of the characters, no development at all.
Why this is considered a great book in the horror genre is beyond me.
There isn't any thing even remotely exciting in this book.

9 people found this helpful

I wont make this mistake again

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

I did not like this book. It is like reading a report. Clinical and boring. I did not check the publication date but something tells me this book is old because it reads like a b movie from the 70s. I feel like someone edited out all the interesting stuff. I need more details on what is happening. There is a story here but it's like the writer got board and glossed over stuff to get it done.

What was most disappointing about H. P. Lovecraft’s story?

The story went noware. Also how did they read what was on the walls of the caves?

What about Edward Herrmann’s performance did you like?

He reads the sotry fine and has a good voice.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from At the Mountains of Madness [Blackstone Edition]?

a lot of the details on the exact locations they were at.

Any additional comments?

You need much more details on that happened to the people at the camp that were killed. there needed to be interaction and conversation between the characters not a report of those things. It's fine to start the book that way but then you need to tanssion to being there.

7 people found this helpful