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Post by kooshmeister on Sept 3, 2014 18:53:41 GMT
A 1931 Miskatonic University expedition to the antarctic to search for fossils beneath the ice yields first the discovery of a new mountain range rivaling the Himalayas. An advance party led by biologist Lake discovers the frozen corpses of a hitherto unknown species of creature, half animal, half plant. When geologist Dyer and the other expedition members reach Lake’s camp, they find the creatures gone… and Lake and his team killed. Some were seemingly dissected! Apparently, the creatures weren’t quite dead… and they woke up very cranky. One man, Gedney, is missing. Dyer and a grad student named Danforth take a plane to fly over the mountains to search for him. Instead they discover a gigantic lost city on the other side. Landing, they decide to go exploring and discover ancient murals. And penguins. Giant monster penguins! Aahhh! (No, seriously, there’s giant penguins. Go with it.) The murals depict the city’s history: it was built by the creatures Lake found, a race of ancient alien scientists dubbed the “Old Ones,” who came from faraway outer space eons ago to establish themselves on Earth, long before even the dinosaurs. Dyer and Danforth realize the Old Ones aren’t necessarily evil, and killed Lake’s party in self-defense, and dissected the humans out of scientific curiosity. But what happened to them? Why is the city abandoned, and the Old Ones reduced to hiding in the antarctic wastes beyond its protective walls, where they froze and went into suspended animation? The answer lies in what still lurks in the deepest, darkest recesses of the city, the formless horrors which once served the Old Ones but then rebelled against them and drove them from the city. The things living where Dyer and Danforth are still heading towards, ignorant of the danger that lies ahead… The story is told in the form of a “letter of warning” written by Dyer to try and dissuade future antarctic expeditions and prevent further penetration of the city and the ancient evil that dwells in it. And I am impressed. The sequences of him and Danforth exploring the ancient ruins and gradually piecing together the history of the Old Ones is good stuff, and even the giant penguin creatures are fairly creepy. And then there are the shoggoths, the aforementioned “formless horrors,” however only one actually appears. Anyway, At the Mountains of Madness was my first exposure to famed horror write H.P. Lovecraft. He impressed me as being an extremely gifted idea man, but when it came to the actual writing part, he left a little to be desired. In addition to piling on loads of huge, archaic words, Lovecraft also somehow manages to both describe things too much and not enough. As for the characters, most of them are cyphers. Only Dyer gets any proper amount of personality. Sidekick Danforth is just there to fly the plane and be the token expendable Red Shirt, although Lovecraft defies convention by letting him live, although considering Dyer survives to tell the story, and Danforth is his pilot, both of their survivals are more or less a given from the outset, which is why I wish Lovecraft had included a handful more expedition members on the flight over the mountains, so they could be shoggoth food. I guess Who Goes There? spoiled me, ‘cause I wanted more arctic scientists getting absorbed by amorphous horrors from the great beyond, damn it! Dyer is an odd guy, though. Although his stated profession is geology, he doesn’t act very much like a scientist. He makes a lot of suppositions and conclusions based on little to no evidence, and he treats the city as a “blasphemous” thing. He has no scientific curiosity, and, indeed, doesn’t do anything scientific beyond taking a few samples of the stone that the ancient buildings are comprised of for dating purpose. Sure, he insists on exploring deeper and deeper into the ruins, but it’s out of morbid, rather than scientific, curiosity. I get that he is aware of the Necronomicon and that the city probably gives off bad vibes like a Midwestern garage mechanic gives off B.O., but it’s his choice of words that makes him seem so unprofessional. Why would Dyer consider the city “blasphemous?” I can’t recall him being mentioned as a main of faith. I can see him considering the discovery staggering given how its age means they’ll have to rewrite a lot of history and science books… but blasphemous? Is Lovecraft one of those guys who thinks science is a religion to scientists? The way science functions is that it changes with the introduction or discovery of new ideas and evidence. Lovecraft seems to think precisely the opposite. I mean, I get that the city and its geometrically alien design are meant to be startling even to a trained observer like Dyer, especially coming so close on the heels of the massacre at the camp, but Dyer behaves as if he’s a superstitious monk discovering something challenging his faith, not making a new discovery. The finding of the city is treated as something dreadful and there’s no sense of wonder or discovery. I’m unsure why Dyer thinks anyone will listen to him, even if they believe his story. He writes so unlike an actual scientist that even people who believed him would dismiss his pleas that nobody go there the way Stevens dismisses the Doctor in The Green Death - Dyer would be seen as un-scientific and an “errant sensation-monger.” So because of the manner in which he words his report, he’s basically shooting himself in the foot. Either nobody will believe him, or they will and go anyway. Despite all of this, I still love the book. It has very good, creepy atmosphere, and I like the slow buildup. I even like the early parts where the expedition is purely routine. Its boring normalcy makes the horrors to come that much more startling. I’ll make a separate post sometime later to focus on all the terrible covers this poor book has gotten over the years.
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Post by Shrink Proof on Sept 4, 2014 16:56:48 GMT
This was my first exposure to Lovecraft too, and it remains my favourite. I completely agree, he came up with some terrific ideas and some sections of this are creepy as hell, but Lovecraft's writing style just doesn't do it for me. He's a like a builder who leaves the scaffolding behind after the job's done.
Despite that I was so impressed that I went on to read pretty much all the rest of HPL's writings and it confirmed my impression about his ideas (and his writing). I would love to see this one filmed - IIRC Guillermo del Toro tried to get Warner Brothers to bankroll it a few years back but failed (Toro has since worked on Kung Fu Panda 2 and is starting on number 3, so we can see where Hollywood's priorities lie...).
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Post by andydecker on Sept 4, 2014 17:57:18 GMT
To Deyer's defence one has to say that he discovered those Aliens in the ice before the City, which in an age before Roswell would be enough to rattle any 30s scientist mind.
I always have a bigger problems with his reading of the murals which defies belief. Considerung how many years it took to decipher egyptian hieroglyphs it is absolutly impossible that a geologist (!) pieces together that complicated a tale while strolling down some corridors. The Elder Things must have been great comic book artists.
With the "blasphemous" you raise an interesting point. I always read this not as a question of catholic or protestant doctrine but as an expression of fear and revulsion. As HPL constructed it, all his cosmic entities were so fundamentally "different" in regard to humanity that their mere existance make human life itself worthless and senseless. So the encounter with these artifacts is a blasphemy to life itself.
HPL can be difficult for our modern taste. He was terrible on action and his characters could mostly be considered naïve and/or weak from our point of view. Danforth losing his sanity? Come on. Like so many of Lovecraft's heroes he comes across like a hysterical victorian spinster seing her first porn. You could "explain" this with the idea that these alien things are toxic to the human mind, but of course this doesn't stand on the page.
Still this is a great story. HPL didn't invent the expedition tale, but this is one of the best realized examples. If you consider that in 1931 there was no Discovery Channel with half a dozen docus about antartic expeditions a writer can steal from HPL did a convincing description of the landscape and the expedition. One of his strength. I will never forget his description of the creepy woods in "The Whisperer in Darkness". Wonderful writing.
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Post by kooshmeister on Sept 5, 2014 14:19:16 GMT
To Deyer's defence one has to say that he discovered those Aliens in the ice before the City, which in an age before Roswell would be enough to rattle any 30s scientist mind. Fair enough, although it was Lake who found the bodies. Dyer and his pals only heard about them over the radio and then saw the aftermath. Weirdly, I seem to recall Dyer blaming Gedney (the missing scientist) for the deaths (!), thinking Gedney had gone mad and killed everyone. However, given the circumstances I'm going to assume that this patently stupid conclusion is just Dyer trying really, really hard not to admit the obvious. The missing and presumably still living Gedney makes a convenient scapegoat for a practical-minded man who doesn't want to admit that ancient alien beings thawed from the ice can spring back to life and still possess enough strength to kill ten to twenty fully grown people. I always have a bigger problems with his reading of the murals which defies belief. Considerung how many years it took to decipher egyptian hieroglyphs it is absolutly impossible that a geologist (!) pieces together that complicated a tale while strolling down some corridors. The Elder Things must have been great comic book artists. That's one slip I'll forgive Lovecraft for. Dyer being able to decipher the murals as quickly as he does allows the story to move forward, so it's what I consider an acceptable break in reality for the sake of the plot. their mere existance make human life itself worthless and senseless. So the encounter with these artifacts is a blasphemy to life itself. I'm not quite sure how the discovery of ancient aliens who had a hand in the creation of humanity automatically makes human life worthless and senseless. Existence is what we make of it. Only an extremely pessimistic person whose gauge of human worth is dependent on us being inherently special, or someone who thinks where we came from is the only thing that matters, not what we've done since then or are doing or will do, would consider that revelation a horrifying one. Now that I think of it, maybe clergymen would react as Dyer does, but certainly no self-respecting person craving knowledge and understanding, as scientists are supposed to. To clergymen, the revelation that humans were created by aliens would undo everything they've believed in. To scientists, it'd just add a new wrinkle to their understanding of the world. I don't care how bizarre the Elder Things, and anything made by them, are. Dyer, by his reaction to them and the city and all that they imply, behaves more like a spiritually disturbed clergyman having his faith challenged than a scientist who's made an important discovery - and before he even learns if they're good or evil (remember, he does not attribute the massacre of Lake's team to them, but to Gedney). Lake of all people, the character we're supposed to consider a fool, behaves the most like an actual scientist. He is delighted and excited by his discovery. Dyer just automatically assumes everything is bad, or has bad implications, and is in general a wet blanket. But that sort of "glass half-empty" world outlook is par for the course in Lovecraft's works, where everyone is more of a morbidly terrified monkey on the verge of existential hysteria than a human being. I suppose the idea is that his critters are just so cosmically horrifying that their mere existence melts people's brains or something, and while that is true, I still think that it's an overall very, very pessimistic way of looking at the world, but considering what kind of life Lovecraft had before he began his writing career, such an outlook is understandable. Danforth losing his sanity? Come on. Like so many of Lovecraft's heroes he comes across like a hysterical victorian spinster seing her first porn. Like I said, they're all like terrified little monkeys more than real people. And, great, maybe that's what Danforth saw? Cthulhu Rule 34! That or he looked back, saw Cthulhu in a Triple-Mega-XL trenchcoat, and the Old One flashed him. Danforth: [Southern belle voice] Oh, my word, I do declare I'm a' gettin' the vapors! Yeah, seeing mighty Cthulhu's squid junk is bound to melt anyone's mind.
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Post by kooshmeister on Sept 5, 2014 15:20:52 GMT
And now, I give you the terrible covers for At the Mountains of Madness! The Modern Library edition uses a nice, stark landscape (one of their better cover images, and they aren't known for them). But other covers for the book have nothing to do with the story therein. Such as this Del-Rey one: Who is this person and why are they part skeleton...? No such character appears in the novel. Nothing even remotely resembling it happens. It's just generic "weird and scary" imagery. It's from a painting by Michael Whelan, and is only a small part of it. Whelan's artwork was apparently used in full for other Lovecraft books. But it's still a terrible cover because it has nothing to do with the story. This one would have an unwary reader believing the story concerns graverobbing and zombie pirates or somesuch nonsense: Beagle seems to think that there's a pop-eyed man with an eyepatch somewhere in the story: Whilst where does a rat man with a worm going through his eye sockets appear in Lovecraft's tale? Nowhere, except here on this Ballantine cover: Abominable snowmen? What?! Seriously, there are many editions of this book, but almost none have good covers. I suppose many of them are good unto themselves, but as covers for this particular book, they fail, and fail hard. They've all left me scratching my heads at what the publishers were thinking. Is the concept of an expedition into the arctic so difficult to get across they just felt like they needed to slap any random disturbing imagery on the cover?
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 5, 2014 15:28:27 GMT
This one would have an unwary reader believing the story concerns graverobbing and zombie pirates or somesuch nonsense I think that one is intended to illustrate "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," which also appears in the book.
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Post by andydecker on Sept 5, 2014 19:05:21 GMT
I had written this long reply about HPLs time and how much more earth-shattering the discovery must have been in an era where man thought himself the pinnacle of creation and master of the universe. Then I thought about it, and you know what, kooshmeister? You are right. Dyer isn't a convincing scientist. He shouldn't have reacted as it is written. He should have been ecstatic about the discovery.
That is what makes Lovecraft Lovecraft. The nihilistic world-view, the eternal pessimism. The look beyond the horizon. It is hard to take sometimes. Derleth couldn't embrace it and put the Mythos into a rigid framework into which it didn't belong. But nowadays I can at least understand his views, unfiltered Lovecraft is hard to produce sucessfully as countless stories prove.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 6, 2014 7:49:47 GMT
One for the gallery, mr. meister - the Grafton 1985 edition Tim White
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Post by kooshmeister on Sept 6, 2014 15:21:34 GMT
At least that one's got a mountain. Dunno about the gremlin critter though. A couple years back, Sterling published a graphic novel adaptation of the book with art by I.N.J. Culbard. It's a very mixed bag. Although the cover is very evocative, the artwork contained inside is an acquired taste. It's very cartoonish, almost Tintin-like (a comparison many others have made), which sort of undermines the more horrific elements such as the mutilated corpses, the giant penguins, and especially the Shoggoth. Mr. Mustache on the left here is Dyer. Danforth is the human chin to the right (yeah, the entire lower half of his face is about 80% chin - that tiny little line underneath his nose is his mouth). And here is the excellent cover: And you know what? I actually kind of like the goofy artwork. While I'm still hoping for an adaptation with more appropriate artwork, Culbard's Tintin style approach manages to kind of evoke those old adventure comics of the funny pages of yesteryear, making it seem like a throwback to a bygone era. It may not be entirely appropriate for this novel, or for Lovecraft, but I find it quite endearing.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 6, 2014 16:00:37 GMT
Whilst where does a rat man with a worm going through his eye sockets appear in Lovecraft's tale? Nowhere, except here on this Ballantine cover: Rat man is the work of John Holmes who painted several similar tortured face monstrosities for the Fontana Book Of Horror Stories
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Post by Shrink Proof on Sept 7, 2014 8:14:55 GMT
Now that I think of it, maybe clergymen would react as Dyer does, but certainly no self-respecting person craving knowledge and understanding, as scientists are supposed to. To clergymen, the revelation that humans were created by aliens would undo everything they've believed in. Reminds me of the clergyman in H G Wells' "War of the Worlds", mentally unable to cope with the Martians.
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Post by kooshmeister on Sept 7, 2014 15:30:18 GMT
Well, ain't this some shit? This is my brand new copy of the graphic novel, and the binding has already come unglued! Wow, they sure don't make books like they used to. Brand new and the cover just pops right off. I had the exact same thing befall my copy of the Hornets' Nest novelization, but that book was over 60 years old! What's At the Mountains of Madness' excuse...? It's still readable. I mean, all that's wrong is the cover is now loose when I read it. But it's still annoying to have a brand new book immediately become damaged goods. Shoddy, Sterling, really shoddy! Fortunately, due to me being stupid, I ordered a second one because the fact I'd ordered the first entirely slipped my mind. Despite a valiant attempt to cancel the order, the comic was shipped. This turned out to be the luckiest thing ever. So far, it isn't displaying any signs of immediately falling apart (I ordered it from a different online seller too).
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Post by pulphack on Sept 8, 2014 4:55:34 GMT
Isn't that a problem with a lot of paperbacks over the last 20 years? Like everything, not made to last these days... and why not, I suppose, as everything becomes obsolete eventually. But two things: that may be so, however it's bloody annoying when you've just paid for it; and secondly, how does that account for all those things that were intended to be ephemeral but still hold strong?
Anyway, been following this with interest, and while I agree that Lovecraft's characters do not react as you would realistically expect such archetypes to respond, that's got to be down to one of his inherent faults as a writer: his lack of characterisation, which I put down to his lack of experience as a human being. From all accounts, he had quite a narrow life, and so an in-depth study of people was never going to be a strong point. However - I do like that word, it somehow makes me sound like I know what I'm talking about - it's that very narrowness of experience that fuels the obsessive side of his imagination when it comes to creating his universe of cosmic terror and awe. Without one, you wouldn't have the other. Similarly, I find him lacking in pace - like wading through treacle in some places - and yet that lack of pace makes the globs of thickly applied descriptive terror all the more impressive. And it is true that he is both good and bad and description - a lot of it, and the 'words cannot describe' schtick - yet this, too, is effective either by accident or design: when he's been so obsessive up to a point, then you think 'so what the HELL is that, that he can't describe it at great length...'
I guess it boils down to writers you like wouldn't have their strengths if there weren't faults to highlight those strengths.
Digressing - your blog is great. You'll still never convince me that Behemoth is a good movie, but Larry Buchanan tackles the Loch Ness Monster? I'd never heard of that one, and despite its seeming awfulness, I now want to waste 90 minutes of my life on it. Damn you!
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Post by Dr Strange on Sept 8, 2014 9:41:54 GMT
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Post by andydecker on Sept 8, 2014 16:58:59 GMT
What's At the Mountains of Madness' excuse...? CreateSpace or PoD?
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