At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

I'd seen H.P. Lovecraft's name pop up in a few NY Times crosswords recently and so when I saw this book at the library, I decided to see what it was about.

Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish visions, H. P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition’s uncanny discoveries–and their encounter with untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization–is a milestone of macabre literature.

Tantalizingly vague, this mysterious description intrigued me enough to bring the book home.

I don't want to give too much away, but the novella centers around the discovery of a millenia-old alien civilization preserved at the South Pole that predates all life on Earth by thousands of years. There's also 6-foot tall albino penguins (my favorite part).

Since it's fairly short, it didn't take me long to get through this horrific tale. I liked it well enough and the story was, at times, way way exciting. But then again, at other times it was extremely droll and boring, particularly when Lovecraft goes into detail about what all the explorers brought on their expedition or about how the camp was set up or the dimensions of different objects or rooms. I also found him to be overly wordy a lot of the time, and you definitely need to have a good vocabulary to understand what's happening.

See for yourself if you don't believe me:

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism.

How many of you actually stuck it out and made it through that whole excerpt? Anybody? Yeah, that's what I thought.

I don't know, I'm kind of torn on this one. The story was good, very, very good. The writing was very...dense. Very, VERY dense.

Would I recomend this book? Well...welllllll...probably not. But I'm gonna leave this one up to you to decide. If it sounds good, if you think you can handle it, then read it. If not, and honestly most people should probably fall under the "not" category, then don't.

OR...you can just read A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne. Similar plot, same excitement, MUCH easier to understand! There we go, a happy compromise. :]