At the Mountains of Madness-Review

Intro

At the Mountains of Madness is one of Lovecraft's most famous stories and is often considered one of his best. I can't entirely agree with the latter statement (The Colour out of Space is the best, after all), but I won't deny that it's a chilling read and a strong competitor for the Lovecraft top stories.

Writing

One benefit At the Mountains of Madness has over The Colour out of Space is the protagonist's involvement in the story (William Dyre). Even though it is recounted to us after the fact, this improves the story's tension immensely. Along with the Dyre, we witness a promising expedition turn into a fight for survival and strange penguins. Again, Lovecraft uses the hostile arctic environment to significant effect here, even more so cause, at the time, it was still vastly unexplored.

The wind howls, the mountain peaks are jagged, and the cold is always present throughout Dyre's accounts, putting the reader on edge before anything weird occurs. Unlike the Gardeners, whose voices were non-existent. William Dyre and his team have more vital voices within the narrative, coming across as ordinary men who are way out of their depth. You can sympathize with their struggles to stay alive as you could have easily been one of them. Unfortunately, I struggle to remember any of them as standout characters; they somewhat blur together as a collective of decent scientists who prefer not to be gobbled up.

However, Lovecraft's strength in creating alien creatures is as strong as ever; remember those penguins I mentioned in the previous paragraph? Well, I would like to talk about that and the Shoggoth themselves. A strength of Lovecraft's prose is the eloquent description of the horrific "This white waddling thing was fully six feet high...monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness." A six-foot eyeless penguin-like monster is quite the image. It sends chills down my spine, trying to picture it. Now for the Shoggoth.

"It was a terrible, indescribable thing caster than any subway train-a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."

Lovecraft was very creative in describing the disgusting and the alien, even if it was at the cost of his characters. He conjures up a visceral picture of abnormality and subversion of nature, where humanity ultimately realizes how insignificant they are in the universe. Maybe that is why Lovecraft was never interested in creating fleshed-out characters because they are ultimately unimportant to his universe. What do you think? Leave me a comment, letting me know what you think!

However, I do think that the escalation is solid and upholds the atmosphere well. I believe At the Mountains of Madness could have benefited from being a short story instead of a novella. Something about the pacing drags a bit between the first and second acts; with some editing, Lovecraft could have had a solid short horror story. But that isn't too big a problem once we move from act two to act three. But it is something that I feel I should have brought up.

Conclusion

At the Mountains of Madness displays Lovecraft's excellent use of pacing and horrific creature designs to significant effect. It was a little slow and could have cut into a solid short story, but I can still provide a hearty recommendation. Monstrous slime balls turn out to be rather scary; it turns out.

Acknowledgments

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