!!!Spoiler Warning!!! If you haven’t read this book yet, I give away some key spoilers!
At the Mountains of Madness
by H.P. Lovecraft
I read this book as part of the Goodreads Summer Reading Challenge 2019—check out how I’m doing!
This, pretty much, was a huge miss for me from start to finish.
I know the writing is dated, but I’ve enjoyed much older books so it can’t be that.
I just think that, for the most part, it was an entirely boring book.
I could not help feeling that they were evil things – mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The story isn’t such a bad premise. It’s set in a sort of alternate world to ours in which the Cthulu Mythos from the Necronomicon is studied extensively and known to everyone.
Then, our group on intrepid explorers go to Antarctica for fossils and surveys and other boring scientific stuffs. There’s a huge chunk of the book taken up with analysis and equipment descriptions etc. Just really dull stuff that doesn’t add to the story in any way. It’s only purpose seems to be to make the whole thing sound more like a scientific journal and therefore more realistic, I suppose. Honestly though, it was just a slog to read through.
He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date – Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian – as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage.
Then our group splits up and one team find some ‘Old Ones‘. Then we lose contact and the other team investigates only to find everyone dead. We do a little more exploration including riding a plane over the unusually high mountain peaks. On the other side is a massive sprawling city, clearly of alien architect.
We go down into the city and explore deep inside the caverns and buildings, and the wall murals and sculptures tell a tale of a civilization of these weird scary creatures way before humanity existed. They left the city and moved under the sea at some point.
But then, shock horror, there appears to be a creature, ‘like a train’, still alive down there and it chases them as they run to the entrance and escape. But, one of them saw something even scarier on glancing back.
The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tell – what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors.
Now, I won’t say that it wasn’t suspenseful and scary, because it was, but only for the last twenty or so pages. The rest of the book was boring, boring, boring. If you make it to the end, it certainly picks up at that last hurdle, but it’s really, really tempting to DNF this book before you get anywhere near the end.
Villain Rating
Not really a villain to mention, but there’s certainly a sort of monster in the story. The book spends most of its time going on about this huge alien civilization, and reiterates that these creatures weren’t evil, just different from anything we’ve ever seen before, but I still think they sort of count as a creature feature.
Apparently, these creatures emit a foul odor and have a star shaped head. The main characters describes being chased down a tunnel by something similar to an oncoming train in speed and power. Are these creatures really evil, though? Probably not. Are they the villains? Also probably not. Just weird and different. Let’s not forget that if they were chasing the narrator it’s because its home had been invaded. Not really much evil in that, is there? 2/10
Happy Reading,
Claire
Love the Villain 