At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales, by H.P. Lovecraft **5/8

This book started off well. In fact, the first 50-60 pages of At the Mountains of Madness are pretty amazing. In this case, though, Lovecraft doesn't sustain it. The last section just doesn't hold up for me, as the revelations he presents as being terrifying aren't, and there's not nearly as much mystery left at the end as there should have been. The **5/8 stars are really for the amazing first half and the other stories in the collection.

It's funny, in a way, that this is probably Lovecraft's best-known novel. The buildup really is special, but the book doesn't deliver in the end. Considering how good Dexter Ward is, this book is kind of disappointing. With DW, Lovecraft keeps upping the ante somehow, ultimately leading to the amazing conclusion. This one has perhaps a better beginning, but the last half of the book consists mostly of the narrator wandering around telling me how frightening and horrible everything is without it actually seeming that horrible or frightening. The narrator in this book is a little problematic for me because he keeps making these suggestive comments about the awfulness, but the way it's presented doesn't really make sense because the narrator is supposed to be trying to convince people not to journey back there. And if he really wanted to do this, he would have simply explained the situation. Instead there's this constant, "trust me, this was the most awful thing" coming from the narrator, and at some point I just became annoyed by the way this was presented. I understand from a story perspective that this approach makes more sense instead of the narrator giving everything away, but it's just not handled well by Lovecraft. In any case, I think my next task in the Lovecraft world will likely be to read his Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath, since that's supposed to be a fantasy version of Dexter Ward.
(Winter 2007)

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