A review by daniell
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
4.0
I first heard about this book in the context of a few jumps that I made from a blog post by Ross Douthat about the weak field of best picture noms and the prevalence of presold movies at the box office: sequels, easy formulas, comic book movies, comic book movies, more comic book movies.
That article is here:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/the-artist-and-the-oscars/
Also, I saw this yesterday and enjoyed it:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/the-unjustly-neglected-margin-call/
From there I linked to a discussion where someone suggested, as an example of the phenomenon Douthat describes, Guillermo Del Toro's (Pan's Labyrinth) willingness to direct and Tom Cruise's willingness to star in a movie version of ATMOM, willingness that has so far met with studio resistance due to the non-presold nature of a Lovecraft story. It's really a shame. And this brings me to the work itself.
ATMOM is a captain's first-person account of an expedition that took place a few years ago, being given now to discourage another expedition that is planning to venture out soon. The drama in the retelling is consistent, and it builds consistently as well without any unnecessarily long sections. Some of the scientific detail challenged my vocabulary, but that made the voyage into this frozen northern land all the more interesting and mysterious.
The expedition sets off to boldly go where no expedition has gone before, with the idea being to check on an old party that got lost in this region and to bring back any interesting findings for analysis. This neat plan starts to change course when they start to find strange things, strange things, and more strange things.
The fun of this book is in the discovery of the things and the drama buildup that this causes, so if that sounds at all appealing then read this book. It's fairly short, the descriptive writing is compelling, and the world is fascinating. The world of the story is the real character here, and that's my only criticism, that the characters are basically vehicles for the story and pretty much ciphers after that.
Another thing, know that this is not a Cthulhu story. He makes reference to him/her/it, but nothing more than that. "The Call of Cthulhu" is his single story regarding that/it.
That article is here:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/the-artist-and-the-oscars/
Also, I saw this yesterday and enjoyed it:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/the-unjustly-neglected-margin-call/
From there I linked to a discussion where someone suggested, as an example of the phenomenon Douthat describes, Guillermo Del Toro's (Pan's Labyrinth) willingness to direct and Tom Cruise's willingness to star in a movie version of ATMOM, willingness that has so far met with studio resistance due to the non-presold nature of a Lovecraft story. It's really a shame. And this brings me to the work itself.
ATMOM is a captain's first-person account of an expedition that took place a few years ago, being given now to discourage another expedition that is planning to venture out soon. The drama in the retelling is consistent, and it builds consistently as well without any unnecessarily long sections. Some of the scientific detail challenged my vocabulary, but that made the voyage into this frozen northern land all the more interesting and mysterious.
The expedition sets off to boldly go where no expedition has gone before, with the idea being to check on an old party that got lost in this region and to bring back any interesting findings for analysis. This neat plan starts to change course when they start to find strange things, strange things, and more strange things.
The fun of this book is in the discovery of the things and the drama buildup that this causes, so if that sounds at all appealing then read this book. It's fairly short, the descriptive writing is compelling, and the world is fascinating. The world of the story is the real character here, and that's my only criticism, that the characters are basically vehicles for the story and pretty much ciphers after that.
Another thing, know that this is not a Cthulhu story. He makes reference to him/her/it, but nothing more than that. "The Call of Cthulhu" is his single story regarding that/it.