Matthew Ted's Reviews > At the Mountains of Madness

92nd book of 2024.

Such a complex relationship with this small book: it's stuffy, detached, boring, but has also completely overtaken my mind over the days reading it and since finishing it (on Saturday), I've been exploring it in my head. All the negatives above actually aid the book. The stuffiness made it feel real, like I was reading dusty old travelogues of an arctic explorer. Lovecraft's wordiness sometimes got the better of him, but I was also drawn into descriptions, which were startlingly vivid.

Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds.
In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things— mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.

And reflecting on the horror, I've come to realise that it is a horror of 'exceptional' calibre, for it is so understated. Why were so many passages unnerving me, particularly when the majority of the story was given to describing the icy wastelands of Antarctica and the jagged structures of ancient, uninhabited alien buildings? Because Lovecraft places the alien not on another planet, but on our own, and the empty forgotten cities are marked with a forgotten and terrible history. He somehow created fear by simply describing a desolate black city surrounded by ice and snow. It is the uncanny perfected.

The more it has sat in my mind, the more I've come to respect it and enjoy it in retrospect. Lovecraft's longwinded descriptions sometimes made me feel impatient, but every time I left the book, I left it a little unsettled. There was a lingering disquiet.

At nearly midnight the other night my girlfriend suddenly remarked that she could not see the cathedral spire out the window. We can usually see it. The sky had a strange remote orange tint and a thick fog had fallen. At once we put our shoes on and headed out. A few drunkards were wandering and yelling, but once we reached the cathedral, there was a strange muffled quality. We could hardly see far ahead of us, and the cathedral spire, even up close, disappeared out of sight into the fog. We walked about for half an hour, and I kept thinking, for some reason, of At the Mountains of Madness, and the slow, meditative, even boring, horror that lay within its pages.