At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels

by H.P. Lovecraft, James Turner (Introduction), S.T. Joshi (Text Editor)

• A Note on the Texts • essay by S. T. Joshi
• Introduction: A Mythos in His Own Image
1.At the Mountains of Madness
2.The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
3.The Shunned House
4.The Dreams in the Witch House
5.The Statement of Randolph Carter
6.The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
7.The Silver Key
8.Through the Gates of the Silver Key

Cover Illustration: Raymond Bayless

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Short Stories, Lovecraftian, Weird Fiction

462 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

— Wikipedia

Reviews

[C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I both loved and hated this book. Ultimately it suffers from the shortcoming that shackles most Lovecraft - a great premise, lots of atmosphere, page after page of anticipation . . . and then the giant albino penguins show up cawing "Tekeli-li," and you start giggling. I'm sorry, but I do. The problem with writing about antedeluvian horrors that man cannot understand is that, when you try to describe them to man, they are, inevitably, underwhelming. Chine Mieville's introduction to the Everyman edition of this book is brilliant, and does a great job of explicating Lovecrafts overt racism, putting it in context while neither explaining it away or diminishing one's enjoyment of his work.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read much, if not most, of Lovecraft's stories in my youth, I was captivated by the chilling portrayal of a universe beyond our comprehension. It was years later that I realized that Lovecraft's methodology was no more scientific than that of alchemists and priests. He still used magic and mysticism, he just separated it from conventional and orthodox religions. Instead of the benevolent God, creator and Savior with a sacred and glorious destiny for humankind, Lovecraft gave us Cthulhu and maleficent elder creatures that merely saw humans as ... cattle.

After I'd grown up a bit and came to understand Lovecraft's truly darker side: his festering racism and bigotry through a firm belief in eugenics and a racial superiority. This was very prevalent in his day. And we can see it getting new popularity in this new post-9/11 century. I felt it was time to revisit Lovecraft's work and began re-reading these tales.

I have to admit that I'm not as impressionable as I was at 12 or 13 and yet many of his stories still hold up and are just as creepily weird, if not more so in new and different ways. Having said that I think that some of Lovecraft's best work is in this collection. The short novel At the Mountains of Madness is still a wonderful gem, as is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, another of his longer works. While The Shunned House did not quite live up to my recollection, The Dreams in the Witch-House probably exceeded my memories. Still it was the four story cycle dealing the Randolph Carter (The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Silver Key & Through the Gates of the Silver Key) that I had not appreciated as much in my youth, but which I now see in a very different light. There is some wonderful stream of consciousness narratives in there and the ending of the last in the cycle left me thinking I might not have even read that particular one when I was younger. It might also be that I just didn't read them in the proper order, so my recollection is skewed. In either case, those four stories form a larger and far more interesting (and disturbing) narrative when read collectively.

Racist? Yes, sadly I admit he was a racist. Although in fairness most of that only comes out when reading his personal letters. There isn't much in the way of overt racism in the stories, mostly he's stereotyping and using clichés. And when taken in the context of the pre-WWII era this type of thoughtlessness can be forgiven as it was so prevalent. It's in his personal letters that the real underlying beliefs and attitudes are so clearly present, and that is inexcusable.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuing Arkham House's valiant attempt to collect every scrap of fiction Lovecraft ever committed to paper (in some cases not having any original manuscripts to work from and thus forced to use the text from whatever pulp magazine published it), the second volume of three contains pretty much all the long stuff, with the story count about a quarter of what the first volume was but still like fifty pages longer. Three of the stories clock in over a hundred pages, which raises the question that you have to ask of any writer who seemed to primarily function as a short story writer . . . can they pull off an entire novel? Judging by the evidence here, the answer is a slightly shaky yes.

Lovecraft actually seems almost tailor made for at least novella length as what makes his stories work is the gradually increasing sense of dread and uneasiness that creeps into the tales almost when you're not looking, where a narrator who starts out near-hysterical and makes you think, "Geez buddy, chill out, it's only slime creatures from beyond" by the end has you convinced to start looking over your own shoulder for cities with weird geometries. In short bursts, he doesn't have enough time to establish the mood and while that works better for the EC Comics style horror tales with the twist ending, for a concentrated dose of Lovecraftian terror you need to let the situation play out a bit and go from "this is kind of bad" to "make your peace with your God but there is no God only pitiless oblivion" in terms of atmosphere.

For the most part, he nails it in "At the Mountains of Madness", which features an Antarctic expedition that somehow discovers new mountains taller than anything anyone has seen before and goes downhill from there. The frozen setting feels alien from the get-go and as our intrepid professors explore further and find a new city and the frozen bodies of previous inhabitants it starts getting extremely eerie. What it does here is play to Lovecraft's best strength as a SF/fantasy writer in creating a situation where the rules of morality as understand them simply do not exist and good and evil can't be defined easily or at all. He gives us a glimpse into a drama that has been going on for millions of years without our involvement and then shows why we have no place being anywhere near it. By piling on stranger and stranger events and letting his characters become more unhinged by what they witness it raises the urgency to a near fever pitch so that by the time the weird looking penguins show up you're about as ready to get out of there as the characters are (presumably with your sanity intact, though that isn't a requirement). What's fascinating is how he fits all these extraterrestrial entities together, often calling back to his own works (Cthulhu gets name checked at least once) and giving a real sense that what we see of the universe is only a fraction of what really goes on.

Still, he can get carried away and the section where the narrator sees the entire history of the city and its alien inhabitants sketched on the walls more or less stops the story cold. Maybe it reads better in serial form but it feels like the story nearly stops in the process.

But as good as that story is, it really feels like a very long Lovecraft short story, in which a series of slowly escalating events keeps occurring until something inevitably terrible happens. The other big story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" functions more like an actual novel, moving back and forth in time, developing its characters (even if they seem to be going from confused to more confused) and giving us an actual mystery to puzzle through as a local doctor attempts to figure out why young Charles Dexter Ward seems to have started acting so strangely, giving up all the stuff he used to like, taking on strange mannerisms and keeping some odd stuff in his lab, among other details. Could it have anything to do with his interest in the occult, perhaps causing him to tap into and awaken forces better left alone? Well, it isn't a case of bad fish, let's put it that way.

This one is intriguing because you're basically finding out what's happening at the same time the doctor is, although you have the benefit of being able to jump to the more likely conclusion long before he does only because you know you're reading a supernatural story and thus aren't expecting a normal explanation. The cat and mouse game between Dr Willett and Ward (or whatever Ward's become) with the former trying to figure out what is going on and what it means while the latter attempts to get everything together for whatever bizarre plan he has in mind, is creepy, at least until it becomes clearer to the reader what's happening before Willett has quite gotten there, meaning that the book feels like it runs a little longer than it needs to. It doesn't help that some of it is told in letters written in an extremely archaic style, which can be tiring. But the setpieces pretty much sell this one, the biggest being the exploration Willett takes into the house where Ward is staging his experiments. He outdoes himself in the freaky department here and it almost makes up for the rest of the book at times making you mutter "get to the point already". The story is also notable for having an actual ending instead of simply trailing off into the ether with a vague sense of disquiet.

With the big guns out of the way, the rest of the collection is a slight mixed bag. I liked "The Dreams in the Witch House" (even if no one else seems to) simply for its combination of really strange events that border on the insane (do you like crazed witches? do you like crazed witches that have giant evil rats as best friends? do you like it if both those things try to sacrifice children?) and the escalating sense of doom on the part of the protagonist as you and he realize that he's completely out of his league and simply walking away isn't going to get him out of the woods. It may not add up to much except sheer madness but boy, is that interesting imagery.

Speaking of interesting imagery, the rest of the book is taken up with stories about Randolph Carter, who is supposed to stand in for Lovecraft in some form. The best one is probably "The Statement of Randolph Carter" which seems to be taken from one of the author's dream and is actually short. Meanwhile, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the exact opposite of short and on some level is his attempt to out-Dunsany Lord Dunsany himself (who, according to T.E.D. Klein's introduction in the third volume, Lovecraft at one point had a big manly author-crush on) as Randolph Carter engages on a quest in the world of dreams that takes him through a variety of adventures in strange places. Unfortunately, I found the story more or less tedious . . . he doesn't have the sense of the mythical that Dunsany was able to convey (the closest contemporary equivalent I can think of is John Crowley), nor is his prose as effortlessly adorned as his hero's. Which means that Carter careens slowly from fantastic city to fantastic city without really getting involved anywhere, constantly getting rescued and with none of it adding up to all that much. If this was twenty pages it would be one thing but he insists on chugging on with this for over a hundred pages, with the theme not really even changing. He tries to go to a place, gets to a place and then it's over.

That leaves "The Silver Key" and "Son of the Silver Key" (just kidding, it's really called "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"), both of which feature Carter. The former seems to behold itself a bit more to dream logic, its contemplative as Carter drifts through scenes that may or may not be from his childhood . . . it's a nice mood piece and sets up the next story where a bunch of people are getting ready to divide up his estate while a swami tells everyone that he's still alive and explains what he's been up to. The framing device gives a bit more weight to the anchorless scenes set in the world of dreams and even if the whole thing doesn't have the heft the real mythos stories do, its also not a hundred pages so I can live with it.

Overall, this one is for the people who read volume one and wanted more, with the caveat that the best stuff was definitely in there. Lovecraft is an acquired taste, his prose is even more archaic than other writers even from that time tended to be and a lot of the stories tend to succeed more on atmosphere than anything else. However, that's hard to sustain and doesn't make them real memorable, even when a bunch of tales on the same theme are read right in a row. The title story and "Charles Dexter Ward" are probably essential, with the crazed witch house story and the Randolph Carter stuff acting as nice bonus material. Still, after a reading a number of them you may find that your day is not complete unless Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Which is fair.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just realized yesterday that I had the wrong edition of this marked on goodreads. I can't remember exactly when I read the fifth printing of this Arkham House edition, but it was probably not long after it was published around '85... which wasn't that long after I discovered the existence of HPL thanks to an interview I read with Big Steve King who mentioned him as an influence.

I believe I might have borrowed a dog-eared copy or two of those old paperbacks with Lovecraft stories to get my feet wet and then splurged (for a 16-year-old) and bought this hardcover as my first HPL book. Since I've basically read every piece of fiction he wrote, including most of his collaborations. ("In the Walls of Eryx" is one of my all-time favorite stories.)

No need to review this again; I'll just close with what I always think these days whenever AtMoM is mentioned:

O Mighty Cthulhu, I beseech thee - Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease have Guillermo del Toro finally get cracking on his movie adaptation of this.

[Marvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collects Lovecraft's three horror novels; the title work, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. There is also a group of well-chosen short stories including "The Dreams in the Witch-House" which may be one of Lovecraft's scariest. Of all the Lovecraft anthologies out there, this may be a good one for the Lovecraft beginner.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's odd how the titular story in this novel was the least good of the lot. Like half the story was them perfectly transcribing an entire species' cultural history from hieroglyphs they literally just found that day. The other stories were good though

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel and some short stories.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

No Old Ones shambling. Weird, atmospheric, stories hinting they do exist. Titular story is classic; traveler in wintery wasteland stumbles upon cavern, envisioning ancient, vastly intelligent, horrors. Traveler was meant to see what he did not want to see. Too bad del Torro could not film adapt; would have been good movie.
Various sojourners envision dark wonders by accident, though they were, mysteriously, drawn to malevolent forces beyond control. Lovecraft has no surcease, except death.

[Gian Marco · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to reread this at least every few years, and every time it gets to me. The enormity of man against the unfathomable forces of the universe. It's a chilling read every time.

Some would argue that it's a good starting point for reading Lovecraft, and while it's a reasonable opinion, I think that you can only appreciate how his style peaked here having read the rest of his work. It's a very mature long story, that gives the plot away slowly, and with delightful, increasing horror.

[Chuck McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautiful hardback edition of Arkham House's Att the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels is an excellent read and includes a number of absolute classics of Lovecraft's longer stories, including 'At the Mountains of Madness', 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward', 'The Dreams in the Witch-House', and more. The entire series to which this edition belongs is worth getting your hands on if you're a fan or collector of Lovecraft.

[Vera Temnyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

H.P Lovecraft is the bomb.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was another semi-random pick from the "1001 Books" list. Before reading it, I looked up a plot synopsis and was a bit worried that it would be too scary for me. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the book.

It's about an expedition to Antarctica where some strange things are discovered. The first part of the story tells about the actual expedition and was pretty interesting. There is a lot of detailed description of Antarctica and extremely cold weather scientific study, which might be too slow for some people. I liked it and was interested.

In the next part of the story, half of the team makes some interesting discoveries. I thought this part was very interesting too and, again, had a lot of detail. There definitely was some suspense throughout the entire middle third of the book, but I think that was more because I knew a bit about the story before reading it.

The last third had a lot of detailed and tied back to the Cthulhu mythos that HP Lovecraft is famous for. It was interesting and there were definitely a few somewhat eerie and suspenseful parts.

I was pleasantly surprised by the story. It was not as scary in a modern-day horror story some of way, but more suspenseful and eerie. I don't think I'll read any more Lovecraft, but I thought this story was worth the read.

[Chris Hawks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I checked this out from the library to get a taste of Lovecraft. It's an okay collection, spoiled mainly by the final four Randolph Carter stories--to be fair, the last story, Through the Gates of the Golden Key, isn't bad, but The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is so dreadfully dull that I took a pause in the middle of it to read another book for a month.

The first four stories, however, are great. And of those, the first two, At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward are outstanding. In fact, the jacket text called the latter "Lovecraft's most precisely-wrought work of horror" and I would have to agree. This collection is worth picking up for those two alone.

[Walt O'Hara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovecraft has a certain stylistic panache. I don't think I've ever encountered adjectives quite like the ones he managed to come up with with any other writer. HPL blows hot and cold with me. The man clearly had a unique voice and an amazing imagination, but every once in a while you get the sensation he's writing for a paycheck. In this particular collection, there are some gems- The titular story about discoveries in the Antarctic, the Case of Charles Dexter Ward and one or two others. What HPL lacked in a sense of pacing he made up for in clever word play and fantastic imagery. At the Mountains of Madness is one of the better collections of HPL stories.

[Chas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three truly impressive novellas are collected in this volume, the titular one soon to be a film by Guillermo Del Toro: "At the Mountains of Madness," a piece of horror-SF that's influence has been felt in everything from Michael Chabon's "Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay" to "Alien vs. Predator". "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" is perhaps overly long, but the Dr. Willett's subterranean journey is worth the read alone. Finally, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is a spellbinding literary explosion unlike anything Lovecraft had written before, a fantasy as memorable as anything by Lord Dunsany, whose work it most resembles.

[Chris Matney · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been decades since I read this book originally. It is a wonderful introduction to the Lovecraft canon. The first five tales including At The Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Shunned House hooked me years ago, and they still work their magic today. The writing is wonderfully lyric, dark and luscious. It is a book that I can fall into for hours. I am not a fan of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, although I can appreciate Lovecraft's intended effect. For some reason, I am not spellbound by his more abstract dream sequences. Overall, however, I highly recommend this book for anyone who ponders the Great Old Ones and our place in the universe.

[Anne]

I do believe we've read everything we're going to read in this, so I'm shuffling it along to the "read" shelf. (Unlike the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, I'm just going to go ahead and take fellow Society members' word that the last two suck.) I really have no idea what to rate this - I know I found things to amuse me in most stories (yes, surely?) but overall it would probably be stretching it to say I actually liked them. I mean, I can barely recall any of the details. So, I guess in this case zero stars = amusing bit only but overall mostly zzzzzzzzworhty

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you enjoy H.P. Lovecraft's stories, you'll love the Arkham House editions - they really add something to the presentation and experience. As long as you are willing to put up with Lovecraft's occasionally over-wrought prose and repetitions, it's a wonderfully fun "pulp horror" thrill. This volume contains Lovecraft's short novel (the title story) and my second-favorite of all his short stories, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward."

[the Skrauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious. Particularly terrifying is his short story "The Dream of the Witch House." Lovecraft's space gods seem somehow more evil than simple regular gods and demons.

The story "At the Mountains of Madness," ends with a terrifying escape in the air over antarctic mountains and the co-pilot screaming himself insane. Great macabre investigation into the mystery of the prehistoy of planet earth.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

i was totally floored by this. after so many years of dismissing lovecaft as a 'horror' writer, i finally picked this up because the title work kept appearing on so many science fiction reading lists. it is a extremely compelling, completely unique story and not in any way similar to the preconceived notions i had before reading.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the kindle book, without the other novels.

Some of the Old Ones are wakened. They annihilate the antarctic explorers who woke them and try to go home after a 500 million year nap or so. Their old slaves, the shoggoths, are waiting. And are they ever hungry.
Rip Van Winkle squared. & sort of a cautionary tale about poking around in things that are none of our business.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I enjoyed the book though some of the dreamcycle stories dragged on a little long for me. May have enjoyed them better if I had read the book straight through instead of as stories between other books I was reading at the same time.

[B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Classic. The style is very. . . dull and dense. My favorites were The Shunned House and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Imagine a textbook from the 1920's. Now insert dreamscapes and Elder Gods. Bam, Lovecraft.

Required reading for horror/fantasy aficionados and not much anyone else.

[Ricky Orr · Rating 2 out of 5]

This stories in this book were interesting, but difficult to read and hard to follow. Although written in the 1920s and early 1930s, Lovecraft's style of writing reminded me of books written years earlier.

[Krotpong · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of his best.

[Nancy Wagner · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read that Guillermo del Toro is planning to make a movie of it and it got me interested. I have read very little of HP Lovecraft, not sure why not.

[matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rated 5 stars primarily due to the novella "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", which is one of my favorite pieces by Lovecraft.

[Collin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most deceptive cover in the history of publishing, but a very nice intro to Lovecraftian novels.

[Mark Singer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential edition of HPL stories.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's always good to visit my old friend, Grandpa.