The Antarktos Cycle

Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu books

by Robert M. Price, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Johnson

Horror and Wonder at the Ends of the Earth Writers are drawn to the unreachable places of the Earth - to the greatest mountains and depths of the sea, the most barren deserts, and to the white frozen deserts surrounding the north and south poles. In our minds' eyes, the beauty and mystery of the ice descends from Poe to the present and into the future, an infinite realm of wonder.

Genres: Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraftian, Fantasy, Fiction, Short Stories, Weird Fiction

572 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1999

About the author

Robert McNair Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, asserting the Christ myth theory.

A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003. He has also written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by H.P. Lovecraft.

Reviews

[Forrest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Embellishments are, at times, welcome, as in the addition of Chipotle chili to dark chocolate (try a dash of Chipotle in your next hot chocolate). At other times, additions to existing works can be kitsch, even gauche. Such is the case here.

I love my Lovecraft, and At The Mountains of Madness is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. So when I saw that Chaosium was re-releasing The Antarktos Cycle (which was way out of my budget as a used paperback), I, for the first time ever, paid more than $10 for an E-book. I gladly paid, hoping to recapture and even elaborate on the magic I felt reading ATMOM the first several times through.

The book starts off promising, with Robert M. Price's excellent introduction: "Lovecraft's Cosmic History," which lays out in great detail the timelines of the cosmos, as envisioned by Lovecraft and influenced by the shared world-building he participated in with others, including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, et al. If you have any question as to where Lovecraft's stories, creatures, or the events he outlined fall, this is the essay to consult. Granted, it is rife with contradiction, as Lovecraft only had a tenuous grasp on the vastness of the Mythos he spawned, but Price does a good job of explaining the different possibility spaces that Lovecraft explored, without making excuses for the contradictions. This is an excellent essay for the Lovecraft scholar.

"Antarktos," an early poem by Lovecraft, starts the fiction ball rolling. It is a short piece, almost trite, but does set up an atmosphere that can't be called anything else but "Lovecraftian".

Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the first piece of prose fiction in the volume. To be honest, this is Poe at his most tedious. This novel is sometimes cited as an inspiration for Melville's utterly amazing Moby Dick, and it is apparent that this is true. Pym is to cargo shipping what Moby Dick is to whaling - everything you didn't want to know about how to pack a cargo hold and then some. Still, Poe presents a fairly solid piece of fiction here, with every deprivation and horror one would expect from a long journey at sea. And, as is always the case, Poe proves himself the master of making the reader feel claustrophobic. I may never stay under the waterline of a ship again.

John Taine's "The Greatest Adventure" is anything but. It is trite and hackneyed in all the worst ways. Take the low-points of pulp, all the warts and scars, compile them into one body, including failed attempts at forced humor and the worst mansplaining I've seen outside of Triplanetary and you've got this story. It was about a quarter of the way through this story that I began to question the wisdom of reading the rest of the volume, but this story is an obvious influence on ATMOM, so I suffered (and I mean SUFFERED) through it.

At the Mountains of Madness was next. You already know my feelings about this novella. Yes, it has its many weaknesses, but I love it.

"The Tomb of the Old Ones" was the absolute nadir of this volume. I have nothing good to say about it, so, for once, I'm going to take my mother's advice and say nothing more about it.

. . . No, I just can't help myself. This story sucked so badly it makes a black hole's pull seem weak in comparison. I kept waiting for the part when it was revealed that the narrator was insane or that the superhero-psychic crap was all a lark. Unfortunately, that moment never came. Thankfully, the ending of the story, after a looooong, painful slog, did.

At least Arthur C. Clarke's "At the Mountains of Murkiness" was supposed to be a joke. It made me chuckle a bit, but it wasn't laugh out loud funny. If you want Lovecraft pastiche, try Selections from H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter. Now *that* is funny!

"The Thing From Another World" might have worked as a great Twilight Zone episode *if* the Thing had actually been a macguffin. But, no, it was a real . . . thing. Further hurting the story was the fact that John W. Campbell, Jr. is enamored of adverbs and poor sentence structure. Reading this sometimes felt like listening to a toothless Welshman with a speech impediment (apologies to my toothless Welshmen with speech impediment friends out there. I know there's at least one of you. Well, at least the Welshman part).

John Glasby's "The Brooding City" was pretty much a photocopy job of every trope and adjective that Lovecraft ever used. It was uninspiring and unoriginal. Glasby tried to evoke Lovecraft, but failed to summon him.

"The Dreaming City," by Roger Johnson was really what I was hoping for from this anthology - a "Lovecraftian" story that was not lifted directly from the pages of Lovecraft and his kin, something with some originality of subject matter, but with the same feel of dread and foreboding that Lovecraft was so good at bringing out from the shadows.

Alas, it was too little, too late. I might purchase another of the Chaosium books, I might not. We'll see what happens when the mood strikes me. Then again, if the mood really strikes me, I'm most likely to just crack open a Lovecraft story and read it. Or, possibly, something by Mark Samuels or Thomas Ligotti, who also seem to "scratch that itch" when I need it.

Then again, there's nothing quite like the original, is there?

[Dvdlynch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This particular collection isn't quite the mixed bag that others in the Chaosium series have been. The first reason for the overall quality is the publication of two novel length stories: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by no less than Edgar Allen Poe and The Greatest Adventure by John Taine aka the mathematician E.T. Bell. Either of these title alone could have warranted a book all their own. The second reason is that editor Robert M. Price has kept the smug postmodernist twaddle that infects so many of his story introductions and essays to a minimum this time.

The Greatest Adventure is probably the crown jewel of this anthology for it's intelligent take on the 'enclave of dinosaurs at the north pole' pulp fiction trope. I will definitely be scouring e-book and used book emporiums looking for more of Mr. Bell's fiction and non-fiction work. Also included is Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness as the thematic center of the anthology. It has been 10 or so years since I have last read this, and I was stuck by how ineffective and well --goofy--this story is. The climactic scene has the narrator and his companion using a flock of blind ablino cave penguins as cover to evade pursuit by the shoggoths, who are revealed to be large masses on semi-sentient pudding with bad attitudes and a penchant for bird calls (Tekeli-li! indeed!)

Rounding out the book are the poem Antarktos (from Lovecraft's 'Fungi from Yuggoth'), 'The Sphinx of the Ice Fields' (so-so sequel to Pym by Jules Verne), 'The Tomb of the Old Ones' by Colin Wilson (another interesting novella length work), 'At the Mountains of Murkiness' by Arthur C. Clarke (a short Lovecraft satire), John W. Campbell, Jr.'s classic The Thing from Another World (better than Howard Hawkes but not as good as John Carpenter) and two Lovecraft pastiches apparently culled from the Crypt of Cthulhu slush pile: The Brooding City (very bad) and The Dreaming City(moderately good).

[Brian Hollingsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing read, made me shiver the summer i read it! I was really impressed with the selection of frozen horror stories that the editor chose to frame with Lovecraft's seminal piece 'At the Mountains of Madness'.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was both excited and slightly intimidated when I picked up this Chaosium collection. I have a great respect for Price's editorial abilities, and have enjoyed his commentary in previous volumes in this series. But this book is LONG (and the font size is tiny...). Also, it contains one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, "At the Mountains of Madness." Overall, now that I've survived the horror(s) inside, I think this is possibly the most consistently high-quality collection in the series...but there are also some problems with it. Price again does a good job in providing access to some rare and (to me) unknown works that likely influenced Lovecraft's story. However, while is commentaries in other volumes are quite erudite, I found the ones in this volume wanting (this is perhaps because the other volumes usually center around a figure from the HPL mythos, while this one centers around locations). I also think it was not necessary to include ALL of Poe's "Arthur Gordon Pym," when really the only things that are important are the last few chapters. (For most of that work, Poe is obviously searching for ways to keep the narrative going so it can reach short novel length; consequently, most of the work is quite tedious and repetitive and focused on the sea, not exactly what Poe was best at portraying. He should have stuck to short fiction.) Verne's continuation of Poe's story, while a curiosity, really strays quite far from the outre elements of Poe's last few pages and thus negates the effect of them (and makes his own work suffer thereby). The Taine novel "The Greatest Adventure" is fairly good--in the ideas department anyway; he had the unfortunate tendency to want to inject inappropriate humorous elements into something that could have been quite good otherwise (sort of like everything Robert W. Chambers wrote EXCEPT the excellent _The Yellow Sign_). The best thing in this book (aside from Lovecraft's story) is Roger Johnson's "The Dreaming City" which is great fun and is the first mythos story I believe I have read that deals with how "nonEuclidean geometry" would actually appear and affect human consciousness in a realistic way.

Aside from these minor quibbles, this is a very good collection, and one which mythos enthusiasts should read.

[Bryan Whitehead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here’s something you don’t see everyday: an anthology featuring several novella-length works. The cornerstone of the collection is Lovecraft’s classic “At the Mountains of Madness,” a personal favorite. Other works come before and after Lovecraft’s novella, including Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” – a first-time read for me – and “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr., the basis for one of my favorite movies. Though it’s nice to have such long, quality works assembled in one place, there are also drawbacks to anthologizing novellas. For example, I found John Taine’s “The Greatest Adventure” and Colin Wilson’s “The Tomb of the Old Ones” tedious and uninspiring, riddled with pulp fiction clichés and editing mistakes (particularly in Taine’s piece). While I appreciate the importance of including such works, I wish they’d been as easy to get through as the shorter stuff that usually populates horror anthologies (or at the very least abridged, as the translator and/or editor did to the Jules Verne entry). I was also a little annoyed by the last two stories, which seemed only remotely related to the book’s overall motif. Weak spots aside, I found this collection enjoyable reading. However, I can’t say whether a person will less pre-existing affection for Antarctic-themed horror stories would derive a similar level of pleasure from the experience.

[Daniel Cicero · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've long been a fan of the Call of Cthulhu Fiction series from Chaosium and this volume is one of the best ones. Perhaps a small thing, but the order of the stories guides the reader. I'd never read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket before. It's referenced in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, so it was very interesting to see the ideas Lovecraft lifted from it. Poe's story moves slowly, as stories of the time did, but it's well worth the time. The second story, The Greatest Adventure, is much more modern, but still slow moving. This 1929 story of a small group of adventurers traveling to the most remote spots on earth and finding horrors beyond their comprehension is a very early example of the genre and even includes an intrepid female pilot. Lots of flying around, lighting off dynamite and encounters with giant monsters. Only then does At the Mountains of Madness come along and, although I've read the story several times, reading it again, with the other two stories fresh in my mind gave me a new appreciation of just how good it is. The highlight for me was the fourth story, The Thing from Another World. It's the story upon which The Thing movies were based, but in its original 1938 form. It's John W. Campbell at his best and thoroughly enjoyable.

[Ευθυμία Δεσποτάκη]

~Introduction: Lovecraft's Cosmic History—by Robert M. Price
~Antarktos—by H.P. Lovecraft
ν-The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket—by Edgar Allen Poe
ν-The Greatest Adventure—by John Taine
ν-At The Mountains Of Madness—by H.P. Lovecraft
ν-The Tomb Of The Old Ones—by Colin Wilson
~At The Mountains Of Murkiness—by Arthur C. Clarke
?-The Thing From Another World—by John W. Campbell Jr.
?-The Brooding City—by John S. Glasby
?-The Dreaming City—by Roger Johnson

Από αυτόν τον τόμο έχω διαβάσει στο παρελθόν όλα τα ν, και δεν ξέρω αν έχω διαβάσει όλα τα ?

Από τα διαβασμένα, το τελευταίο που διάβασα ήταν το The Tomb Of The Old Ones, σε licenced audiobook από το αξιόλογο κανάλι HorrorBabble. Αξιοπρεπές κείμενο, λίγο πιο φλύαρο απ' όσο θα το ήθελα, με πολύ διασκεδαστική βιβλιογραφία, που ανακατεύει Ντένιγκεν, Χάπγκουντ, Λάβκραφτ και Πλάτωνα.

[The Artificer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book deserves about 2.75 stars.

If you're a dedicated mythos fan, you've probably read most of this already.
If you're not, you probably will be bored to tears.

Worth the buy (currently OOP, but can be found without too much trouble or expense)
if you're a completionist, otherwise there are much better collections to spend your money on.