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The Great White Space
Frederick Plowright, a well-known scientific photographer, is recruited by Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale to accompany his research team in search of “The Great White Space,” described in ancient and arcane texts as a portal leading to the extremities of the universe. Plowright, Scarsdale, and the rest of their crew embark on the Great Northern Expedition, traversing a terrifying and desolate landscape to the Black Mountains, where a passageway hundreds of feet high leads to a lost city miles below the surface of the earth. But the unsettling discoveries they make there are only a precursor of the true horror to follow. For the doorway of the Great White Space opens both ways, and something unspeakably evil has crossed over—a horrifying abomination that does not intend to let any of them return to the surface alive . . .
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First published January 1, 1975
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About the author
Basil Copper
185 books41 followersBasil Copper was an English writer and former journalist and newspaper editor. He has written over 50 books and scripts. In addition to fantasy and horror, Copper is known for his series of Solar Pons stories continuing the character created by August Derleth.
Copper edited a 1982 two-volume omnibus collection of Derleth's stories of the 'Pontine' canon, published by Arkham House, a publishing firm founded by Derleth himself and chiefly publishing weird fiction (such as Cthulhu Mythos tales); in that edition, Copper "edited" most of the tales in ways that many Pontine aficionados found objectionable[citation needed]. A later omnibus, The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition, was issued in 2000 under the imprint of Mycroft & Moran (a name which is itself a Holmesian jest).
He also wrote the long-running hard-boiled detective stories of "Mike Faraday" (58 novels from 1966 to 1988).
Copper has received many honours in recent years. In 1979, the Mark Twain Society of America elected him a Knight of Mark Twain for his outstanding "contribution to modern fiction", while the Praed Street Irregulars have twice honoured him for his work on the Solar Pons series. He has been a member of the Crime Writer's Association for over thirty years, serving as chairman in 1981/82 and on its committee for a total of seven years.
In early 2008, a bio-bibliography was published on him: Basil Copper: A Life in Books, compiled and edited by Stephen Jones.
In March 2010, Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper was launched at the Brighton World Horror Convention as a two-volume set by PS Publishing.
Copper edited a 1982 two-volume omnibus collection of Derleth's stories of the 'Pontine' canon, published by Arkham House, a publishing firm founded by Derleth himself and chiefly publishing weird fiction (such as Cthulhu Mythos tales); in that edition, Copper "edited" most of the tales in ways that many Pontine aficionados found objectionable[citation needed]. A later omnibus, The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition, was issued in 2000 under the imprint of Mycroft & Moran (a name which is itself a Holmesian jest).
He also wrote the long-running hard-boiled detective stories of "Mike Faraday" (58 novels from 1966 to 1988).
Copper has received many honours in recent years. In 1979, the Mark Twain Society of America elected him a Knight of Mark Twain for his outstanding "contribution to modern fiction", while the Praed Street Irregulars have twice honoured him for his work on the Solar Pons series. He has been a member of the Crime Writer's Association for over thirty years, serving as chairman in 1981/82 and on its committee for a total of seven years.
In early 2008, a bio-bibliography was published on him: Basil Copper: A Life in Books, compiled and edited by Stephen Jones.
In March 2010, Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper was launched at the Brighton World Horror Convention as a two-volume set by PS Publishing.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
December 3, 2018
Largely a good old-school cosmic horror tale, as long as one allows for a novel that is better thought of as in the style of Jules Verne but wearing a eldritch mask. The novel's genetic code is about 70% Kooky Things that Occur when White Euros Romp through Foreign Lands with only about 30% left for Egads, There's an Elder Thing Looking at Me. Depending on why you pick up this novel - meaning whether or not you have been told this is primarily a horror novel - you will be variously thrilled or disappointed.
It is actually, perhaps, the great downside to this book that the cover blurb does not, as it seems at a glance, merely sum up the customary set-up but in fact covers a good 3/4s of the plot, maybe closer to 5/6s. Sure, it is a short novel, but it is one really full of travel discussions and long treks down long caves. If you find yourself waiting for the promise the blurb lays out to show up and then get cracking, then you had better be able to console yourself in the meantime with repetitive descriptions of hard basalt and smooth corridors and head lamps and underground water sources and hard basalt and inexplicable winds blowing from the north and losing track of time and custom built tractors and expedition photography and elephant guns and hard basalt and dim phosphorescence and strange mists and weird geometries and hard basalt and tall ceilings and village women who have sex with lots of dudes while always having one nipple exposed.*
Structurally, I would consider this a novel worth about 2.5 stars or so. The problem with aping the old classics such as [Length of Time or Distance] {in | across | under | through | against | over} [Place] is that those stories have been told.** There has already been that novel (a couple of that novel, even) about an underground waterways down hidden caves found through ancient writings and folks having to flee through dark caverns. Revisiting those old classics is mostly worth it when you want to put a spin upon it. I guess that's exactly Copper*** was up to with the marrying of the concept to Lovecraftian trope. That was his post-mod trapping. So...wait, what am I complaining about, again?
Though part of me found the book to be quite tedious (and it is under 200 pages, too...man), when it gets down to brass tacks I enjoyed the book way more as a whole than I enjoyed any particular aspect of the book. Wait, that's not quite true. The horror meets science fiction touches in impossibly long tunnels and the hints of the underground city are actually pretty sweet. Also, they are prescient for a lot of writing that showed up later...bits of Event Horizon and House of Leaves and Laird Barron can be spotted...maybe some of the Roger Corman 80s movies...others. It is just so brief and so very nearly all at once that you have been lulled into nothing much happening and then...bam...strange tentacled things and hopping things show up and folks get their dice and miniatures out and start rolling for initiative and checking how many grenades they have left in their backpacks and calculating ranged combat damage modifiers and counting up medkits. That kind of thing. It hits like a wrecking ball, the barely-there transition souring the impact. Then, the reasoning behind the expedition (both the given one and the later semi-implied one) feels so isolated from the whole that it is hard to reconcile the ending of the story with the parts that precede it.
For all my back and forth complaints and praise, the final score is a fairly solid 4 out of 5 stars. I really liked it. As a novel of ideas, it sings. As a novel that gets you in the spine in a couple of places, it does quite well when it means to. Maybe don't read it right before bedtime or before you have had your cup of tea or anything, but there is a lot of good to be had, here. If nothing else, take it as someone filling in the gaps that Lovecraft's own writings might have when it comes to stuff like actually discussing expedition planning and technology. Or take it as a different, for its time, tweaking of an old formula (by mixing another old formula into it). Or just...you know...maybe you like really long, dark caves. There's nothing wrong with that.
* That last one happens before they get to the caves, by the way, so no...it's not like the guys stumble upon an underground race of bangable princesses and set-about....vanquishing... Yes, I know, Edgar Rice Burroughs would be soooo disappointed.
** Yes, this book is itself 40+ years old, but people had already been putting "new spins on old tales" by this point. I mean, it came out two years after The Princess Bride.
*** BONUS FACT: For years I've been reading and saying Basil Copper's name as Basil Cooper and now I am pretty sure the Mandela Effect is real.
It is actually, perhaps, the great downside to this book that the cover blurb does not, as it seems at a glance, merely sum up the customary set-up but in fact covers a good 3/4s of the plot, maybe closer to 5/6s. Sure, it is a short novel, but it is one really full of travel discussions and long treks down long caves. If you find yourself waiting for the promise the blurb lays out to show up and then get cracking, then you had better be able to console yourself in the meantime with repetitive descriptions of hard basalt and smooth corridors and head lamps and underground water sources and hard basalt and inexplicable winds blowing from the north and losing track of time and custom built tractors and expedition photography and elephant guns and hard basalt and dim phosphorescence and strange mists and weird geometries and hard basalt and tall ceilings and village women who have sex with lots of dudes while always having one nipple exposed.*
Structurally, I would consider this a novel worth about 2.5 stars or so. The problem with aping the old classics such as [Length of Time or Distance] {in | across | under | through | against | over} [Place] is that those stories have been told.** There has already been that novel (a couple of that novel, even) about an underground waterways down hidden caves found through ancient writings and folks having to flee through dark caverns. Revisiting those old classics is mostly worth it when you want to put a spin upon it. I guess that's exactly Copper*** was up to with the marrying of the concept to Lovecraftian trope. That was his post-mod trapping. So...wait, what am I complaining about, again?
Though part of me found the book to be quite tedious (and it is under 200 pages, too...man), when it gets down to brass tacks I enjoyed the book way more as a whole than I enjoyed any particular aspect of the book. Wait, that's not quite true. The horror meets science fiction touches in impossibly long tunnels and the hints of the underground city are actually pretty sweet. Also, they are prescient for a lot of writing that showed up later...bits of Event Horizon and House of Leaves and Laird Barron can be spotted...maybe some of the Roger Corman 80s movies...others. It is just so brief and so very nearly all at once that you have been lulled into nothing much happening and then...bam...strange tentacled things and hopping things show up and folks get their dice and miniatures out and start rolling for initiative and checking how many grenades they have left in their backpacks and calculating ranged combat damage modifiers and counting up medkits. That kind of thing. It hits like a wrecking ball, the barely-there transition souring the impact. Then, the reasoning behind the expedition (both the given one and the later semi-implied one) feels so isolated from the whole that it is hard to reconcile the ending of the story with the parts that precede it.
For all my back and forth complaints and praise, the final score is a fairly solid 4 out of 5 stars. I really liked it. As a novel of ideas, it sings. As a novel that gets you in the spine in a couple of places, it does quite well when it means to. Maybe don't read it right before bedtime or before you have had your cup of tea or anything, but there is a lot of good to be had, here. If nothing else, take it as someone filling in the gaps that Lovecraft's own writings might have when it comes to stuff like actually discussing expedition planning and technology. Or take it as a different, for its time, tweaking of an old formula (by mixing another old formula into it). Or just...you know...maybe you like really long, dark caves. There's nothing wrong with that.
* That last one happens before they get to the caves, by the way, so no...it's not like the guys stumble upon an underground race of bangable princesses and set-about....vanquishing... Yes, I know, Edgar Rice Burroughs would be soooo disappointed.
** Yes, this book is itself 40+ years old, but people had already been putting "new spins on old tales" by this point. I mean, it came out two years after The Princess Bride.
*** BONUS FACT: For years I've been reading and saying Basil Copper's name as Basil Cooper and now I am pretty sure the Mandela Effect is real.
December 30, 2015
Copper does Lovecraft, but real classy like. this retread of At the Mountains of Madness does a fairly good job but I prefer intense, excitable Lovecraft to dry, classy Copper.
October 22, 2020
The short review of the book is - the author tries to do a Lovecraft and moderately succeeds. The feel is there: the chills are not.
A group of four explorer scientists, under the leadership of Clark Ashton Scarsdale, along with the photographer Plowright, the first person narrator of the novel, travel to the "Black Mountains" (an unmentioned location - though the clues given hint at somewhere in Mongolia) to discover the "ancient city of Croth" as described in the esoteric book, The Ethics of Ygor. There, as is the fate of all adventurers on Lovecraftian quests, they meet with an unmentionable doom with only Plowright escaping (no, these are not spoilers, the sad fate of the expedition is mentioned at the outset); and he wants to place the facts before an incredulous humanity.
This is a competently written novel, very readable and all - but it runs on for too long, IMO. The story is only maximum novella-length, and Copper stretches it out with boring and repetitive descriptions of the explorers setting up camp, having food, and discussing - so much so that when the action comes, it is too little, too late. And you will be frightened only if you are the kind of person who gets the heebie-jeebies by someone jumping out from behind the door and shouting "boo"!
A group of four explorer scientists, under the leadership of Clark Ashton Scarsdale, along with the photographer Plowright, the first person narrator of the novel, travel to the "Black Mountains" (an unmentioned location - though the clues given hint at somewhere in Mongolia) to discover the "ancient city of Croth" as described in the esoteric book, The Ethics of Ygor. There, as is the fate of all adventurers on Lovecraftian quests, they meet with an unmentionable doom with only Plowright escaping (no, these are not spoilers, the sad fate of the expedition is mentioned at the outset); and he wants to place the facts before an incredulous humanity.
This is a competently written novel, very readable and all - but it runs on for too long, IMO. The story is only maximum novella-length, and Copper stretches it out with boring and repetitive descriptions of the explorers setting up camp, having food, and discussing - so much so that when the action comes, it is too little, too late. And you will be frightened only if you are the kind of person who gets the heebie-jeebies by someone jumping out from behind the door and shouting "boo"!
March 10, 2022
As an homage to Lovecraft and CAS, this is... okay. It's a turn of last century -I think- Boy's Own adventure -though written in the seventies- into a cyclopean cave system somewhere in Asia, with bespoke -and suspiciously advanced- tractors as transport and men's men as characters. It ends with some brain-sucking space aliens, an inter-dimensional gate, and lobbed grenades. And, of course, sentences IN CAPITALS.
Copper tries for the style of Lovecraft, but doesn't really achieve it - The Great White Space is solid enough, but rather plodding and stilted. It lacks the enthusiasms, the OTT, the imagination, the dark wonder, that lifts Lovecraft -and CAS- somewhere special. But it does get the job done, and kept me reading to the end.
If you're after something that's reminiscent of HPL and CAS, there are worse places to go than TGWS - it's quite short (though would have worked better as a novella), and the numbers are almost all followed except the most important: though some have touted it as such, Cosmic Horror this ain't.
Copper tries for the style of Lovecraft, but doesn't really achieve it - The Great White Space is solid enough, but rather plodding and stilted. It lacks the enthusiasms, the OTT, the imagination, the dark wonder, that lifts Lovecraft -and CAS- somewhere special. But it does get the job done, and kept me reading to the end.
If you're after something that's reminiscent of HPL and CAS, there are worse places to go than TGWS - it's quite short (though would have worked better as a novella), and the numbers are almost all followed except the most important: though some have touted it as such, Cosmic Horror this ain't.
December 26, 2024
I wouldn't say The Great White Space is a waste of your time, but it's underwhelming. The premise should be familiar to any reader of early 20th century adventure fiction, a group of highly learned, middle-aged men embark on an expedition into a mysterious, underground city. In this case mind-warping horrors await. The first half of the novel details minutely their preparations and the two pit stops they make, so to speak, on the way to the fictional Black Mountains (no, not the ones in either Wales or the US). It's narrated in a rather dry, formal manner I've come to associate with early 20th century fiction, perhaps hearkening to the likes of Lovecraft or Blackwood, though I felt that it came off as noticeably affected. Characterisation is predictably thin, not very unusual for a (short) novel in the genre, but considering the sheer length of the preamble I would've expected there to be more. Nearly half of the novel is devoted to the logistics of the operation, by page 70 I'd had more than enough of the tractors and their long, slow progress aboveground, as well as the division and description of labour. The two isolated villages they stopped at ultimately didn't amount to much in terms of story development. It also seemed that Scarsdale, the leader of the expedition, was being needlessly coy about its nature. (I say needlessly, because the book is quite lacking in payoff. The suspense was built well enough.)
Where the book finally took off was the underground cave system. Without spoiling anything, it turned out that the voyage in the dark was remarkably interesting, if not exactly innovative if you're familiar with any sort of archaeology narrative (either serious, or the whips-and-safari-hats kind). I wish the characters had been a little more curious or forthcoming, so my own curiosity could be sated. On the cosmic horror front, things are simultaneously too on-the-nose and obscured. I don't think the author set out to do anything new.
On the bright side, I now know what 'monadelphous' means.
Where the book finally took off was the underground cave system. Without spoiling anything, it turned out that the voyage in the dark was remarkably interesting, if not exactly innovative if you're familiar with any sort of archaeology narrative (either serious, or the whips-and-safari-hats kind). I wish the characters had been a little more curious or forthcoming, so my own curiosity could be sated. On the cosmic horror front, things are simultaneously too on-the-nose and obscured. I don't think the author set out to do anything new.
On the bright side, I now know what 'monadelphous' means.
March 22, 2016
H.P. Lovecraft not only introduced a fundamentally new genre of horror — “cosmic horror” — but inspired generations of writers who have built on his ideas and taken them in interesting new directions.
Valancourt Books recently released a new edition of The Great White Space (1974) by Basil Copper. I snapped it up right away and devoured it (metaphorically, of course) over the course of a day.
Basil Copper (1924-April 2013) was an incredibly prolific author who wrote novels and short stories in horror and mystery. His first professionally published story appeared in 1964, a horror story titled “The Spider.” He would go on to have a long relationship with the classic Lovecraftian publisher Arkham House, which curiously did not publish his 1974 ‘Space.
The Great White Space is a wonderful novel of cosmic horror, very much reminiscent of Lovecraft’s classic At the Mountains of Madness (with shades of The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Shadow Out of Time and a few other stories). It is one of the best Lovecraft stories I’ve read which wasn’t written by Lovecraft himself!
Read the whole review.
Valancourt Books recently released a new edition of The Great White Space (1974) by Basil Copper. I snapped it up right away and devoured it (metaphorically, of course) over the course of a day.
Basil Copper (1924-April 2013) was an incredibly prolific author who wrote novels and short stories in horror and mystery. His first professionally published story appeared in 1964, a horror story titled “The Spider.” He would go on to have a long relationship with the classic Lovecraftian publisher Arkham House, which curiously did not publish his 1974 ‘Space.
The Great White Space is a wonderful novel of cosmic horror, very much reminiscent of Lovecraft’s classic At the Mountains of Madness (with shades of The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Shadow Out of Time and a few other stories). It is one of the best Lovecraft stories I’ve read which wasn’t written by Lovecraft himself!
Read the whole review.
May 18, 2025
Not very impressed! There just wasn’t any kind of creepy atmosphere imo, most of the novel was just their preparations and travelogue, then the aliens turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. And a lot of it was quite preposterous! Why were the aliens seemingly so dumb? How could multiple 50ft life forms be so easily killed with some grenades!? There was a fun little twist however, but it wasn’t that much fun!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 11, 2024
At the Mountains of Madness by way of Jules Verne. If you skipped the first page with the obligatory "though my mind is shattered I must warn humanity etc. etc.," you could easily go 50 pages before realizing this is a horror novel. Much emphasis is placed on the planning and execution of the expedition to a secret tunnel system under an ambiguously located mountain range, not to mention the actual travel there. The buildup of dread is extremely gradual, with regular repetition of the warm wind from the north and the sensation of drum beating. Things start ramping up on approach to the (literally) explosive finale, and there are some gruesome images,
While the writing and pacing is superior in several ways to Lovecraft's original, with an oppressive atmosphere, and some actual characters (the indomitable scientist-explorer Clark Ashton Scarsdale and his peevish colleague Van Damm), in the end Lovecraft's wins out on the whole. The Great White Space's conclusion offers nothing but a brief creature-feature and a twist that doesn't change that much looking back: Compare this with Lovecraft's genuinely surprising moral-viewpoint twist, and the concept of an alien precursor civilization that was genuinely new at the time. In fact, it may be the earliest treatment of the subject, as it predates even the first non-retrofitted Lensman books. I suppose there's an argument to made that Blavatsky, or even Hesiod, originated the idea, not to mention the Roman Empire, but I feel there is a qualitative difference between religious and science fictional treatments of the concept.
Copper also goes in the opposite direction in exposition. If Lovecraft's story was all excessive explanation, Copper's is all image and mystery. No answer for anything that the expedition encounters is ever provided (excepting the city of Croth's book-projector), and we don't even get any excerpts from Scarsdale's guidebook, The Ethics of Ygor. The narrator remains as in the dark as we the readers, and in fact remarks regularly that every other member of the expedition seems to know more than him. This would be totally fine, but the things encountered never push the boundary of weirdness where explanation comes to seem superfluous. Even the Great White Space itself is too straightforward, I ended up looking back more fondly on the early segments where the crew were puttering about in the more ambiguously menacing cities of Zak and Nylstrom. It all gives the impression that there is some explanation tying it all together, but that even if we had it, it would be pretty pedestrian.
Overall, a bit of a disappointment, but short enough and not so monotonous that I would say I truly hated it.
One Adrian M. Kleinbergen wrote an unauthorized sequel, Return to the Great White Space available print on demand, who knows if it's any good.
While the writing and pacing is superior in several ways to Lovecraft's original, with an oppressive atmosphere, and some actual characters (the indomitable scientist-explorer Clark Ashton Scarsdale and his peevish colleague Van Damm), in the end Lovecraft's wins out on the whole. The Great White Space's conclusion offers nothing but a brief creature-feature and a twist that doesn't change that much looking back: Compare this with Lovecraft's genuinely surprising moral-viewpoint twist, and the concept of an alien precursor civilization that was genuinely new at the time. In fact, it may be the earliest treatment of the subject, as it predates even the first non-retrofitted Lensman books. I suppose there's an argument to made that Blavatsky, or even Hesiod, originated the idea, not to mention the Roman Empire, but I feel there is a qualitative difference between religious and science fictional treatments of the concept.
Copper also goes in the opposite direction in exposition. If Lovecraft's story was all excessive explanation, Copper's is all image and mystery. No answer for anything that the expedition encounters is ever provided (excepting the city of Croth's book-projector), and we don't even get any excerpts from Scarsdale's guidebook, The Ethics of Ygor. The narrator remains as in the dark as we the readers, and in fact remarks regularly that every other member of the expedition seems to know more than him. This would be totally fine, but the things encountered never push the boundary of weirdness where explanation comes to seem superfluous. Even the Great White Space itself is too straightforward, I ended up looking back more fondly on the early segments where the crew were puttering about in the more ambiguously menacing cities of Zak and Nylstrom. It all gives the impression that there is some explanation tying it all together, but that even if we had it, it would be pretty pedestrian.
Overall, a bit of a disappointment, but short enough and not so monotonous that I would say I truly hated it.
One Adrian M. Kleinbergen wrote an unauthorized sequel, Return to the Great White Space available print on demand, who knows if it's any good.
April 18, 2014
Rather turgid beginning, but once the expedition begins, this was a quick and fun read. Some really good Lovecraftian tropes, though sometimes it is a little too trite...Clark Ashton Scarsdale? Overall, I enjoyed this novel very much though. I have had it sitting on my shelves for years and never felt much of a desire to read it until recently, wish I had discovered it sooner. I am looking forward to reading August Derleth's Solar Pons books and the continuations by Basil Cooper.
July 16, 2023
Yay! This was great. If you are into old pulp like King Solomon’s Mines but wished it had cosmic horror this is for you. The pace is slow, but it has a solid build of tension and keeps on building to a delightfully raucous climax.
The first third is solidly under the influence of Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard. Classic white British dudes go on an expedition to a foreign country. To its benefit he obscures the real world locations so it doesn’t fall into weird misrepresentations. It’s just a couple of “exotic” locations. Not ideal, but not classically offensive either. Though the title, out of context of the content of the book, does feel like a decision that people wouldn’t make today.
The second act slowly transitions from classical boys life pulp to smoopy weird stories faire. You have to be excited about traveling in creepy otherworldly caves and fascinated by traditional lost cities concepts for this to keep you engaged; which hit a very specific target for me.
Then the end becomes kind of bonkers. His adoration of Lovecraft is undeniable.
It’s a book of ideas and procedures rather than character development so you can feel the burden of pastiche. Despite the fact that it was written in the early 70s, it’s intended to feel like classic pulp, and while it succeeds, being so beholden to the style meant that Copper didn’t use as many contemporary techniques to build characters. It doesn’t ruin the book for me, but it does make me wish he’d padded the book with a bit more character interaction instead of all the descriptions of the hardness of the stone walls in the cave.
All in all a very fun read if you like antiquated adventure stories spiced by oogly googly monsters and explosions.
The first third is solidly under the influence of Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard. Classic white British dudes go on an expedition to a foreign country. To its benefit he obscures the real world locations so it doesn’t fall into weird misrepresentations. It’s just a couple of “exotic” locations. Not ideal, but not classically offensive either. Though the title, out of context of the content of the book, does feel like a decision that people wouldn’t make today.
The second act slowly transitions from classical boys life pulp to smoopy weird stories faire. You have to be excited about traveling in creepy otherworldly caves and fascinated by traditional lost cities concepts for this to keep you engaged; which hit a very specific target for me.
Then the end becomes kind of bonkers. His adoration of Lovecraft is undeniable.
It’s a book of ideas and procedures rather than character development so you can feel the burden of pastiche. Despite the fact that it was written in the early 70s, it’s intended to feel like classic pulp, and while it succeeds, being so beholden to the style meant that Copper didn’t use as many contemporary techniques to build characters. It doesn’t ruin the book for me, but it does make me wish he’d padded the book with a bit more character interaction instead of all the descriptions of the hardness of the stone walls in the cave.
All in all a very fun read if you like antiquated adventure stories spiced by oogly googly monsters and explosions.
December 28, 2024
For those of you who have read everything written by the great H. P. Lovecraft but are still hankering for another solid dose of cosmic horror and tentacled monstrosities, hoo boy, have I got a doozy for you! Although written four decades after the so-called "Sage of Providence" dominated the field of weird fiction in the 1930s, this book --Basil Copper's "The Great White Space"--is such a convincing pastiche that all fans of the genre should be left happily grinning nevertheless. More on the novel's similarities to Lovecraft's work, in particular his classic 1936 novella "At the Mountains of Madness," in a moment.
"The Great White Space" was originally released in 1974 as a hardcover book by the British publisher Robert Hale, with cover art by Colin Andrews. A year later, St. Martin's Press, here in the U.S., came out with its own hardcover edition, but featuring the same Andrews cover art. In 1976, also in the U.S., Manor Books issued the novel in paperback (with a very freaky cover by Bob Larkin), and in 1980, Sphere Books in England came out with its own paperback, cover by Terry Oakes. The book would then go OOPs (out of prints) for 22 years, till the German publisher Festa revived it in 2002 under the misleading title "Die Eisholle" ("The Ice Hell"), and with cover art by the illustrator professionally known as Babbarammdass (aka Hanno von Bran). And finally, for readers today, there is the trade-sized paperback released by Valancourt Books in 2013, with its faithful cover art by Eric Robertson and an introduction by horror authority Stephen Jones.
Now, before diving into the myriad wonders to be encountered in this volume, a quick word on the author himself. Basil Frederick Albert Copper was born in London in 1924. Today, Copper is assuredly best known for three very different literary endeavors. First, he was the author of no fewer than 52 novels centering on Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, written from 1966 to 1988. He also continued the character of Solar Pons, created by Lovecraft champion and Arkham House founder August Derleth, in seven collections of short stories and one novel. And last but certainly not least, he authored six novels and 10 collections that dealt with weird, cosmic and supernatural horror. Copper ultimately passed away in 2013 at age 89.
His very first novel of weird and cosmic horror, "The Great White Space" is narrated to us by Frederick (same spelling as Copper's middle name, right?) Plowright, a professional photographer and filmmaker who had achieved some renown by having accompanied several explorers on rather hazardous journeys. Still in his mid-30s at the time of his narrative, Plowright, we are told, is currently a broken man; the sole survivor of the so-called "Great Northern Expedition" of (circa) 1934, the tragic events of which are given to us in some detail. The photographer, we learn, had been contacted by no less a figure than Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale, who had convinced the younger man to join him in his next venture. Several years earlier, Scarsdale had penetrated a cave system somewhere in the neighborhood of Tibet but had been forced to turn back after encountering a vast subterranean lake. A student of esoteric and arcane lore, Scarsdale now hoped to discover wondrous things on the other side of that lake, and this time would come prepared with four tractors (more like enormous tanks, we soon discover) and collapsible rubber rafts...not to mention a small army's worth of armaments. Another professor of hidden knowledge, as well as an engineer and geologist, Cornelius Van Damm, in addition to Norman Holden (historian) and Geoffrey Prescott (linguist and Egyptologist), would be accompanying them; a team of five to penetrate a subterranean area where no man had trod before.
And so, Plowright tells us, after an intensive few weeks of training at handling the tanks and other gear at the professor's temporary home in Surrey, the quintet had indeed set off by ship. It had taken them many weeks to reach the isolated village of Zak, acquire a dwarfish and treacherous guide named Zalor, arrive at an even more primitive village called Nylstrom, cross a burning desert and the Plain of Darkness to reach their ultimate destination, the Black Mountains. There, Scarsdale had led the men to the ancient, 500-foot-high doorway that had been carved into the mountainside, guarded by a hieroglyph-covered stone that forbade entry. But feeling secure in their rolling fortresses, the men had of course proceeded. They had arrived at the underground lake (85 miles into the mountain system and five miles beneath it!), made a safe transit across it in their rubber rafts, and then discovered numerous wonders: a gallery of the embalmed dead; an ancient and seemingly abandoned city; and, most horrible of all, the Great White Space, an area of palpitating, resounding light that acted as nothing less than a portal to the stars! And through that blinding and deafening zone of incandescent light had emerged nightmarish shapes that had proven to be the undoing of the Great Northern Expedition...to put it very mildly!
As you may have already discerned, "The Great White Space" really is something of a must-read for all fans of cosmic horror, sci-fi, lost-world adventure novels, and especially H. P. Lovecraft. As mentioned, it is truly an excellent pastiche of the 1930s style of weird-fiction writing; the book just doesn't feel like a modern novel, especially one written in the 1970s. Copper turns out to be a fairly wonderful wordsmith, and yet he is certainly not above occasionally employing the language that made pulp fiction so much fun. Thus, we can get a sentence such as "I glimpsed the forms of the slug-things all about me now, their monadelphous outlines fibrillating and undulating in the pitiless glare from outer space," as well as "I tasted the bitter taste of blood and bile in my mouth and my brain was a seething cauldron of white-hot terror"! And speaking of those slug-things, the alien menaces encountered here would surely make ol' H. P. beam in approbation! We are thus treated to those sluglike jelly creatures that are impervious to gunfire; 50-foot-high, tentacled bat monsters that can suck a living man to a collapsible husk (!); and five-foot-high grasshopper thingies. Another nod to Lovecraft comes via the forbidden tomes that Scarsdale has studied; not "The Necronomicon," but here, "The Ethics of Ygor" and "The Trone Tables," which have given the professor a good idea of what he might find beyond that underground lake. Too, as in Lovecraft, a sense of cosmic awe is engendered in the reader, while many mysteries perforce go unexplained.
And Lovecraft isn't the only writer who is paid homage to here. There is a tip of the chapeau, surely, to H. Rider Haggard, the so-called "Father of the Lost-Race Novel," especially when those two isolated villages are arrived at, when three of Scarsdale's tanks draw themselves up "into a rough laager," and when the underground cavern is first explored. Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864) is of course brought to mind, and the macabre atmosphere is at times reminiscent of some of the writings of William Hope Hodgson, such as in "The Night Land" (1912). And need I even mention that the character Clark Ashton Scarsdale (an homage to Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, Stephen Jones mentions, although I did not quite see it) takes his name from the great fantasist of the 1930s and '40s, Clark Ashton Smith?
Copper's book is a taut and lean affair, not exceeding 170 pages in this Valancourt edition; there is no excess flab, and our narrator even tells us at one point that "it would sorely overburden this narrative if I went into great detail" regarding certain items. Still, there is an abundance of detail as to other important matters. The first half of the novel comes off like a simple (although fascinating) story of Asian exploration, and our intrepid quintet does not even arrive at the Black Mountains until the tale is around one-third done. But the book's final 40 pages or so, it must be added, are absolutely thrilling. Any number of splendid sequences are given to the reader, including our narrator's brutal fight with the dwarf guide Zalor; the discovery of Zalor's desiccated corpse in the cavern system; the exploration and crossing of the underground lake; the discovery of an alien embalming gallery, and the opening of some of the canopic-style jars therein; walking through the deserted (?) alien city of Croth; the initial finding of the Great White Space and its cosmic users; the hideous and horrible deaths of four of our heroes; and Plowright and Scarsdale's protracted battle against the alien beings, armed with useless guns and more-than-useful hand grenades. All five of the men, it should be said, are hugely likeable sorts, which only makes their very gruesome ends all the more upsetting. They are all brave men who realistically become panicky and even unhinged--even, at some moments, Scarsdale--when confronted with those inhuman horrors from beyond. All told, "The Great White Space" is a wonderfully entertaining read that could easily have been sequelized. Jones tells us that Copper also came out with a "companion piece" (not quite sure what that means in this instance) entitled "Into the Silence" (1983), and I sure would love to read that one now!
In truth, I have very few complaints to lodge against Copper's very impressive work here. Oh, there are a few instances of faulty grammar ("The contrast of the splendours of Zak were so marked..."; "...neither of us were exactly impatient..."), and many mysteries remain unsolved by the book's end. (Just what were Zalor's motivations, and how did he beat the men back to the underground cavern?) But perhaps my biggest beef with Copper here is his unusual use of commas throughout the book; sometimes too few, sometimes too many. I'm not sure if this was a stylistic affectation used in this novel only to bring about a sense of strangeness (as Hodgson did in many of his works) or not, but it did make for some genuine stumbling blocks for this old copy editor. Tell me if I'm wrong about there being too few commas in these sentences: "Number 1, I saw was labelled Command Vehicle..."; "We reached Zak on September 1st and there, with much haggling and grumbling the porters were paid off..."; "The Mir, in laboured conversations conducted through Scarsdale told us something of his people's customs..."; "Stretching behind us, like the slime-track left by a gigantic slug was our own trail..."; "'I know the route, as you realise and I shall need you to control the radio...'"; "He took the tea sullenly, quite unlike his usual self and sipped it with great shuddering gasps..." Do you see what I mean? Conversely, at times there are too many commas; to wit: "Altogether, it was a strange, and fascinating place in which we found ourselves..."; "...I noticed, that, even when off watch, he cast occasional glances through the windscreen..."; "...he was of course, right"; "There was little, or nothing we could now do..." As I say, this kind of awkward and jerky punctuation can be a little offputting, but does fortunately pale into insignificance when compared to the book's many other fine qualities.
I would now be very interested in checking out some more of Basil Copper's works that are currently in print, and fortunately for me, Valancourt does at the moment have available two more of the author's novels, namely "Necropolis" (1980) and "The House of the Wolf" (1983). I look forward to experiencing those two books one day in the near future...weird comma usage or no....
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at https://fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for all fans of sci-fi and horror....)
"The Great White Space" was originally released in 1974 as a hardcover book by the British publisher Robert Hale, with cover art by Colin Andrews. A year later, St. Martin's Press, here in the U.S., came out with its own hardcover edition, but featuring the same Andrews cover art. In 1976, also in the U.S., Manor Books issued the novel in paperback (with a very freaky cover by Bob Larkin), and in 1980, Sphere Books in England came out with its own paperback, cover by Terry Oakes. The book would then go OOPs (out of prints) for 22 years, till the German publisher Festa revived it in 2002 under the misleading title "Die Eisholle" ("The Ice Hell"), and with cover art by the illustrator professionally known as Babbarammdass (aka Hanno von Bran). And finally, for readers today, there is the trade-sized paperback released by Valancourt Books in 2013, with its faithful cover art by Eric Robertson and an introduction by horror authority Stephen Jones.
Now, before diving into the myriad wonders to be encountered in this volume, a quick word on the author himself. Basil Frederick Albert Copper was born in London in 1924. Today, Copper is assuredly best known for three very different literary endeavors. First, he was the author of no fewer than 52 novels centering on Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, written from 1966 to 1988. He also continued the character of Solar Pons, created by Lovecraft champion and Arkham House founder August Derleth, in seven collections of short stories and one novel. And last but certainly not least, he authored six novels and 10 collections that dealt with weird, cosmic and supernatural horror. Copper ultimately passed away in 2013 at age 89.
His very first novel of weird and cosmic horror, "The Great White Space" is narrated to us by Frederick (same spelling as Copper's middle name, right?) Plowright, a professional photographer and filmmaker who had achieved some renown by having accompanied several explorers on rather hazardous journeys. Still in his mid-30s at the time of his narrative, Plowright, we are told, is currently a broken man; the sole survivor of the so-called "Great Northern Expedition" of (circa) 1934, the tragic events of which are given to us in some detail. The photographer, we learn, had been contacted by no less a figure than Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale, who had convinced the younger man to join him in his next venture. Several years earlier, Scarsdale had penetrated a cave system somewhere in the neighborhood of Tibet but had been forced to turn back after encountering a vast subterranean lake. A student of esoteric and arcane lore, Scarsdale now hoped to discover wondrous things on the other side of that lake, and this time would come prepared with four tractors (more like enormous tanks, we soon discover) and collapsible rubber rafts...not to mention a small army's worth of armaments. Another professor of hidden knowledge, as well as an engineer and geologist, Cornelius Van Damm, in addition to Norman Holden (historian) and Geoffrey Prescott (linguist and Egyptologist), would be accompanying them; a team of five to penetrate a subterranean area where no man had trod before.
And so, Plowright tells us, after an intensive few weeks of training at handling the tanks and other gear at the professor's temporary home in Surrey, the quintet had indeed set off by ship. It had taken them many weeks to reach the isolated village of Zak, acquire a dwarfish and treacherous guide named Zalor, arrive at an even more primitive village called Nylstrom, cross a burning desert and the Plain of Darkness to reach their ultimate destination, the Black Mountains. There, Scarsdale had led the men to the ancient, 500-foot-high doorway that had been carved into the mountainside, guarded by a hieroglyph-covered stone that forbade entry. But feeling secure in their rolling fortresses, the men had of course proceeded. They had arrived at the underground lake (85 miles into the mountain system and five miles beneath it!), made a safe transit across it in their rubber rafts, and then discovered numerous wonders: a gallery of the embalmed dead; an ancient and seemingly abandoned city; and, most horrible of all, the Great White Space, an area of palpitating, resounding light that acted as nothing less than a portal to the stars! And through that blinding and deafening zone of incandescent light had emerged nightmarish shapes that had proven to be the undoing of the Great Northern Expedition...to put it very mildly!
As you may have already discerned, "The Great White Space" really is something of a must-read for all fans of cosmic horror, sci-fi, lost-world adventure novels, and especially H. P. Lovecraft. As mentioned, it is truly an excellent pastiche of the 1930s style of weird-fiction writing; the book just doesn't feel like a modern novel, especially one written in the 1970s. Copper turns out to be a fairly wonderful wordsmith, and yet he is certainly not above occasionally employing the language that made pulp fiction so much fun. Thus, we can get a sentence such as "I glimpsed the forms of the slug-things all about me now, their monadelphous outlines fibrillating and undulating in the pitiless glare from outer space," as well as "I tasted the bitter taste of blood and bile in my mouth and my brain was a seething cauldron of white-hot terror"! And speaking of those slug-things, the alien menaces encountered here would surely make ol' H. P. beam in approbation! We are thus treated to those sluglike jelly creatures that are impervious to gunfire; 50-foot-high, tentacled bat monsters that can suck a living man to a collapsible husk (!); and five-foot-high grasshopper thingies. Another nod to Lovecraft comes via the forbidden tomes that Scarsdale has studied; not "The Necronomicon," but here, "The Ethics of Ygor" and "The Trone Tables," which have given the professor a good idea of what he might find beyond that underground lake. Too, as in Lovecraft, a sense of cosmic awe is engendered in the reader, while many mysteries perforce go unexplained.
And Lovecraft isn't the only writer who is paid homage to here. There is a tip of the chapeau, surely, to H. Rider Haggard, the so-called "Father of the Lost-Race Novel," especially when those two isolated villages are arrived at, when three of Scarsdale's tanks draw themselves up "into a rough laager," and when the underground cavern is first explored. Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864) is of course brought to mind, and the macabre atmosphere is at times reminiscent of some of the writings of William Hope Hodgson, such as in "The Night Land" (1912). And need I even mention that the character Clark Ashton Scarsdale (an homage to Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, Stephen Jones mentions, although I did not quite see it) takes his name from the great fantasist of the 1930s and '40s, Clark Ashton Smith?
Copper's book is a taut and lean affair, not exceeding 170 pages in this Valancourt edition; there is no excess flab, and our narrator even tells us at one point that "it would sorely overburden this narrative if I went into great detail" regarding certain items. Still, there is an abundance of detail as to other important matters. The first half of the novel comes off like a simple (although fascinating) story of Asian exploration, and our intrepid quintet does not even arrive at the Black Mountains until the tale is around one-third done. But the book's final 40 pages or so, it must be added, are absolutely thrilling. Any number of splendid sequences are given to the reader, including our narrator's brutal fight with the dwarf guide Zalor; the discovery of Zalor's desiccated corpse in the cavern system; the exploration and crossing of the underground lake; the discovery of an alien embalming gallery, and the opening of some of the canopic-style jars therein; walking through the deserted (?) alien city of Croth; the initial finding of the Great White Space and its cosmic users; the hideous and horrible deaths of four of our heroes; and Plowright and Scarsdale's protracted battle against the alien beings, armed with useless guns and more-than-useful hand grenades. All five of the men, it should be said, are hugely likeable sorts, which only makes their very gruesome ends all the more upsetting. They are all brave men who realistically become panicky and even unhinged--even, at some moments, Scarsdale--when confronted with those inhuman horrors from beyond. All told, "The Great White Space" is a wonderfully entertaining read that could easily have been sequelized. Jones tells us that Copper also came out with a "companion piece" (not quite sure what that means in this instance) entitled "Into the Silence" (1983), and I sure would love to read that one now!
In truth, I have very few complaints to lodge against Copper's very impressive work here. Oh, there are a few instances of faulty grammar ("The contrast of the splendours of Zak were so marked..."; "...neither of us were exactly impatient..."), and many mysteries remain unsolved by the book's end. (Just what were Zalor's motivations, and how did he beat the men back to the underground cavern?) But perhaps my biggest beef with Copper here is his unusual use of commas throughout the book; sometimes too few, sometimes too many. I'm not sure if this was a stylistic affectation used in this novel only to bring about a sense of strangeness (as Hodgson did in many of his works) or not, but it did make for some genuine stumbling blocks for this old copy editor. Tell me if I'm wrong about there being too few commas in these sentences: "Number 1, I saw was labelled Command Vehicle..."; "We reached Zak on September 1st and there, with much haggling and grumbling the porters were paid off..."; "The Mir, in laboured conversations conducted through Scarsdale told us something of his people's customs..."; "Stretching behind us, like the slime-track left by a gigantic slug was our own trail..."; "'I know the route, as you realise and I shall need you to control the radio...'"; "He took the tea sullenly, quite unlike his usual self and sipped it with great shuddering gasps..." Do you see what I mean? Conversely, at times there are too many commas; to wit: "Altogether, it was a strange, and fascinating place in which we found ourselves..."; "...I noticed, that, even when off watch, he cast occasional glances through the windscreen..."; "...he was of course, right"; "There was little, or nothing we could now do..." As I say, this kind of awkward and jerky punctuation can be a little offputting, but does fortunately pale into insignificance when compared to the book's many other fine qualities.
I would now be very interested in checking out some more of Basil Copper's works that are currently in print, and fortunately for me, Valancourt does at the moment have available two more of the author's novels, namely "Necropolis" (1980) and "The House of the Wolf" (1983). I look forward to experiencing those two books one day in the near future...weird comma usage or no....
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at https://fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for all fans of sci-fi and horror....)
Read
December 30, 2016An inexplicable yet oddly instructive Lovecraft pastiche. If HPL was Jesus (which, for all his undoubted sins, obviously he wasn't) then August Derleth was St Paul - the man who preserves and spreads the legacy at the same time as corrupting it. Which I suppose would make Basil Copper into Linus - the next generation nonentity, the point at which anything novel has been lost and the whole business has become rote ritual. This book is dedicated to Lovecraft and Derleth in tandem as "Openers of the Way", as if there were nothing to choose between them; elsewhere, in the same manner as Derleth posthumously continued and completed Lovecraft, so Copper carried on Derleth's work, despite the absence of any clear reason to do so. And here, in 1974, Copper for some strange reason decided that the best way to honour his hallowed predecessor was to perpetrate a considerably less good remake of At the Mountains of Madness, lightly mixed with a bit of Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger (the stand-in going by a name which is itself another eminently unsubtle homage, 'Clark Ashton Scarsdale'). In defence of Copper, he does at least refrain from garlanding his work with lazy references to the Lovecraft legendarium, instead inventing his own hideous monsters and unhallowed texts - but he has a terrible tin ear for it, and we're never likely to be as alarmed by the prospect of 'the Ethics of Ygor' or 'the Trone Tables' as the dread Necronomicon. Indeed, in general the book serves mainly to show us how much harder it is to write Lovecraft than you might think. Yes, we all take the piss out of Howard's overuse of 'blasphemous', 'eldritch' and 'cyclopean', but at least he knew the meaning and correct application of each word. Unlike Copper, who uses "insectivorous" when he clearly means something looks like an insect, and thinks "automata" and "phenomena" are singular. And then late in proceedings he finds the word "monadelphous" and starts flinging that about, and lords know I don't mind having to look up a word, but in this instance even having done so I'm left none the wiser about the appearance it unhelpfully describes. Then there's the appalling excess of detail as regards the early stages of the Great Northern Expedition, and perhaps it's intentional that we should find monotony as great a threat as terror, but still, it means judicious skimming is recommended if you do embark on this. Though obviously it's a better plan yet not to bother, unless you feel a burning need to further explore the question 'Is there any other Lovecraft-inspired fiction which challenges Brian Lumley's hitherto secure position as the absolute pits?'
August 20, 2009
I have loved this book since I first read it in the 1980's. It's atmospheric, creepy, has wonderfully imagined locations. The Great White Space is in the same Mould as Journey to The Centre of The Earth but more of an adult version. I am a sucker for a good trek tale and this is no exception. Journey across deserts and up into mysterious mountains where a cave leads to some big surprises . . .
September 6, 2015
I liked this book so much, I wrote a sequel to it.
http://www.blurb.com/b/6432530-return...
http://www.blurb.com/b/6432530-return...
January 22, 2021
did NOT expect this silly little book from the 70s about repressed homosexual scientists to scare me so badly that i ran around on the beach like a headless chicken
April 9, 2025
On initial pick up I didn't think there could be a more perfect book for me. 1930's Lovecraftian vibes, lost city, exploration of unknown lands - it has everything that appeals to me. In fact is has a very strong vibe of Journey to the Centre of the Earth meeting At the Madness of Madness. The problem is that it not only takes the best of those books, but the worst of them too.
The book can be divided into three unofficial "acts". The first act covers the preparation work for the expedition to discover a mysterious cosmic gateway; here the formal style works well with lightness of tone, the mystery and the comaraderie between characters. The second act is the journey itself; starting out across mysterious desert lands, it eventually find itself deep within colossal tunnels hewn into a distant mountain range. The final act is the horror fuelled finale of action, madness and 'things from beyond'.
Acts one and three are the strongest parts of the book and achieve everything they set out to accomplish - especially in the final quarter. The book falls down in the second act which slows to a plodding pace through mostly pitch dark, featureless tunnels - occasionally enlivened by a waterway or curious object. Expedition routines are mundane and repetitive and the looming dread isn't as oppressive as it could be. It reminded me of the interminable trek through the bowels of the Earth in Jules Verne's more well known work before getting to the good bits. In keeping with such muted atmosphere, even the lost city itself somehow feels more like a less impressive version of the eldritch city of the Elder Things in Lovecraft's seminal novel, despite some crossover in architectural descriptions. There are some notable events which I wont spoil here, but they feel a bit smothered and too few in number to ratchett up the tension against the tedium of the journey, which is too often described in cyclical detail.
When it gets to the good bits later though, it doesn't disappoint, nor does the climax cop out as so many other pretenders do. As a lover of Lovecraftian fiction, this was an enjoyable homage to the mythos era and a decent addition to my library. As a recommendation, it'll appeal to anyone who loved stories like the aforementioned At the Mountains of Madness and Clark Ashton Smith's much shorter Vaults of Yoh-Vombis. For everyone else, just read those instead.
The book can be divided into three unofficial "acts". The first act covers the preparation work for the expedition to discover a mysterious cosmic gateway; here the formal style works well with lightness of tone, the mystery and the comaraderie between characters. The second act is the journey itself; starting out across mysterious desert lands, it eventually find itself deep within colossal tunnels hewn into a distant mountain range. The final act is the horror fuelled finale of action, madness and 'things from beyond'.
Acts one and three are the strongest parts of the book and achieve everything they set out to accomplish - especially in the final quarter. The book falls down in the second act which slows to a plodding pace through mostly pitch dark, featureless tunnels - occasionally enlivened by a waterway or curious object. Expedition routines are mundane and repetitive and the looming dread isn't as oppressive as it could be. It reminded me of the interminable trek through the bowels of the Earth in Jules Verne's more well known work before getting to the good bits. In keeping with such muted atmosphere, even the lost city itself somehow feels more like a less impressive version of the eldritch city of the Elder Things in Lovecraft's seminal novel, despite some crossover in architectural descriptions. There are some notable events which I wont spoil here, but they feel a bit smothered and too few in number to ratchett up the tension against the tedium of the journey, which is too often described in cyclical detail.
When it gets to the good bits later though, it doesn't disappoint, nor does the climax cop out as so many other pretenders do. As a lover of Lovecraftian fiction, this was an enjoyable homage to the mythos era and a decent addition to my library. As a recommendation, it'll appeal to anyone who loved stories like the aforementioned At the Mountains of Madness and Clark Ashton Smith's much shorter Vaults of Yoh-Vombis. For everyone else, just read those instead.
January 2, 2018
As a Cthulhu Mythos pastiche, this book rates 3 stars for creativity and as a 1970s curio piece; as anything else it rates 1 star for its thin narrative that might have worked better as a short story.
Five British scientists set off on an expedition to a mysterious site somewhere near Tibet, where a gigantic cave complex conceals a legendary portal to another world (I think? it's really vague), "The Great White Space." A promising adventure-story intro (the expeditioneers' equipment list includes flare guns! Elephant guns! Grenades! Tanks!!) turns into a brief travel narrative through exotic villages of imaginary cultures, and then into a long, dark trek through endless caverns until finally . The book builds up some anticipation as the oblivious investigators get closer and closer to certain doom, but even though things finally get tentacley at the end it's not really worth the wait; it's like a Weird Tales version of a found-footage horror movie where the characters point flashlights at shadows for 95 minutes and in the last 5 minutes everyone is killed by CGI monsters. Other reviewers have pointed out sloppy writing like how Copper uses the word "insectivorous" when he evidently means "insect-like"; I'd add the facts that . At its best, despite or because of the lack of realism, it has a fever-dream atmosphere, and Copper gets props for making up his own Mythos names (the Ethics of Ygor, the Trone Tables, the cities of Nylstrom, Croth and Zak). Even though he uses new names, though, Copper seems content just to recycle old Lovecraftian themes and tell us about "obscene and depraved carvings", and he never really gives us enough cosmic hints or original creepy ideas to make the book work beyond the level of "some idiots go in a cave and get eaten by monsters."
Five British scientists set off on an expedition to a mysterious site somewhere near Tibet, where a gigantic cave complex conceals a legendary portal to another world (I think? it's really vague), "The Great White Space." A promising adventure-story intro (the expeditioneers' equipment list includes flare guns! Elephant guns! Grenades! Tanks!!) turns into a brief travel narrative through exotic villages of imaginary cultures, and then into a long, dark trek through endless caverns until finally . The book builds up some anticipation as the oblivious investigators get closer and closer to certain doom, but even though things finally get tentacley at the end it's not really worth the wait; it's like a Weird Tales version of a found-footage horror movie where the characters point flashlights at shadows for 95 minutes and in the last 5 minutes everyone is killed by CGI monsters. Other reviewers have pointed out sloppy writing like how Copper uses the word "insectivorous" when he evidently means "insect-like"; I'd add the facts that . At its best, despite or because of the lack of realism, it has a fever-dream atmosphere, and Copper gets props for making up his own Mythos names (the Ethics of Ygor, the Trone Tables, the cities of Nylstrom, Croth and Zak). Even though he uses new names, though, Copper seems content just to recycle old Lovecraftian themes and tell us about "obscene and depraved carvings", and he never really gives us enough cosmic hints or original creepy ideas to make the book work beyond the level of "some idiots go in a cave and get eaten by monsters."
October 14, 2021
I wish the rating system had a 4 1/2 star option on this one. The first part of the book was a bit slow, having more in common with a Jules Verne novel than a HP Lovecraft one. I still enjoyed that part once I accepted that was the way it was, but fortunately little by little cosmic horror elements began to bleed into the writing (which was what I wanted:) The last fifty pages, however, moved like a freight train to the climax, and I devoured those easily within a couple hours. If you read some of my other reviews then you should know I'm a big fan of Mr. Copper's writing style; this book does not particularly do him justice on that front either. He was trying to sound like Lovecraft, both conceptually and in composition as well. It succeeded in some respects on that endeavor, but for me personally I would have preferred his own elegant prose instead. These complaints are relatively minor; a lover of cosmic horror should enjoy this book as much as I did.
April 16, 2018
Basil Copper is one of many writers who have turned their talents to popularizing and expanding HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. I've read Copper's work before in various short story anthologies-I never really cared for him but now I realize short stories may have not have been his forte. The Great White Space gives Copper a little more room to work in, as novels often do, and the result is fantastic. The Great White Space obviously owes a really large literary debt to Lovecraft's own At the Mountains of Madness. But it is chilling in its' own right and greatly evocative of the terrors of the unknown. This was a very atmospheric read and genuinely frightening. Plus as a total non literary aside my edition features a really nice Bob Larkin cover. Sweet!
February 8, 2020
Synopsis: A photographer is employed to join an expedition to a secret destination where untold horrors await. A team of five embark across land and sea and finally into the centre of the earth where they discover a portal to another dimension, teeming with the specters of alien horror.
What was good about it:
This was a well written and surprisingly good piece of fiction. The suspense and detail of the feelings of lurching into an unknown situation was captivating. The protagonists were well considered and believable, and it didn’t feel too silly, as far as horror goes. There are parallels to the Alien story, in the almost idiotic curiosity that compels the protagonists forward to certain doom. The descriptive language was great and it set a believable and eerie backdrop.
What didn’t I enjoy about it:
Although it’s not a long book it somehow felt long. Perhaps this was because of the ratio of descriptive text to narrative and dialogue. I wanted more to happen along the way that implied they were in danger, and not just the old “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
What was good about it:
This was a well written and surprisingly good piece of fiction. The suspense and detail of the feelings of lurching into an unknown situation was captivating. The protagonists were well considered and believable, and it didn’t feel too silly, as far as horror goes. There are parallels to the Alien story, in the almost idiotic curiosity that compels the protagonists forward to certain doom. The descriptive language was great and it set a believable and eerie backdrop.
What didn’t I enjoy about it:
Although it’s not a long book it somehow felt long. Perhaps this was because of the ratio of descriptive text to narrative and dialogue. I wanted more to happen along the way that implied they were in danger, and not just the old “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 17, 2021
A noteworthy pastiche of Lovecraft. The writing was good, and I enjoyed the general narrative, setting and imagery, though it lacked the philosophy of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", and could have been a bit more forthcoming with the lore and speculation. It was a bit overly interested in the minutiae of day to day expeditionary operations, while being incredibly stingy with the mythopoeia. The expedition leaders know too much, and say too little, while the narrator is all too obligingly incurious until the bitter end. Maybe not a favorite, but overall I did quite like it.
April 15, 2022
Starts with such ominous promise, but ultimately, "The Great White Space" is just a mix of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Festival". And unfortunately, all three of those incredible stories are much better than the thinly plotted, blandly described horror found here.
January 7, 2023
Basically a rehash of “At The Mountains of Madness”.
There’s a somewhat creative journey through a fantasy Bhutan to get to the eldritch site. The eldritch site itself is less creative than in “Mountains.”
The foreshadowing is too vague to build tension effectively. The denouement is weak, drawn-out, and involves several dozen hand grenades.
There’s a somewhat creative journey through a fantasy Bhutan to get to the eldritch site. The eldritch site itself is less creative than in “Mountains.”
The foreshadowing is too vague to build tension effectively. The denouement is weak, drawn-out, and involves several dozen hand grenades.
June 26, 2020
I liked HPL’s version (At the Mountains of Madness) and respect his take on off-stage cosmic horror, but I also loved this re-telling with on-stage monsters! Copper’s version is less boring, a better journalistic account such as he was, and frankly, was a better read in one-sitting - whereas I picked up and put down Lovecraft multiple times. It is true that Copper has his derivative qualities, but it is nice to ‘re-read’ those same tropes when written well. I’ve also read House of the Wolf, and soon to have a look at The Black Death - said to be his own favorite creation.
April 5, 2021
Another excellent Lovecraft pastiche. Keep'em coming
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June 24, 2021Older gods, demons or civilisations. A good novel and well written.
January 15, 2025
Book by Copper, Basil
March 31, 2024
As other reviewers have said: this is Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth meets Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. The ending is worth getting to for such a short read. For Lovecraft fans or completionists, I'd recommend it.
August 26, 2009
very well written and spooky. however, i give it only three stars because of the goofy ending, which seemed rushed, like the author just got tired of writing and had to blow off coming up with an interesting ending or had a deadline or just plain fucked it up.
could have been a classic. oh well
could have been a classic. oh well
October 30, 2011
A very good horror novel in the Lovecraftian vein.
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