It’s important to note, before going into this review, that I consider H. P. Lovecraft to be, not only one of the greatest horror writers, but one of the greatest writers in general. He has a skill with words that can make even something small an insignificant a nightmarish vision. It is for this reason that his short story “The Shadow out of Time” is my all time favorite short story and a personal inspiration for me. Knowing all of this going in, At the Mountains of Madness is somewhat of a disappointment.

            Set in the early 1930s, At the Mountains of Madness follows a group of scientists as they seek to uncover Antarctica’s mysteries. Rather than finding the more likely fossils and ice cores, they discover the dreaded mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. I phrase it like this because anyone who has read more than one story by H. P. Lovecraft will notice that each of these stories has an underlying connection or myth that links them all together. This includes, but isn’t limited to, the old ones, Cthulhu and his spawn, and the Shoggoths. There isn’t a particularly large amount of character development among the main characters in the story, in fact, I can’t even remember if the narrator was given a name, but the focus of Lovecraft’s stories have rarely been on character, and instead focus on the nameless horrors of his mythos. In this regard, the book excels. Each and every time one of his creatures comes onto the scene, the reader is glued to the page, expecting, hoping and fearing just when the thing will show its true colors. If the book were to focus on this, in much the same way his short stories typically do, I would have given it a perfect score without hesitation. However the increased length of the short novel left a little too much filler room that wasn’t as well utilized as it could be.

            The first place where the book falters is in the beginning where we’re given a handful of scientific language and numbers from the nineteen thirties. While it gives the book credibility, it reads like real science books, and does little to get the reader interested in what is going to happen. Shortly after this, the book picks up with a series of communications with a separated camp and the extraordinary ‘bodies’ they have found. Just after building this momentum, however, the book again grinds to a halt when the narrator plays around with the reader. We, as readers, know that something crazy went down at Lake’s camp even before his messages stop, yet the narrator sees fit to give us the ‘official’ briefing of what happened, which is the version the explorers gave to the press that doesn’t include any of the horrors. While I understand the mechanics of this (making the information, soon to be conveyed to the reader, more interesting) it just went on too long. It is then followed by the narrator and Danforth’s exploration of the mountains and what they find, which doesn’t get interesting until after several chapters of description.

            The ending is what saved this book for me, with the last few chapters delivering everything that I love from Lovecraft’s writing. It leads me to ask, though, why wasn’t this book written as a short story rather than a short novel? If many of the description areas were cut down, tightening up the narrative, this story would have been well on its way to surpassing “The Shadow out of Time” as my favorite.

            While I wasn’t able to score Lovecraft as highly as I would like, I still highly recommend both this book and his short stories. The amount of work and depth that swims beneath each story speaks volumes about his skill as a writer. One could call him the J. R. R. Tolkien of the horror genre. While he didn’t create his own language, and he wrote short stories rather than novels, he has a vast network of interconnected ideas that creates one brilliant whole of literature. And, like Tolkien, he has set a benchmark within his own genre that has rarely been surpassed.