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nickdablin's review against another edition
5.0
Really enjoyable classic horror/survival novella. It's written in a deliberately archaic style that makes it feel all the more genuine, and evokes the mystery and terror of the unknown at every turn.
animalculum's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
marplatense's review against another edition
3.0
Although I usually enjoy sea adventures (and, since Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym made a great impression on me when I read it in my youth, specially if they include horror elements), this book didn't particularly engage me. I believe that my problem was the main character: a true sycophant, more interested in bootlicking the bosun than actually deal with problems and a guy that forgets all about his fellow companions in disgrace as soon as he meets a beautiful woman (to tell you the truth, I would probably do the same in the case of the lady but it doesn't mean I would root for someone like that). The fate that most of the sailors encountered was something that I didn't expected either.
On the bright side, his narrative was fun (although Lovecraft describes it as "an inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce XVIII century language"), the first island they encountered (full of mist and mysterious trees) was terrific and the monsters that attacked them in the hill were engrossing.
On the bright side, his narrative was fun (although Lovecraft describes it as "an inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce XVIII century language"), the first island they encountered (full of mist and mysterious trees) was terrific and the monsters that attacked them in the hill were engrossing.
arthurbdd's review against another edition
3.0
Suffers from a faux-archaic writing style, though not as much as The Night Land. Fun stuff, but gets repetitive and the pacing is glacial.
mazza57's review against another edition
3.0
This is more like a ghost story than anything. It suffers from age and the use of 10 words where today 1 or 2 might do. Overall it is a good read
wutang13's review against another edition
Got bored. Interesting monsters and setting but it the plot just kind of drags
akemi_666's review against another edition
2.0
this is a very influential text
the first half bespeaks a terror in ecological and zoological disjunctions: of uncanny beings that straddle the limits of the human body, monstrously unfolding and morphing between psychical and physical realities, prefiguring explorations in later texts, such as silent hill 2 and annihilation, where materiality cannot be distinguished from hallucinations
the second half is a boring, happy corpse dragged clean from mud and slime: a reactionary retreat from the ontological ruptures the first half depicted — to daddy civilisation's campfires, and superstructures, and heteronormative trysts on the wrecks of decaying ships no longer operative by her majesty's army, yet still erect (!) and taut (!) against nature's sensuous flows (!)
this is the limitation of the old weird: its depiction of monstrosity is always an othering, a voyeuristic traversal into abjection for the purpose of reconstituting society's boundaries ever more categorically
while there are hints of a moreness beyond the status quo — a recurrence of mythical beings (such as kraken and mermen) in the age of enlightenment — this moreness is, ultimately, repelled or repressed. in stark contrast, later new weird writers depict bodily transgressions (of the biological, the psychological, and the political) as potentially productive, sites that may offer us joyous new configurations of becoming (even at the risk of old painful entanglements) — a new collective myth making that often involves non-human beings
despite my critiques, there's some interesting things going on in glen carrig. as with annihilation, it plays with our propensity to project humanness into environments we cannot comprehend — to bring the homely into the unhomely, like an inverted uncanny, constituting an unresolvable ambiguity in our experiences of novelty — hauntological loops connecting past and future into eerie spirals of fate and chance, necessity and contingency, death and birth (read: totality and freedom)
glen carrig similarly deals with themes of loneliness and disconnect. some passages feel like a 19th century variant on annihilation:
recommended for fans of mieville, melville, morrowind, pirates of the caribbean, and the odyssey
the first half bespeaks a terror in ecological and zoological disjunctions: of uncanny beings that straddle the limits of the human body, monstrously unfolding and morphing between psychical and physical realities, prefiguring explorations in later texts, such as silent hill 2 and annihilation, where materiality cannot be distinguished from hallucinations
the second half is a boring, happy corpse dragged clean from mud and slime: a reactionary retreat from the ontological ruptures the first half depicted — to daddy civilisation's campfires, and superstructures, and heteronormative trysts on the wrecks of decaying ships no longer operative by her majesty's army, yet still erect (!) and taut (!) against nature's sensuous flows (!)
this is the limitation of the old weird: its depiction of monstrosity is always an othering, a voyeuristic traversal into abjection for the purpose of reconstituting society's boundaries ever more categorically
while there are hints of a moreness beyond the status quo — a recurrence of mythical beings (such as kraken and mermen) in the age of enlightenment — this moreness is, ultimately, repelled or repressed. in stark contrast, later new weird writers depict bodily transgressions (of the biological, the psychological, and the political) as potentially productive, sites that may offer us joyous new configurations of becoming (even at the risk of old painful entanglements) — a new collective myth making that often involves non-human beings
despite my critiques, there's some interesting things going on in glen carrig. as with annihilation, it plays with our propensity to project humanness into environments we cannot comprehend — to bring the homely into the unhomely, like an inverted uncanny, constituting an unresolvable ambiguity in our experiences of novelty — hauntological loops connecting past and future into eerie spirals of fate and chance, necessity and contingency, death and birth (read: totality and freedom)
glen carrig similarly deals with themes of loneliness and disconnect. some passages feel like a 19th century variant on annihilation:
Anon, I would stare out across the immensity of the vast continent of weed and slime that stretched its incredible desolation out beyond the darkening horizon, and there would come the thought to me of the terror of men whose vessels had been entangled among its strange growths, and so my thoughts came to the lone derelict that lay out there in the dusk, and I fell to wondering what had been the end of her people, and at that I grew yet more solemn in my heart. For it seemed to me that they must have died at last by starvation, and if not by that, then by the act of some one of the devil-creatures which inhabited that lonely weed-world.
recommended for fans of mieville, melville, morrowind, pirates of the caribbean, and the odyssey
libris_leonis's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.25
jvan's review against another edition
3.0
This is apparently classified as horror a lot but it's more weird fiction to me: seas of weeds, monster crabs, clever devices. There's horrifying noises and strange weed men and some sort of mutable monster, as well as endless forlorn screams, that push it into horror territory, but overall the feel is more weird and pulpy, filtered through the contrivance of an 18th century account if a sea voyage gone very wrong.
We never learn what happened to the Glen Carrig, by the by.
We never learn what happened to the Glen Carrig, by the by.