Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I like the Cuthulu mythology, but I find the stories a bit too slow to really capture my imagination. The plot moves along quite slowly and I notice that the book I'm reading is old
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Gradually made my way through this, my first Lovecraft. The best is great, the worst is meh. Turgid creepy hallucinatory visions.
Includes:
The one in the Arctic
The one in the multidimensional haunted basement
The math one with the witch
Etc
Includes:
The one in the Arctic
The one in the multidimensional haunted basement
The math one with the witch
Etc
dark
spoj sf-a i horora, ovo je priča o ekspediciji na južni pol i otkrivanju njegovih mračnih tajni. lovecraft je pisac bogatog vokabulara i jasno je zašto ima mnoštvo poklonika - osebujan je, mračan i ozbiljan, na sličan način kao i e. a. poe (koji je i imao utjecaj na lovecrafta). knjiga "planine ludila" predstavlja se kao horor priča, ali ona je daleko od horora u današnjem smislu riječi... ovo je gotička/macabre priča s fantastičnim, mističnim, misterioznim, imaginarnim slikama.
evo jedan isječak, čisto da znaš što možeš očekivati:
"da se oblikuje makar i rudimentarna predodžba naših misli i osjećaja dok smo prodirali u taj eonima nijemi labirint neljudske gradnje, morala bi se povezati beznadno zbunjujuća zbrka neuhvatljivih raspoloženja, sjećanja i utisaka. sama zapanjujuća starost i smrtna pustoš tog mjesta bile bi dovoljne da svladaju skoro svaku iole osjetljiviju osobu, ali dodan tim čimbenicima bio je i skorašnji neobjašnjeni užas u logoru, i otkrića suviše brzo dostignuta užasnim zidnim skulpturama oko nas."
pa kome se sviđa... samo naprijed, toga i tome sličnome ima skoro 200 stranica.
evo jedan isječak, čisto da znaš što možeš očekivati:
"da se oblikuje makar i rudimentarna predodžba naših misli i osjećaja dok smo prodirali u taj eonima nijemi labirint neljudske gradnje, morala bi se povezati beznadno zbunjujuća zbrka neuhvatljivih raspoloženja, sjećanja i utisaka. sama zapanjujuća starost i smrtna pustoš tog mjesta bile bi dovoljne da svladaju skoro svaku iole osjetljiviju osobu, ali dodan tim čimbenicima bio je i skorašnji neobjašnjeni užas u logoru, i otkrića suviše brzo dostignuta užasnim zidnim skulpturama oko nas."
pa kome se sviđa... samo naprijed, toga i tome sličnome ima skoro 200 stranica.
Gave me nightmares back then. Really shouldn't have done re-read this.... cos nightmares are back.
H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 1: At the Mountains of Madness (1999) sisältää nimikkonovellinsa ja lyhyen johdatuksen lisäksi kuusi muuta Lovecraft-tarinaa: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dreams in the Witch-House, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Silver Key sekä Through the Gates of the Silver Key. Näistä neljä jälkimmäistä kertovat Randolph Carterin seikkailuista unimaailmassa ja sen ulkopuolella, muiden ollessa enemmän tai vähemmän itsenäisiä tarinoita.
Kokoelman kiinnostavimmat novellit olivat mielestäni Randolph Carterin unimaailmaan sijoittuva seikkailu The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, joka tosin välillä tuntui junnaavan paikoillaan vähän turhankin kauan. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward oli myös mielenkiintoinen lukukokemus, joka toimi kaikin puolin niin sujuvuuden kuin kiinnostavuuden ylläpitämisen kohdalla. Sen sijaan teoksen Antarktikselle sijoittunut nimikkonovelli At the Mountains of Madness kaipasi mielestäni tiivistämistä ja vähemmän asioiden perusteellista kuvailua, joka teki novellista hitaasti etenevän ja paikoitellen jopa tylsän. Muut novellit olivat keskitasoisia, vaikkakin kohtuullisen kiinnostavia. Valitettavasti pisimpien novellien suvantohetket olivat minulle liikaa ja sen vuoksi annan kirjalle vain kolme tähteä.
Kokoelman kiinnostavimmat novellit olivat mielestäni Randolph Carterin unimaailmaan sijoittuva seikkailu The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, joka tosin välillä tuntui junnaavan paikoillaan vähän turhankin kauan. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward oli myös mielenkiintoinen lukukokemus, joka toimi kaikin puolin niin sujuvuuden kuin kiinnostavuuden ylläpitämisen kohdalla. Sen sijaan teoksen Antarktikselle sijoittunut nimikkonovelli At the Mountains of Madness kaipasi mielestäni tiivistämistä ja vähemmän asioiden perusteellista kuvailua, joka teki novellista hitaasti etenevän ja paikoitellen jopa tylsän. Muut novellit olivat keskitasoisia, vaikkakin kohtuullisen kiinnostavia. Valitettavasti pisimpien novellien suvantohetket olivat minulle liikaa ja sen vuoksi annan kirjalle vain kolme tähteä.
To save you time, I shall summarize this novelette for you. If the subject comes up at a cocktail party, (1) pretend you've really read it, (2) find cooler cocktail parties. But, really, this has some INTENSE spoilers.
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (Now with additions to satisfy the whiners)
Okay, so, there's like TEN scientists, and it doesn't matter what their names are, because none of them have personalities. For the purposes of making this more exciting, lets say their names are Michael, Eh!, Jacob, Ceridwen, Caris, Jason, Manny, Brian and Aerin. And, by the way, now would be the appropriate time to turn all the lights off, except for maybe a few candles to get a spooky mood going.
Okay, so! Our brave crew of scientists are going down to the South Pole to study something Scientific. Lets imagine it's the effects of global warming. They're gonna check to see how much more ice has melted, and whether or not the penguins are sweating to death and whatnot. But, when we get down there to the pole, there's a big snow-storm! Some of us are kinda big pussies, so we don't want to fly to the research site and maybe die on the way, so we let the most courageous ones go first. So Ceridwen, Brian, Jason, and Eh! all hop into the plane and fly into the snowy sky.
We cowards are all hanging around and playing Mario Kart and arguing about whether Jay-Z is the new Frank Sinatra, and, if so, whether Beyonce is Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr. We're waiting on messages, but we're all on T-Mobile, and you can't even get service in fucking KANSAS CITY on T-Mobile, so you aren't getting SHIT at the south pole. Every now and then, though, our associates manage to get a text message through to us. The first one is all like,
WEIRD BUILDINGS, REMINISCENT OF ROERICH PAINTINGS, ALSO OF CHAPTERS FROM THAT OH-SO-HARD TO LOCATE TOME, THE NECRONOMICON, WRITTEN BY THAT CRAFTY FOREIGNER, ABDUL AL HAZZAD BIN LADEN.
And we're all like, "Yeah, I remember that old, impossible to find tome. I was flipping through its shadow-laden pages for no reason whatsoever this one time. So, there's general agreement: sounds like Necronomicon, chapter 5: "On Scary Arctic Architecture and Other Scary Things Too."
Meanwhile, Ceridwen was building a small hospital with her bare hands, crafting perfect rectangular bricks out of snow. Jason, who was practicing his quickdrawing skills, said, "Do you want any help with that?"
"Nope," Ceridwen said. "It's just a small hospital; it shouldn't take me too long."
Meanwhile, Eh! was standing in a snowdrift in deep meditation. Focusing her qi energy, she pitched a ball of focused, dense air forward, and used it to explode the head off of a snowman that Brian was making.
"Stop doing your ninja moves on my snowmen, Eh!" Brian said. "That's the fifth snowman you've ruined!"
With a shrug, Eh! turns toward a high plateau of ice and begins focusing her qi once again. With another blast of air, she caused an avalanche of frozen ice shards that levelled the rest of Brian's snowman army.
Back in cowardville, the phone vibrates again, and says WE FOUND SOME FREAKY, HALF-VEGETABLE-HALF-ANIMALS THAT SEEM PERFECTLY FROZEN. WE'RE GONNA DESCRIBE THEM FOR LIKE 1000 WORDS, BUT YOU AREN'T GONNA HAVE A FUCKING CLUE WHAT WE'RE SAYING, and then they do. When they're done describing the strange beasts, they say, WE'RE KINDA FREAKED OUT, IT LOOKS LIKE SOME STRANGE ANCIENT RACE HAS LIVED HERE IN THE PAST. WE ALL AGREE IT SOUNDS LIKE THE "ANCIENT ONES" FROM THE NECRONOMICON, CHAPTER 7.
Now, we were all excited about the scientific possibilites, so much so that Jacob thoughtfully scratched his ironic beard, and Caris jizzed in his pants. We waited, and we waited, but no more texts arrived.
Then, finally, we got one last message:
AAAAAAARRRRRGH! ICK. DEAD.
And we were skeptical about exactly what this means, so we all loaded into the other helicopter. (The arctic storm had lessened, btw.) We flew out there to the research site, and we saw the penguins were indeed sweating to death. But, more importantly, we saw the strange, arctic structures that immediately reminded us of our undergrad perusals of that old, lost and forgotten tome, and also the Roerich painting. (This comparison to Roerich is VERY important: if my imitation were even more close to the original, it would sound more like this:
Roerich, Roerich Roerich. Roerich? Roerich, Roerich Necronomicon Roerich!
But, in my efforts to entertain, I will omit much of the Roerich-ing.)
Even more importantly than these strange ancient structures (Roerich) was what we then saw: the mutilated bodies of our erstwhile comrades! Brian was all over the campsite in gloopy red chunks, like someone had broken a pinata filled with raw sirloin. Ceridwen lay with huge bites out of her, as if some large beast had been noshing on her. And, stranger still, Jason's body was in the very small hospital Ceridwen had built with her bare hands. It appeared a surgery had been done on him, very carefully inspecting all of his insides, but leaving him mostly intact. Part of his body was missing, cut away with amazing precision, as if by a laser.
Anyway, this was all incredibly frightening, and we couldn't imagine what had happened to our unfortunate comrades. But we were on a set schedule, so we went to doing our work.
We went in to check out the strange buildings, and Manny is all like, "I'm going to go off alone this way and see what I can find," and we're like, "Okay, whatev." A few minutes later, as we walk with our torches through the very very unpleasantly dark hallways, we hear Manny scream. Like a girl. Then silence.
We pressed on.
Strange pictures were scattered around the walls of these inner chambers, pictures of those strange creatures from the Necronomicon. The pictures told a story of how the creatures came to earth, and how they created life as we know it as a cure for their boredom, and how they grew people in a big bowl, kind of like sea monkeys.
We passed through vast chambers, many of them, for like pages and pages...I mean, hours and hours. By the time we were done looking at all the wall murals, several more of our party had died from boredom.
Jacob was walking along with the torch, and he was like, "Is that one of those ancient whatchamacallits?" And it was: recently dead, looking like it has died out of pure fright. Then, we heard a deep, throaty cackle from down one of the chambers.
Brad said, "What the shit was that?"
And I was all like, "I didn't know you were here, Brad!"
And he was like, *shrug*.
"It sounds like some tremendous bird!" Jacob said.
"Like a really big chicken!" I said.
We noticed a great, foul-smelling fog coming from the darkness before us, like we were buried in a pile of high school gym socks filled with dog poop. We started running and shrieking through the dark, dank, dark corridors. Turkeys are fucking dangerous as hell, and this thing sounded even bigger.
For some stupid reason, Caris was all like, "Let's simultaneously turn and look and see what's back there, looming up from the stenchy darkness!"
So we did. And it wasn't just a chicken. It was scarier than that. It was a big blob of protoplasm flowing forward, with an endless supply of eyeballs and mouths rising to its surface, the mouths howling out in that frightening "cluck, cluck, cluck."
We came to a chamber with some penguin babies in it, and we started field-goal kicking them back into the darkness, hoping to slow down the onset of that protoplasmic horror from the depths of earth's coldest and darkest recesses.
It didn't slow the thing down, so we tripped Brad. Then, Caris tripped on a pocket of strangely dense air. Jacob and I kept running.
I smelled feces, and I had a suspicion about what just happened in Jacob's pants. Behind us, behind that wall of rancid fog, we could hear that blob of ancient unknowable soulless funkiness devouring Brad and Caris, and they moaned with pain and horror as they sank into it and were quickly digested.
Finally, we got back outside and ran to the helicopter. Aerin was snoozing in the pilot's seat. We shook her awake and said, "Step on it!"
The helicopter lifted into the air, and Aerin was like, "It smells like you guys stepped in shit." And I said, "It was Jacob," and he said, "Way to narc me out," and I was like, "Dude, it's not a big mystery, maybe next time we go investigate ancient evils you should wear a diaper." He was upset, and, in an attempt to distract himself from the embarassing situation, looked over his shoulder at the receding mountains...and glimpsed something so petrifyingly horrific, so vast and abysmally bleak, horror that Jacob may never fully recover emotionally, and might only speak in sentence fragments for the rest of his life:
"The spires. . . of doom. . . . the ancient blood of souls forgotten. . . the peaks of apocalypse birth. . . the cluttered geography of darkness. . . "
Not to mention he shat himself again.
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (Now with additions to satisfy the whiners)
Okay, so, there's like TEN scientists, and it doesn't matter what their names are, because none of them have personalities. For the purposes of making this more exciting, lets say their names are Michael, Eh!, Jacob, Ceridwen, Caris, Jason, Manny, Brian and Aerin. And, by the way, now would be the appropriate time to turn all the lights off, except for maybe a few candles to get a spooky mood going.
Okay, so! Our brave crew of scientists are going down to the South Pole to study something Scientific. Lets imagine it's the effects of global warming. They're gonna check to see how much more ice has melted, and whether or not the penguins are sweating to death and whatnot. But, when we get down there to the pole, there's a big snow-storm! Some of us are kinda big pussies, so we don't want to fly to the research site and maybe die on the way, so we let the most courageous ones go first. So Ceridwen, Brian, Jason, and Eh! all hop into the plane and fly into the snowy sky.
We cowards are all hanging around and playing Mario Kart and arguing about whether Jay-Z is the new Frank Sinatra, and, if so, whether Beyonce is Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr. We're waiting on messages, but we're all on T-Mobile, and you can't even get service in fucking KANSAS CITY on T-Mobile, so you aren't getting SHIT at the south pole. Every now and then, though, our associates manage to get a text message through to us. The first one is all like,
WEIRD BUILDINGS, REMINISCENT OF ROERICH PAINTINGS, ALSO OF CHAPTERS FROM THAT OH-SO-HARD TO LOCATE TOME, THE NECRONOMICON, WRITTEN BY THAT CRAFTY FOREIGNER, ABDUL AL HAZZAD BIN LADEN.
And we're all like, "Yeah, I remember that old, impossible to find tome. I was flipping through its shadow-laden pages for no reason whatsoever this one time. So, there's general agreement: sounds like Necronomicon, chapter 5: "On Scary Arctic Architecture and Other Scary Things Too."
Meanwhile, Ceridwen was building a small hospital with her bare hands, crafting perfect rectangular bricks out of snow. Jason, who was practicing his quickdrawing skills, said, "Do you want any help with that?"
"Nope," Ceridwen said. "It's just a small hospital; it shouldn't take me too long."
Meanwhile, Eh! was standing in a snowdrift in deep meditation. Focusing her qi energy, she pitched a ball of focused, dense air forward, and used it to explode the head off of a snowman that Brian was making.
"Stop doing your ninja moves on my snowmen, Eh!" Brian said. "That's the fifth snowman you've ruined!"
With a shrug, Eh! turns toward a high plateau of ice and begins focusing her qi once again. With another blast of air, she caused an avalanche of frozen ice shards that levelled the rest of Brian's snowman army.
Back in cowardville, the phone vibrates again, and says WE FOUND SOME FREAKY, HALF-VEGETABLE-HALF-ANIMALS THAT SEEM PERFECTLY FROZEN. WE'RE GONNA DESCRIBE THEM FOR LIKE 1000 WORDS, BUT YOU AREN'T GONNA HAVE A FUCKING CLUE WHAT WE'RE SAYING, and then they do. When they're done describing the strange beasts, they say, WE'RE KINDA FREAKED OUT, IT LOOKS LIKE SOME STRANGE ANCIENT RACE HAS LIVED HERE IN THE PAST. WE ALL AGREE IT SOUNDS LIKE THE "ANCIENT ONES" FROM THE NECRONOMICON, CHAPTER 7.
Now, we were all excited about the scientific possibilites, so much so that Jacob thoughtfully scratched his ironic beard, and Caris jizzed in his pants. We waited, and we waited, but no more texts arrived.
Then, finally, we got one last message:
AAAAAAARRRRRGH! ICK. DEAD.
And we were skeptical about exactly what this means, so we all loaded into the other helicopter. (The arctic storm had lessened, btw.) We flew out there to the research site, and we saw the penguins were indeed sweating to death. But, more importantly, we saw the strange, arctic structures that immediately reminded us of our undergrad perusals of that old, lost and forgotten tome, and also the Roerich painting. (This comparison to Roerich is VERY important: if my imitation were even more close to the original, it would sound more like this:
Roerich, Roerich Roerich. Roerich? Roerich, Roerich Necronomicon Roerich!
But, in my efforts to entertain, I will omit much of the Roerich-ing.)
Even more importantly than these strange ancient structures (Roerich) was what we then saw: the mutilated bodies of our erstwhile comrades! Brian was all over the campsite in gloopy red chunks, like someone had broken a pinata filled with raw sirloin. Ceridwen lay with huge bites out of her, as if some large beast had been noshing on her. And, stranger still, Jason's body was in the very small hospital Ceridwen had built with her bare hands. It appeared a surgery had been done on him, very carefully inspecting all of his insides, but leaving him mostly intact. Part of his body was missing, cut away with amazing precision, as if by a laser.
Anyway, this was all incredibly frightening, and we couldn't imagine what had happened to our unfortunate comrades. But we were on a set schedule, so we went to doing our work.
We went in to check out the strange buildings, and Manny is all like, "I'm going to go off alone this way and see what I can find," and we're like, "Okay, whatev." A few minutes later, as we walk with our torches through the very very unpleasantly dark hallways, we hear Manny scream. Like a girl. Then silence.
We pressed on.
Strange pictures were scattered around the walls of these inner chambers, pictures of those strange creatures from the Necronomicon. The pictures told a story of how the creatures came to earth, and how they created life as we know it as a cure for their boredom, and how they grew people in a big bowl, kind of like sea monkeys.
We passed through vast chambers, many of them, for like pages and pages...I mean, hours and hours. By the time we were done looking at all the wall murals, several more of our party had died from boredom.
Jacob was walking along with the torch, and he was like, "Is that one of those ancient whatchamacallits?" And it was: recently dead, looking like it has died out of pure fright. Then, we heard a deep, throaty cackle from down one of the chambers.
Brad said, "What the shit was that?"
And I was all like, "I didn't know you were here, Brad!"
And he was like, *shrug*.
"It sounds like some tremendous bird!" Jacob said.
"Like a really big chicken!" I said.
We noticed a great, foul-smelling fog coming from the darkness before us, like we were buried in a pile of high school gym socks filled with dog poop. We started running and shrieking through the dark, dank, dark corridors. Turkeys are fucking dangerous as hell, and this thing sounded even bigger.
For some stupid reason, Caris was all like, "Let's simultaneously turn and look and see what's back there, looming up from the stenchy darkness!"
So we did. And it wasn't just a chicken. It was scarier than that. It was a big blob of protoplasm flowing forward, with an endless supply of eyeballs and mouths rising to its surface, the mouths howling out in that frightening "cluck, cluck, cluck."
We came to a chamber with some penguin babies in it, and we started field-goal kicking them back into the darkness, hoping to slow down the onset of that protoplasmic horror from the depths of earth's coldest and darkest recesses.
It didn't slow the thing down, so we tripped Brad. Then, Caris tripped on a pocket of strangely dense air. Jacob and I kept running.
I smelled feces, and I had a suspicion about what just happened in Jacob's pants. Behind us, behind that wall of rancid fog, we could hear that blob of ancient unknowable soulless funkiness devouring Brad and Caris, and they moaned with pain and horror as they sank into it and were quickly digested.
Finally, we got back outside and ran to the helicopter. Aerin was snoozing in the pilot's seat. We shook her awake and said, "Step on it!"
The helicopter lifted into the air, and Aerin was like, "It smells like you guys stepped in shit." And I said, "It was Jacob," and he said, "Way to narc me out," and I was like, "Dude, it's not a big mystery, maybe next time we go investigate ancient evils you should wear a diaper." He was upset, and, in an attempt to distract himself from the embarassing situation, looked over his shoulder at the receding mountains...and glimpsed something so petrifyingly horrific, so vast and abysmally bleak, horror that Jacob may never fully recover emotionally, and might only speak in sentence fragments for the rest of his life:
"The spires. . . of doom. . . . the ancient blood of souls forgotten. . . the peaks of apocalypse birth. . . the cluttered geography of darkness. . . "
Not to mention he shat himself again.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
reflective