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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
En terminos generales es un buen libro pero tengo sentimientos encontrados respecto del ritmo y el exceso descriptivo en algunos capitulos. El último acto se siente repetitivo y desgastante, sin embargo disfrute mucho mi primer contacto con la mitologia de este mundo ficticio creado por Lovecraft.
No es una buena historia para iniciarse en el universo de Lovecraft debido a que cita en varias oportunidades trabajos anteriores.
No es una buena historia para iniciarse en el universo de Lovecraft debido a que cita en varias oportunidades trabajos anteriores.
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-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
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-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
On a purely visual level, this book is a masterpiece. It contains some of my absolute favourite depictions of Lovecraft's creatures and settings. This story is also one of Lovecraft's best, despite it's problematic elements that come from the author's worldview, and one that any fan of the genre should consider.
Hola, lectores, por fin hemos llegado a la última reseña de la colección Novelas de terror del escritor H. P. Lovecraft. En esta ocasión les contaré sobre En las montañas de la locura, unas de las historias más completas del autor.
La historia comienza cuando un grupo de expertos llega a la Antártida en una misión científica, la cual los lleva al descubrimiento de unos seres mitológicos que anteceden a la humanidad misma. Pronto los científicos descubren que estos organismos no son para nada parecidos a los que la ciencia haya descubierto con anterioridad.
La anatomía de las criaturas es única, pues no se ha visto nada semejante jamás, lo cual significa que están ante el mayor hallazgo de la humanidad. Todo dará un giro inesperado cuando parte del equipo que forma la expedición no logra contactar con la otra mitad de los integrantes, que se encuentran a cierta distancia en otro campamento, debido a una tormenta que dificulta la transmisión.
Lo que desconoce el grupo, es que estos han sido asesinados a excepción de uno de los exploradores y uno de los perros. El resto de la expedición no encuentra más opción que viajara a través de las misteriosas montañas de la Antártida, donde se ven inmersos en un paraje con figuras glaciales dotadas de gran espectacularidad que salen del imaginario que los humanos hayan visto antes.
En esta novela Lovecraft nos muestra su mejor faceta como narrador. Nos relata la historia de Los Antiguos, siendo esta novela, la principal fuente de información sobre ellos. Además, constituyen parte de los Mitos de Cthulhu.
Como es característica del autor a la hora de relatar sus fascinantes historias, abundan las descripciones, no solo de Los Antiguos, sino del paisaje mismo, pues a lo largo del relato podremos apreciar en sus letras lo magnífico que es la Antártida.
Resulta fascinante que H. P. Lovecraft se haya tomado el tiempo y la dedicación de ahondar en las descripciones de sus criaturas. En los primeros capítulos podemos leer la descripción sobre como son anatómicamente estos seres que provienen del cosmos. Hacía el final de la historia también descubriremos algunas costumbres de estos seres y la historia de estos en nuestro planeta.
LEER COMPLETO EN MI BLOG: https://www.blogdivergente.com/2021/05/resena-en-las-montanas-de-la-locura-de.html
La historia comienza cuando un grupo de expertos llega a la Antártida en una misión científica, la cual los lleva al descubrimiento de unos seres mitológicos que anteceden a la humanidad misma. Pronto los científicos descubren que estos organismos no son para nada parecidos a los que la ciencia haya descubierto con anterioridad.
La anatomía de las criaturas es única, pues no se ha visto nada semejante jamás, lo cual significa que están ante el mayor hallazgo de la humanidad. Todo dará un giro inesperado cuando parte del equipo que forma la expedición no logra contactar con la otra mitad de los integrantes, que se encuentran a cierta distancia en otro campamento, debido a una tormenta que dificulta la transmisión.
Lo que desconoce el grupo, es que estos han sido asesinados a excepción de uno de los exploradores y uno de los perros. El resto de la expedición no encuentra más opción que viajara a través de las misteriosas montañas de la Antártida, donde se ven inmersos en un paraje con figuras glaciales dotadas de gran espectacularidad que salen del imaginario que los humanos hayan visto antes.
En esta novela Lovecraft nos muestra su mejor faceta como narrador. Nos relata la historia de Los Antiguos, siendo esta novela, la principal fuente de información sobre ellos. Además, constituyen parte de los Mitos de Cthulhu.
Como es característica del autor a la hora de relatar sus fascinantes historias, abundan las descripciones, no solo de Los Antiguos, sino del paisaje mismo, pues a lo largo del relato podremos apreciar en sus letras lo magnífico que es la Antártida.
Resulta fascinante que H. P. Lovecraft se haya tomado el tiempo y la dedicación de ahondar en las descripciones de sus criaturas. En los primeros capítulos podemos leer la descripción sobre como son anatómicamente estos seres que provienen del cosmos. Hacía el final de la historia también descubriremos algunas costumbres de estos seres y la historia de estos en nuestro planeta.
LEER COMPLETO EN MI BLOG: https://www.blogdivergente.com/2021/05/resena-en-las-montanas-de-la-locura-de.html
Can't give this 5/5 because the "Other Tales of Terror" don't deserve perfect marks, but this is some of the most entertaining horror I've ever read.
Undoubtedly Lovecraft's most thorough and detailed story. This book combines Lovecraft's tale of the unknown with Baranger's absolutely stunning depictions to create an all new immersive experience. While there is something to be said about the power of imagination when reading Lovecraft's work, this visual interpretation of his famous novella is a must-read for any cosmic horror fans. The details within the artwork, especially the architectural design, engross the reader. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my copy of the second volume.
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
The edition I have contains several novels. In 2022 I read: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
20/08 - I've just finished the first short story in this anthology, At the Mountains of Madness. I've previously read an anthology of Lovecraftian short stories, but nothing by the man himself. The first thing I want to say is that, other than having starfish shaped heads, I have no idea what the alien entities, the old ones, are supposed to have looked like. Lovecraft's description of all their different body parts and their dimensions went completely over my head and left me wishing for a picture. I really liked the way Lake sent reports of what they'd found over the radio, getting more and more excited with each new development. It really added to the tension as I was reading.
Has this been made into a movie? If not, why not? I can see this as a fantastic Paranormal/Blair Witch shaky hand-held camera kind of movie (but not the kind that draws mockery) with the reports from Lake done in video messages instead of radio transmissions and when the rest of the team get to the destroyed campsite they could find a damaged-but-still-working camera which could start to tell the story of what happened. If it had a good director and some decent actors, I could totally see that being a hit and something that Lovecraft fans would tacitly agree to see, hoping it wouldn't be a desecration of Lovecraft's memory, only to find it far surpassed their expectations and was a credit to his memory.
I was a little put off by the discussion of Shoggoths without any explanation of what they are, as if I and everyone else reading his work should know what a Shoggoth is because I've read all his other work. Maybe that, and my brain being unable to turn Lovecraft's description of the Elder Ones into a cohesive animal/vegetable thing, were the reasons why I didn't find this scary. I enjoyed it and look forward to reading the rest of the short stories, but it wasn't scary.
22/08 - So, I've now looked up Shoggoths and the Elder Ones to see what Lovecraft might have been imagining when he wrote those horribly complicated descriptions. Nothing like what my slightly less sophisticated imagination had conjured up, but at least now I have a solid image to concentrate on whenever more Shoggoths or Elder Ones appear in any Lovecraft stories that I subsequently read.
Now I'm onto the next story in the anthology, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which is possibly even better than At the Mountains of Madness. I love the mystery of what Ward's ancestor, Joseph Curwen, might be - zombie, vampire or something else - and through figuring out what Ward has become and how.
On another note, I am surprised at the number of errors I'm finding in the editing - repeated words, words with incorrect first letters and general misspellings. Is this how the stories (I've noticed the errors in both) were published originally or is it just this anthology that needs an overall edit? To be continued...
24/08 - Of course Lovecraft doesn't reveal exactly what happened to Curwen on the night he was annihilated, he leaves it up to our imaginations. Is that a 'thing' with Gothic horror stories, that not everything is revealed as anything our imagination might create would be scarier than if the author told us outright what happened? Because I don't agree. I have a number of theories, all slightly different variations on the same theme, but I'm not sure and I find that more frustrating than disturbing/scary. To be continued...
26/08 - I loved the ending of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, I couldn't guess what was going on with Charles at all. I was thinking that Ward might have conjured Curwen up and sort of subsumed him into himself and begun to turn into Curwen, so I was surprised when the truth was revealed.
Now I'm halfway through The Dreams in the Witch House which is not quite as good. I was not impressed or scared by the description of the "small, white, furry thing" that flashes across rooms in the corner of your eye and has the face and hands of a human - that's just weird and possibly funny, it reminds me of a scene from a kids' movie where the witch/wizard turns the annoying person into a rat but it still has the human face superimposed on the rat body. It just doesn't work for me. But the idea of either bringing something tangible out of a dream or somehow finding it in the real world after you've dreamed about it definitely made an impression, so much so I had my own strange experience.
Since I started reading Lovecraft just over a week ago I've been having strange, vivid dreams. One night my brother tried to shoot me, then I woke up got a drink and went back to sleep only to find myself and my family in a very futuristic airport where I was the only one to notice the terrorist with the smoking backpack walking through the airport. I was yelling at everyone to get down when I woke up the next morning. Then another night I had a dream about a character from a short 'whodunnit' murder mystery tv series called Harper's Island. The character was John Wakefield a serial killer killing off everyone on the island. In my dream he was roaming my large, well-treed backyard and had captured my mum (except she wasn't my actual mother, she looked completely different) and trussed her to an A-frame, like what you use to grow beans on. I was sneaking through the yard searching through the stacks of farm tools for the perfect weapon to kill Wakefield with. I finally decided on a very long pole with a three-pronged fork on the end (who knows what kind of farm tool it was supposed to be), long enough so that I didn't have to be too close to him and pointy enough for killing. I was holding it preparing to stab him in the back while he was taunting my 'mother' when I started to get cramp in my hand so bad that I could hardly continue to hold the weapon (I have been getting some bad hand cramps lately that I've attributed to too much typing). I woke up somewhere around there, before I had the chance to drop the weapon or kill Wakefield. And last night I dreamed I was at a friends' birthday party and we were playing some kind of crazy party game that involved being bound hand and foot and placed on our sides in a box until one whole side of our body had gone numb (from lying on it for so long). My body was going numb when I woke up to find that I was lying on my arm and it had gone numb.
Now, I'm pretty sure those weird dreams coming one after another while I'm reading Lovecraft is all just a coincidence. While I enjoy horror and fantasy (ghosts, vampires etc) and would be quick to believe if there was ever any evidence (something actually happened to me), I don't actually believe in the supernatural - it just makes for great stories. Wow, this review is long and I've still got 4.5 stories to go, hope I can fit it into the 13,034 characters I've got left. To be continued...
28/11 - Finally getting back to this after nearly two years of reading other books. When I stopped reading last time it was at the end of The Dreams in the Witch-House, which, looking back at my review from last year, I found more frustrating than scary, but still enjoyable. The Statement of Randolph Carter was a good offering but felt unfinished, like the second last chapter of a story, not the only chapter. What happened to Carter between hearing that 'other' voice on the end of the phone and waking up in the hospital? What did Warren see in the depths of the earth? Did the 'thing' on the phone get out into our world? Then, when I started reading The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and it had Carter in it again I thought it might expand on The Statement of Randolph Carter, explain some of the questions the reader was left with, but I had absolutely no idea what was going on in that story. To me, it seemed to be a whole lot of rambling purple prose and waffling about overly existential ideas. I only read 20 pages before I gave up and skipped to the next story, The Silver Key, which also features Randolph Carter and some unnecessarily descriptive writing. We'll see how much I can bear before surrendering. To be continued...
30/11 - The Silver Key and Through the Gates of the Silver Key continue the story of Randolph Carter. They were both a mix of the rambling of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and the more readable (for me) narrative of The Statement of Randolph Carter. I enjoyed learning more, and thus understanding more, about what happened to Carter and am glad I made the effort to finish the last two stories after the frustration/waste of time that was The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, but after reading the whole anthology I've realised that Lovecraft isn't really for me. When it comes to horror it seems I don't find oblique scares all that scary, I'm a 'show-not-tell' kind of reader and Lovecraft appears to be the master of 'tell-not-show' horror. When things are left up to the reader I find myself more frustrated that the author didn't tell us or give better clues to lead us to the answer, rather than curious and excited that I get to create my own ending. I probably wouldn't read another Lovecraft book, but if you're a fan of his, or a first timer looking for a good example of his work then I recommend you try this book. I think it has a good selection of his writing, showcasing a range of some of his most popular stories.
PopSugar 2015 Reading Challenge: A Book you Started but Never Finished
Has this been made into a movie? If not, why not? I can see this as a fantastic Paranormal/Blair Witch shaky hand-held camera kind of movie (but not the kind that draws mockery) with the reports from Lake done in video messages instead of radio transmissions and when the rest of the team get to the destroyed campsite they could find a damaged-but-still-working camera which could start to tell the story of what happened. If it had a good director and some decent actors, I could totally see that being a hit and something that Lovecraft fans would tacitly agree to see, hoping it wouldn't be a desecration of Lovecraft's memory, only to find it far surpassed their expectations and was a credit to his memory.
I was a little put off by the discussion of Shoggoths without any explanation of what they are, as if I and everyone else reading his work should know what a Shoggoth is because I've read all his other work. Maybe that, and my brain being unable to turn Lovecraft's description of the Elder Ones into a cohesive animal/vegetable thing, were the reasons why I didn't find this scary. I enjoyed it and look forward to reading the rest of the short stories, but it wasn't scary.
22/08 - So, I've now looked up Shoggoths and the Elder Ones to see what Lovecraft might have been imagining when he wrote those horribly complicated descriptions. Nothing like what my slightly less sophisticated imagination had conjured up, but at least now I have a solid image to concentrate on whenever more Shoggoths or Elder Ones appear in any Lovecraft stories that I subsequently read.
Now I'm onto the next story in the anthology, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which is possibly even better than At the Mountains of Madness. I love the mystery of what Ward's ancestor, Joseph Curwen, might be - zombie, vampire or something else - and through figuring out what Ward has become and how.
On another note, I am surprised at the number of errors I'm finding in the editing - repeated words, words with incorrect first letters and general misspellings. Is this how the stories (I've noticed the errors in both) were published originally or is it just this anthology that needs an overall edit? To be continued...
24/08 - Of course Lovecraft doesn't reveal exactly what happened to Curwen on the night he was annihilated, he leaves it up to our imaginations. Is that a 'thing' with Gothic horror stories, that not everything is revealed as anything our imagination might create would be scarier than if the author told us outright what happened? Because I don't agree. I have a number of theories, all slightly different variations on the same theme, but I'm not sure and I find that more frustrating than disturbing/scary. To be continued...
26/08 - I loved the ending of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, I couldn't guess what was going on with Charles at all. I was thinking that Ward might have conjured Curwen up and sort of subsumed him into himself and begun to turn into Curwen, so I was surprised when the truth was revealed.
Now I'm halfway through The Dreams in the Witch House which is not quite as good. I was not impressed or scared by the description of the "small, white, furry thing" that flashes across rooms in the corner of your eye and has the face and hands of a human - that's just weird and possibly funny, it reminds me of a scene from a kids' movie where the witch/wizard turns the annoying person into a rat but it still has the human face superimposed on the rat body. It just doesn't work for me. But the idea of either bringing something tangible out of a dream or somehow finding it in the real world after you've dreamed about it definitely made an impression, so much so I had my own strange experience.
Since I started reading Lovecraft just over a week ago I've been having strange, vivid dreams. One night my brother tried to shoot me, then I woke up got a drink and went back to sleep only to find myself and my family in a very futuristic airport where I was the only one to notice the terrorist with the smoking backpack walking through the airport. I was yelling at everyone to get down when I woke up the next morning. Then another night I had a dream about a character from a short 'whodunnit' murder mystery tv series called Harper's Island. The character was John Wakefield a serial killer killing off everyone on the island. In my dream he was roaming my large, well-treed backyard and had captured my mum (except she wasn't my actual mother, she looked completely different) and trussed her to an A-frame, like what you use to grow beans on. I was sneaking through the yard searching through the stacks of farm tools for the perfect weapon to kill Wakefield with. I finally decided on a very long pole with a three-pronged fork on the end (who knows what kind of farm tool it was supposed to be), long enough so that I didn't have to be too close to him and pointy enough for killing. I was holding it preparing to stab him in the back while he was taunting my 'mother' when I started to get cramp in my hand so bad that I could hardly continue to hold the weapon (I have been getting some bad hand cramps lately that I've attributed to too much typing). I woke up somewhere around there, before I had the chance to drop the weapon or kill Wakefield. And last night I dreamed I was at a friends' birthday party and we were playing some kind of crazy party game that involved being bound hand and foot and placed on our sides in a box until one whole side of our body had gone numb (from lying on it for so long). My body was going numb when I woke up to find that I was lying on my arm and it had gone numb.
Now, I'm pretty sure those weird dreams coming one after another while I'm reading Lovecraft is all just a coincidence. While I enjoy horror and fantasy (ghosts, vampires etc) and would be quick to believe if there was ever any evidence (something actually happened to me), I don't actually believe in the supernatural - it just makes for great stories. Wow, this review is long and I've still got 4.5 stories to go, hope I can fit it into the 13,034 characters I've got left. To be continued...
28/11 - Finally getting back to this after nearly two years of reading other books. When I stopped reading last time it was at the end of The Dreams in the Witch-House, which, looking back at my review from last year, I found more frustrating than scary, but still enjoyable. The Statement of Randolph Carter was a good offering but felt unfinished, like the second last chapter of a story, not the only chapter. What happened to Carter between hearing that 'other' voice on the end of the phone and waking up in the hospital? What did Warren see in the depths of the earth? Did the 'thing' on the phone get out into our world? Then, when I started reading The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and it had Carter in it again I thought it might expand on The Statement of Randolph Carter, explain some of the questions the reader was left with, but I had absolutely no idea what was going on in that story. To me, it seemed to be a whole lot of rambling purple prose and waffling about overly existential ideas. I only read 20 pages before I gave up and skipped to the next story, The Silver Key, which also features Randolph Carter and some unnecessarily descriptive writing. We'll see how much I can bear before surrendering. To be continued...
30/11 - The Silver Key and Through the Gates of the Silver Key continue the story of Randolph Carter. They were both a mix of the rambling of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and the more readable (for me) narrative of The Statement of Randolph Carter. I enjoyed learning more, and thus understanding more, about what happened to Carter and am glad I made the effort to finish the last two stories after the frustration/waste of time that was The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, but after reading the whole anthology I've realised that Lovecraft isn't really for me. When it comes to horror it seems I don't find oblique scares all that scary, I'm a 'show-not-tell' kind of reader and Lovecraft appears to be the master of 'tell-not-show' horror. When things are left up to the reader I find myself more frustrated that the author didn't tell us or give better clues to lead us to the answer, rather than curious and excited that I get to create my own ending. I probably wouldn't read another Lovecraft book, but if you're a fan of his, or a first timer looking for a good example of his work then I recommend you try this book. I think it has a good selection of his writing, showcasing a range of some of his most popular stories.
PopSugar 2015 Reading Challenge: A Book you Started but Never Finished
dark
mysterious
slow-paced