will_cherico 's review for:

Frozen Hell by John W. Campbell Jr.

5.0

---

John W. Campbell Jr's extended version of Who Goes There? is a masterclass in paranoia and suspense. The high drama style of writing typical to pulp magazines combined with the hard, scientific investigation that Campbell was so enamored with creates a fantastic dynamic between the characters and emphasizes the isolation they all feel, both due to their location and their circumstance. Paranoia's such a powerful emotion, and this story captures it in a way I haven't seen as effectively in speculative fiction outside of The Monsters are Due on Maple Street. Even the title of its shortened version - Who Goes There? - evokes the discomfort of hearing what you could've sworn is a footstep outside your door. The structure is an enjoyable one, it's a series of tests the scientists try to come up with to figure out first what the Thing is and then how to identify/destroy it before it makes it out of Antarctica, and it's a great race against the clock. The novella falls victim to a few issues that nearly all pulps suffer from - the level-headed scientists go insane almost comically fast, the story's too short to give us a good sense of each main character's personality, and most importantly I would've liked to see their interpersonal paranoia play out a little more, like how we see in John Carpenter's 1982 film adaptation rather than just the typical madness caricature - but it manages to hold its own, making it a really strong, much more cosmically optimistic companion to H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.