A review by curiouser_and_curiouser
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

adventurous challenging mysterious slow-paced

2.75

Cosmic horror is one of my absolute favorite genres and this just didn’t live up to my expectations AT ALL. Perhaps I misjudged the meaning of cosmic horror. I thought it was an exploration of the fear of the unknown—-indescribable, inexplicable, incomprehensible things that drive people to insanity. I guess HP Lovecraft’s version is just introducing enormous deities that have immense power and make humanity feel insignificant, which is also nice but not what I was expecting. The first 60% were promising: a mysterious, isolated Antarctic setting that set the stage for something genuinely unsettling. But all of that potential was squandered when the story took a hard left into dense, speculative anthropology. It became a slog of pseudo-zoology and pseudo-biology — exhausting and immersion-breaking. The creatures were explained to death. They had furniture. They kept slaves. They painted murals. They had homes.  Like how am i supposed to fear these things if you’re giving them human traits? Cosmic horror should shake your understanding of reality, not read like a museum exhibit. The only truly inexplicable event happens at the 96% mark, but that was not enough to redeem the rest of the story. This Thing Between Us is still the best cosmic horror I’ve read yet. I propose we create a new subgenre of cosmic horror altogether so that I can avoid the disappointment of traditional Lovecraftian stories like this one ever again.