At the Mountains of Madness

February 20, 2012
Lovecraft’s At the Mountain of Madness opens with a newspaper announcement of a voyage to Antarctica, immediately followed by the narrator, Professor William Dyer stating his opposition to it. From there, the book launches into the story of Dyer’s own, earlier expedition to the Antarctic wasteland, one that culminated in murder and horror in the aforementioned mountains. Lovecraft was a master of writing about indescribable horrors whose visages violate the laws of nature in unsettling ways. Right off the bat, this creates a problem for anyone seeking to translate his work into a visual medium: how to keep the sense of unspoken tension and dread? Artist I.N.J. Culbard addressed this concern admirably by telling the story largely through radio broadcasts, which forces the reader to feel the tense isolation felt by the explorers as they uncover progressively horrific mysteries from the Antarctic ice. Culbard also effectively threads a sense of dread throughout the book with subtle touches of the macabre, such as a glimpse of two blind penguins swimming in the foreground of an early frame. This is one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories. Although it is questionable whether it needed an adaptation, this is an excellent one.

September 15, 2013

An Antarctic expedition by Miskatonic University researchers unearths evidence of an ancient nonhuman civilization on the Barren, the supposedly lifeless windswept interior of the Antarctic plateau. When the researchers find strange fossils of unfamiliar creatures and ancient carved stones, their discoveries lead to horrors buried beneath the mountains that cost the scientists more than they expect. Narrator William Roberts gives an appropriately grave and dramatic reading. VERDICT Lovecraft's intentionally archaic and elaborate style, at its peak here, will appeal to fans of Edgar Allan Poe and his other 19th-century gothic predecessors.--Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ., Atlanta

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