Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mega collection of Antarctic fiction, January 29, 2005
There is an interesting story about this Chaosium collection [...]Charles Engan relates that when Chaosium was preparing to release the enormous campaign "Beyond the Mountains of Madness", there was not enough money to print everything in its entirety. The authors wanted to include "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" as well as "At the Mountains of Madness", but since it was too expensive to include with the campaign, a friend offered to underwrite the expense of publishing the material, plus other fiction, as a separate volume. Voila! The Antarktos Cycle.
Contents:
"Antarktos" - from the "Fungi of Yuggoth" poem by HPL
"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket"
"The Sphinx of the Ice Fields" - excerpts
"The Greatest Adventure"
"At the Mountains of Madness"
"The Tomb of the Old Ones"
"At the Mountains of Murkiness"
"The Thing From Another World"
"The Brooding City"
"The Dreaming City"
Traditionally, these cycles are used to illustrate how HPL developed the concepts used in his stories. "Arthur Gordon Pym" might be included solely for the purpose of the aformentioned campaign, but it is excellent Antarctic fiction by a rather important author in the development of horror. Also, have you ever wondered where "tekel-li-li" comes from? "Sphinx of the Ice Fields" has excerpts related to Pym's narrative.
"The Greatest Adventure" might also be useful for keepers planning to run the camapign for which Antarktos was designed - it describes the preparations for an Antarctic expedition as well as the actual undertaking itself. The incredibly potent seeds of life that they find undoubtedly inspired the movie "Evolution" as well as other fiction
"At the Mountains of Madness" is one of HPL's finest stories. I would love to see a cinematic version of this. Perhaps with global warming, Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness will someday be seen rising over the Antarctic plain!
I don't have much to say about the other titles. The last two develop the "Old Ones" that lived in Irem. Lovecraft sometimes used the same name for different concepts - he claimed that contradictory facts were more appropriate to an ancient myth cycle than having everythinng fit together neatly. They could have been left out and finished the book with ...
"The Thing From Another World" - I expected this to be pulpy, but it was surprisingly serious. Antarctic researchers discover an alien craft embedded in the ice. Unwittingly releasing an alien with control over its morphology at the sub-cellular level, it replicates itself by consuming and imitating life around itself. Who is human, and who is the monster? Do the infected humans even know that they are no longer human? Can they take the chance on anyone leaving the base alive? An incredible psychodrama as well as science fiction and horror. Great stuff - made me want to watch Carpenter's version again.
So yes, there are some very annoying typos, but the quality of the fiction is mostly top-notch, with some very unusual themes being explored. Don't let this collection pass you by.
|
|
|
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Flawed Collection, December 10, 2001
By A Customer
An excellent collection of short to medium length stories, all dealing with Antarctic expeditions and what the adventurers found (but wish they hadn't). I only gave this book three stars because of the horrible proof-reading. It appeared as if the original documents had been scanned in and run through OCR software without a human bothering to check the results. Some examples: in one story, Tekeli-li is printed T>k>li-li; in one story all instances of "he" are printed as "be". Other than that, I would recommend this collection to anyone interested in weird fiction set in Antarctica.
|
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Stories are alright, text itself has problems, December 29, 2004
My main problem with this collection is the typos. At one point, I found three of them on one page. These weren't hard to spot typos either. Most of them involved spanish characters, tildes, umlauts and the like. While the occasional typo isn't all that big of a deal, if they occur in these amounts, it breaks the mood, which is all important in a horror story.
Of the stories themselves, I didn't get the Taine one at all, although there were some cool scenes in it, the tomb of the old ones was good fun but predictable, the thing from another world seemed over rated, the brooding city was also formulaic, but rather amusing, and the narrative of arthur gordon pym was uneven, although at its heights, it demonstrated unprecedented imagination.
At The Mountains of Madness itself is somewhat odd. It starts very, very well, establishing the threatening menace of its setting and then getting right on to the monsters, which are very imaginative. Slowly, however, it loses its way. The monsters become an alien race we are meant to sympathize with. A second set of monsters is introduced, and these are memorable, but they are not given enough time to attain the desired impact. However, the story does possess Lovecraft's funniest (and possibly only) joke (although whether this is intentional or not is somewhat debatable).
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
