Customer Reviews

Hive

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Being a huge fan of Lovecraft when i heard about a supposed sequel to At the Mountains of Madness, i went ahead and purchased it. Hive is a mixed bag. I've only read one other thing by Curran and that was in Warfear a short story called the Chattering of Tiny Teeth. That was a great story and i had high hope for this one. Some which were met and others that weren't.

Hive centers around a artic expedition where there are two sets of people the Scientists and the Engineers. The story starts off with the discovery of "mummies" by a drilling team. We come to learn that these mummies are something that has never been seen before and believed to be alien in nature. Not too long after there discovery weird things start to happen to people. Odd dreams plague the camp and insanity besets a certain few as well.I don't want to give too much away here.Just suffice to say that not all the mummies are quite dead and they have some plans for us.

Now my main complaint regarding this novel is that it is NOT a sequel to At the Mountains of Madness. For those of you who have read that story you will remember that the story centered around a Shoggoth uprising against their alien masters. This story ahs nothing whatsoever to do with those events other than to mention the Pabodie expedition and distort it to its own use. Hive is well written but it lacks the cosmic dread that Lovecraft and also Kiernan are so good at. Everything is explained in too much detail which is not good. Another gripe of mine is that you really don't feel very much for the characters they are more like cardboard cut outs than 3 dimensional people who you care for.

Overall i did enjoy Hive, it was well paced and suspenseful. While not a great novel it is enjoyable if you take it for what it is. Also a side note that cover is spectacular its ashame that it really has nothing to do with the story.

Hive is a new publication by Elder Signs Press, just released about a month ago. The author is Tim Curran. Even though we are unpacking, as usual most of my mythos books are in a box somewhere and I can't say how many stories by Mr. Curran I may have read. I never read his other novel, Skin Medicine. He has written two short stories I saw recently, "The Eyes of Howard Curlix" (from Horrors Beyond) and "The Chattering of Tiny Teeth" (from Warfear). Both were well crafted and enjoyable. The limited edition hardcover of Hive is sold out (I was lucky enough to get a copy) but the trade paperback is available for only $10.85, and eligible for free shipping if the total order is more than $25. My copy was rather more expensive, but it is a high quality hardback that upholds the high standards set by Elder Signs, and I imagine the paperback is good quality as well. Page count was 269. I must mention that the cover art by Dave Carson is phenomenally gorgeous, a shoggoth-like creature arising from the icy depths in an ancient ruined city. However I would mildly contend whether it represented any actual scene from the book or was more just a terrific Lovecraftian painting. Editing was tight with minimal typos (especially compared to the disastrous HP Lovecraft Institute).

This book is billed as a sequel to "At the Mountains of Madness."

Sequel: n.
1. Something that follows; a continuation.
2. A literary, dramatic, or cinematic work whose narrative continues that of a preexisting work.
3. A result or consequence.
In the sense that it is set in the same environment of the Pabodie expedition, it is a sequel...relying on definition #1. But I would dispute the aptness of definition #2. I'll come back to that. Be advised that some spoilers may follow.

The plot is set in the modern era at a scientific research station in Antarctica. The cast is a collection of scientists, technicians and other misfits who are spending the Antarctic winter doing research, basically cut off from the rest of the world and living in a small oasis in the midst of a harsh and unforgiving landscape. Some of them are investigating areas previously searched by the Pabodie expedition in ATMOM and the unearth some frozen/mummified Old One cadavers...or are they really cadavers?

I really really wanted to like this book. And I did like the basic conception of the plot and how it was carried out. Otherwise I had some difficulties with it. This may read a little like stream of consciousness, alas. First of all, although Curran used the same setting as ATMOM, and the machinations of the Old Ones were central to the story, it wasn't really a sequel. I haven't read ATMOM in a few years, but as I recall were not the shoggoths ascendant in the ruins of the Old Ones' city? Shoggoths did not make an appearance in the book. But that's OK. I think we would all rather an author followed his own muse and not just slap together another Lovecraftian pastiche.

Part of my indelible response to any Antarctic horror story is informed by John Carpenter's "The Thing" (no, he's not a relative, the John Carpenter I'm related to is a commercial artist). I think this movie is brilliant: frightening, creepy, hysterically funny in parts, with great acting performances and very very Lovecraftian sensibility. I view it as the best ever Lovecraftian film. And so I can't help but look for similarities, and I can't help but find them. Curran himself makes a tributary mention of "The Thing" near the end of his text. Having seen this and Alien, I must say there were no highly original plot twists in Hive to sustain tension. But on the other hand, as it is set in the same frame of reference as ATMOM we already knew about the bogeymen, so I wasn't put off by this either.

And now we come to my greatest issue with Hive, the writing itself. The prose just did not knock my socks off. I should note that the idiom made no effort to mimic HPL's prose (which is not a bad thing!). ATMOM is one of my all time favorite HPL works and it was only about a hundred pages or so. Word count in ATMOM runs about 41,000 and we know that HPL did not use the most economical prose. Hive was just too long. For the most part I think the mythos has been best served by the short story. The mythos type novels that have really grabbed me have been few: Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk by Goodfellow, Rules of Engagement by Tynes and Balak by Rainey. Most of the others have not been as good for whatever reason. In Hive I often felt the whole book should have been edited down to novella length to remove excess verbiage. For example, there were often, for me, excessive adjectives in oddly structured usage. Back when I was a teen I actually read about 5 or 6 John Norman Gor novels, you know, the ones before he degenerated into soft core bondage porn, and he would structure sentences like *and too, to me it seemed bold* instead of the more direct *it seemed bold to me*. Of course Yoda type sentence structure (beautifully lampooned in George Lucas in Love) is even more annoying. I'm getting off track, there was nothing that bad here, but if something is red, blue and green I'd rather say that than it was red and blue and green. Doing so once is for effect, more is for affectation. And bloody vexing when if goes on page after page. Using 4 to 6 adjectives to describe things in the same sentence also just bogs things down. Also I think the author just tried a little too hard. The descriptions are arduous, effortful, and for me did not evoke the intended horror, otherness whatever. I found the characters lacked life and were frankly not distinctive enough for me to try to keep them straight, or care about their fates. And the dialogue just didn't ring true, profanity for effect but just sort of falling flat like, well, profanity for effect. When I compare that to Radiant Dawn where the characters jump off the page, develop and become people I cared about, and where the dialogue bristles, sparkles, keeping me reading at a break neck pace...Hive suffers by comparison. I set it down a few times and read some other books in between attempts at finishing it. On the other hand I did not punt on it like I did Nightmare's Disciple and A Darkness Inbred.

So a mixed bag here. The book in paperback is very reasonable priced, eligible for free shipping. And it was a noble effort. I did care about the plot and wanted to see where Curran ended the story, and I did think the ending was satisfying (if anticipated by "the Thing" again). I'll give it 3 stars. I await other opinions with interest. I certainly will not shy away from Curran's future mythos offerings.

The cover blurb of Curran's book calls it a sequel to Lovecraft's immortal "At the Mountains of Madness," but, as several reviewers have commented, it owes at least as much to John Carpenter's 1987 ugh-fest "The Thing." The description of bearded hero Jimmy Hayes even sounds like Kurt Russell's portrayal (and also parallels him in using foul language that would undoubtedly have the Old Gentleman of Providence rotating rapidly in his grave -- assuming he's still there). Moreover, the climactic moment, where Hayes and girlfriend take on a by-now grossly-deformed co-worker who has been taken over by alien forces, sounds like a direct crib from Russell's final confrontation with the many-headed monster that was once his co-worker.

I confess that in spite of the deficiences others have pointed out, I did rather enjoy this novel, especially the descriptions of the abandoned ruins of the Elder Things, while his description of the expedition's attempt to drill down to a lake under the Antarctic icecap, in which said Elder Things have set up shop, could come right out of today's science headlines (in fact, I believe a similar project is under way right now -- although they haven't found any life forms on its bottom so far higher than mats of cyano-bacteria).

In the end, my major complaint with "The Hive" is with its central theme, the portrayal of the Elder Things. In ATMOM, the narrator begins by regarding them with horror but eventually comes to see them with sympathy as the last few intelligent (albeit far beyond human understanding) beings of their race, trapped in an unfamiliar time but doing the best they can with the tools they are given. This concept, of Elder Things who are unquestionably alien but essentially benign, carried over into Chaosium's "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" gaming system. Curran, however, has blended the worst features of Elder Things and shoggoths (with the additional ability, familiar from "Scanners," of blowing up human heads by remote control) to make the Elder Things a slavering menace to man's survival, much less his dominion over the Earth. It makes for an interesting page-turner, but if you're looking for a Lovecraft sequel, go elsewhere (and keep this book out of the hands of impressionable children who might get nightmares from it).

Those folks at Elder Signs Press are doing their best to keep original Cthulhu Mythos fiction alive, and HIVE is the most recent example of their endeavor. And it never even mentions the name "Cthulhu." HIVE by Tim Curran is an original novel and a "sequel" to H. P. Lovecraft's short novel "At the Mountains of Madness."

Set in the modern day at an Antarctic research station, and populated with scientists of various disciplines and maintenance crew members, everything seems fine until the scientists discover something they can only call "mummies" -- frozen and long dead life forms unlike anything they have ever seen; tentacles for feet, twig like arms, fan-like wings, and heads like starfish.

Except maybe they aren't dead, at least not dead like scientist understand the term. Soon, the station populace suffers from an outbreak or really bad dreams, dreams about ancient cities and star-born journeys. Meanwhile, a drilling team sends a probe into a geo-thermally warmed underground lake, and discovers what might be the ruins of pre-human hive-like city. But the images from the probe show what might be still living versions of those mummies. Suddenly, the dreams become a lot more vivid and induce insanity before they cause some minds to physically and psychically meltdown, literally.
But is all of this really going on, or is it just a breakout of stress from being at the South Pole for so long? A crew member and the station doctor know it is real, and they set out to prevent the citizens of that hive city from encroaching onto the rest of the world, assuming, of course, they don't go crazy themselves and die on their mission.

Inevitably, Curran's novel will be compared to "At the Mountain of Madness" and tales like John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" For the most part, HIVE will be compared favorably.

There are two things in HIVE that Curran does that make this book very good as compared to other Mythos fiction. First, he makes the Old Ones a true, menacing threat to his characters. They actually come across as scary, not just as props in a long list of Mythos baddies. That leads seamlessly right into the second thing Curran does right in this book; he does not have any other Mythos creatures/myths get entangled in the plot to slow down the action with a byzantine litany of Mythos particulars. Curran focused on just enough of the Old Ones history (journeyed from other stars long ago, trapped in Antarctica, somehow horribly connected to humanity) to give the characters an operational understanding of their threat. That is not to say there aren't some connections, because there are, especially to the first explorers in Lovecaft's short novel, a Miskatonic University reference, and a very brief cameo by one other Mythos creature that works in conjunction with, not against, the Old Ones and their infinite menace.
Other pluses for this novel are that Curran obviously did some research on realistic life at the South Pole, as well as other scientific details that enhance the characters and setting.

The only downside to HIVE is that there are some sections that get a bit bogged down in description. This is probably unavoidable given the novel's setting and that some characters have to perform some actions alone. Luckily, these sections are not overbearing, like some Mythos tales.

In short, HIVE is a novel that enriches the Mythos sub-genre. While certainly a good time will be had by Mythos fans, this is also a good book to for only casual Mythos horror fans as well.

This review was originally published in the Hellnotes Newsletter

In my never-ending quest to read fiction at least partially inspired by Lovecraft, I put Hive on my wishlist and received it as a Christmas gift. I was excited - it promised a combination of John Carpenter's The Thing and a continuation (if not an outright sequel) of At the Mountains of Madness (ATMOM). This review, by necessity, contains spoilers, and it's a big one.

Ahem. Are they gone yet? You! Hey you! You sure you don't want me to spoil this? Okay...

The thing on the cover that's clearly supposed to be a shoggoth? Not in the book.

Mind you, I get that a cover's purpose is to sell a story, and ATMOM was as much about shoggoths as it was about elder things. But really, if the cover has a monster on it, I expect the monster to make an appearance. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, yes. Curran crafts a promising tale of the Antarctic Kharkov Station led by no-nonsense Jimmy Hayes. Hayes is a working-class, how-do-ya-do kind of fella. He bristles at the cold logic of the base's commander, pines over the blue-eyed pretty doctor, and otherwise has a quip for every encounter with the alien and unknown. If you found those last two sentences annoying, you're not going to like Hayes.

Curran, using Hayes' voice, tells a tale that ranges from pedestrian to prosaic, with the everyman's voice juxtaposed with beautifully-crafted Lovecraftian descriptions of dread. This creates a very dissonant narrative style that ping-pongs between "aw shucks!" commentary and creeping horror. Hayes ends each chapter with a clever quip that's not very clever, and pretty soon his voice wears on the reader.

The other problem is that this story is bigger than Hayes. Gates, a brilliant scientist, is barely glimpsed but largely responsible for fending off the far-reaching plans of the Elder Things who - unlike their mildly sympathetic counterparts in Lovecraft's tale - are decidedly hostile to humanity. Their plan is absurdly far-fetched and doesn't always mesh with the Elder Thing's actual behavior, which is apparently to flap around like giant bats startled by the sunlight. More effective are the ghosts of the Elder Things, which can melt your eyeballs right out of their sockets.

But then there's talk of The Color Out of Space, in-fighting between Hayes and just about everybody else that drags on far too long, the randomly inserted Cutchen who appears out of nowhere with virtually no character development (so you know what that means), and a final showdown with a convenient zombie that's hardly a showdown at all. When you face down a race of Elder Things, I expect a climactic battle more in the order of Aliens vs. Predator than a fight reminiscent of Dragon Ball Z.

And that's the problem. Hive is beautifully crafted but lacks direction, dragging on too long in some places and burdened by a coarse narrator who isn't up to Curran's linguistic ability. I would have traded the coarse Hayes for the intellectual Gates any day.

A fairly-good sequel to ATMOM, but not on the mark. From little things (such as the stereotypical authority figure being a villain and the free-spirits the heroes) to excessive emphasis on profanity instead of literary. Good for a beach paperback, but not worthy of Lovecraft.

Plus, I have an issue with the book cover. There are no shoggoths in the novel! I want my shoggoths, dangit!!! :-)

Tim Curran is a master horror writer. It is criminal that he is not more well known.

Hive is the fourth novel by him that I have read and I will be making my way through them all. The story is a sequel to Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness" and Curran builds on that story, taking it in his own direction. Where Lovecraft's original story can be a real chore to get through, Hive is a real page turner with never a dull moment.

The movie, "The Thing" is also clearly an influence and Curran acknowledges that film twice in Hive.

I don't really get the negative reviews here. If I was to be critical I could say that I find it unlikely that a city could be in any way intact after several hundred million years, but that is Lovecraft's fault. The cover is misleading too.

Strongly recommended along with all Tim Curran.

I liked this novel and will reread it after SPAWN comes out, which is the sequel. True, there are no shoggoths in Hive, which I thought might be due to two books (Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk) - and Curran's possibly not wanting to step on feet.

The view of the Old Ones of Antartica was already elaborated upon by Brian Lumley in his story about the last city of Alanhati. I think the tale is called The Outpost, but I don't recall. It was good. I should reread that one too :)

Of course Hive would incorporate elements of "The Thing" because that story has been officially incorporated into the mythos (Chaosium Books). We never found out what the Thing was, remember. One could easily merge that into At the Mountains of Madness. Combine then, the Lumley story, which further elaborates on those Old Ones - and keep in mind another author (whom Curran probably knows) writing two books that feature shoggoths - and bingo - the Hive.

Now that it's ALL published, I await Spawn.

I had very high expectations of book that is supposed to be a sequel to myfavorite H.P.Lovecraft story. My expectations weren't quite met. But, there's plenty of dread to make this a good horror novel, if you can somehow ignore that it's supposed to be a sequel. I've read the novel twice and I enjoyed it more the second time around.

I rather enjoyed this book and its follow up. It is simple, heavily uses elements of Lovecraftian horror but in a modern setting. However, after some time (especially in the second book of this series) I felt somewhat bored because it is always about ice, snow, ice, blizzard, snow, ice...It is a deadly environment that essentially isolate the protagonist of the story, OK we understand, but after the 10th description of how the ice is cold it sort of becomes repetitive.

Another slightly annoying feature is that it feels like the author is having issues about the fact that most of Lovecraft characters were men of education: professors, writers, doctors...Here the heroes or "good guys" are mostly cooks, mechanics, handymen, ...while the scientist just die or are the bad guys.

There are a few grammatical mistakes (NOT typos) here and there that could have benefitted from a more thorough proofreading, and the few descriptions of basic biology were a little bit off the mark.

Nonetheless I read this book without effort. Entertaining, but not outstanding.