Customer Reviews

The Mountains of Madness

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In this strange, short novel of voodoo, love and history, protagonist Dan Colby wakes up under a full moon in a graveyard on the Caribbean island of St. Joseph. Bewilderment gives way to fear as he realizes he has no memory of how he got there or who he is, besides a name. The last he remembers is meeting a friend in a hotel room in New York City. "Strangely, though, he couldn't remember the name of the hotel or that of the friend."

The story then switches to a coffee plantation where an older, sophisticated man and his beautiful young peasant wife greet a young, white visitor, Janice Hall. She is researching an ancestor, a sea captain who had helped the plantation's white owner and some others escape during the slave revolt that led to the island's independence.

Cave alternates between Dan's nightmarish stumbling through island terrain, beset by hallucinations, evil desires and fragmented memories and Janice's halting probe into the past. In one hallucination he sees a young girl and attacks, rapes and murders her. The next morning, seeing a similar girl in the flesh, he is powerless to subdue his murderous urge. Chased, cursed, and reviled, he naturally finds his way to the plantation.

Voodoo charms meant to curse the white interlopers and the plantation are found throughout the property. Workers refuse to work, accidents plague those who try to help, horrifying nightmares haunt Dan and Janice as they struggle to discover who is trying to destroy them and why.

This is an old-fashioned sort of story from a veteran horror writer who has published nearly a thousand pulp-fiction stories and 49 novels in his 70 years of writing. Its tight plot and suspenseful prose transcend the pulp genre however, offering a nuanced view of voodoo in a highly entertaining story.

Hugh B. Cave has had quite a career; pulp magazine writer, slick magazine writer, novelist, non-fiction writer, and finally a coffee plantation owner. But horror and science fiction fans are a strange breed, they never forget. During the seventies, long after Cave had stopped writing, a cadre of fans and small-press publishers began a revival of his career and began to bring back into print some of his pulp horror and adventure stories and novels; they also managed to get the man writing new stories and novels again. What followed in the next twenty years or so was several collections worth of short stories, a string of novels, and a memoir or two. "The Mountains Of Madness" was the last novel that he managed to publish before death in 2004, just a few years shy of his hundredth birthday.

By today's standards, "The Mountains Of Madness" is neither groundbreaking in its content or in the story's telling. It is an old-fashioned pulp story, what was once called an "eerie" or "weird" tale. In fact, in the old days of the thirties or forties it would have appeared as a two part serial in one of the old weird or horror fiction pulps. It is just a little longer than the length of one half of one of those old Ace Double novels, and probably would never have even seen print if not for Cemetery Dance Publications, one of the more influential small-press specialty book publishers.

Dan Colby is an American entrepreneur, and he initially wakes up in a the cemetery of St. Joseph unable to even remember who he is, or why he is where he is. Understandably confused, he begins to wander the wild countryside, during which he starves, dehydrates, suffers hallucinations, finds out that he may be a wanted person, and has uncontrollable urges to kill and maim, almost destroying a small child.

Parallel with Colby's wild adventures is the story of Janice Hall, a young writer who has decided to investigate her history and the history of her family. Having arrived on St. Joseph, she initially contacts Gerry Delacroix, the foreman of the Morel Plantation, and through him she manages to find a room with Albert and Camille Morel. The Morels are in the process of waiting for a young American businessman to show up so that Albert can sell him his plantation and move back to the city.

Colby eventually shows up at the Morel plantation, he has by now recovered much of his memory, except that he STILL can't remember how he got to St. Joseph. Colby's and Hall's story's then become braided together as the romance between the two starts to grow and cement, yet problems continue as Hall continues to research her family's past, hallucinations continue, and danger constantly looms over the Hall/Colby relationship.

For those who have acclimated to today's practice of four hundred plus page paranormal romances this novel will probably be a tough read as it skimps on the redundant and extraneous filler that so marks modern novels. "The Mountains Of Madness" also lacks the graphic sexual content and language that so many modern paranormal romances have, instead, this novel takes the slow road to romance, and the articulate road to language.

Cave is like going to your Grandfather and asking to be told a story, and the story that he tells you as you sit on his lap is thrilling and exciting in all the right places, and having a lot of danger, romance, sinister happenings, melodrama, and weird suspense. It's like reading an old "B" black-and-white weird adventure movie. Cave treats voodoo with respect; no melodramatic zombies, no thrashing natives screaming in unintelligible languages, and in the end, whether or not everything has a supernatural reason for happening is left open to interpretation.

One neat thing is that Cave shows that you often sow what you reap, so that if you treat people with respect, when trouble come down, you may very well find that you have some unexpected allies that will come to your aid. For an old pulp fan, and a fan of leaner, old-fashioned, well-told stories, "The Mountains Of Madness", which has nothing to do with the H. P. Lovecraft novella of the same name, gets a five-star rating.

It should be mentioned that "The Mountains Of Madness" also has black-and-white endpapers, three pulp style illustrations, and a great full-color front cover by the under-rated Keith Minion making this an attractive package indeed. And mine's (woo-woo) signed by Hugh B. Cave, the man himself! It's just too bad that this novel has never been reprinted into paperback to a wider audience. They don't write `em much like this anymore, and `tis a shame too.