Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Lovecraft Pistache, October 10, 2005
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.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worth a look, July 27, 2005
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.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A New Story about the Old Ones, May 9, 2006
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
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