At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Collected Lovecraft Fiction Series) [ハードカバー]

I will not try to write a complete review, since I see that there are already 17 reviews available here, several of fine quality.

This edition is of great interest because it issues from Arkham House. Arkham House publishing was founded by August Derleth, a protege of H.P. Lovecraft who himself wrote a rather large volume of pastiche material using the Cthulhu mythos of Lovecraft. One motive of Derleth's in founding Arkham House publishing was to find a medium to reissue all the writings of Lovecraft, since many were confined to the pulps like Weird Tales that had first printed them.

I recently purchased this book. The quality of the book is excellent. The print is clear and easy to read. The bookbinding quality is just excellent. This may explain why the book is not particularly cheap.

As for the contents, readers may be glad to know that this book contains much of the very finest writing Lovecraft produced. The short novels were written following Lovecraft's return from his years living in New York, and follow the breakup of his marriage. This "period" of about a decade marked the finest of Lovecraft's writings. In my opinion -- arguably -- "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" are the best works in the Lovecraft canon. A few other words might come up to them, but nothing's better.

Those who find Lovecraft interesting should also check out the writings of August Derleth that incorporate Lovecraft's "Cthulhu mythos." There is also a board game entitled "Arkham Horror" which attempts to recreate the scary Lovecraft universe on your card table. Whacky as this sounds, the game is fun to play.

So have at it! Scare yourselves silly! I love this sort of material myself.

It's not fair to call Lovecraft a horror writer, as from his pen have come some of the most beautiful pieces of literature ever. Tales of the macabre, the ancient, the unspeakable. His narrative style draws you in immediately, engulfing you with the rich atmosphere of the Cthulhu Mythos. Some of Lovecraft's best works are collected in this volume - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath, The Shunned House, as well as numerous short stories. Whether you're a nouveau fan or an old aquaintance, pick this book up

I saw this new dust jacket illustration and groaned in dismay. How could Arkham House do this to Lovecraft, give him a jacket illustration that looks like it belongs on a horror comic cover? Thankfully, I have the editions with those fabulous and beautiful and eerie jacket illustrations by Raymond Bayless. Ah well, once you open the book, you are in one of the finest realms of all time. A photo of Lovecraft is opposite the title page, and he looks so severe, with his dark eyes and his oddly-clamped mouth. The eyes look haunted, as if they have looked on secret terror.

In "A Note on the Texts," editor S. T. Joshi explains the process of his correcting the texts of hundreds of errors introduced by earlier editors. For "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," "The Dreams in the Witch House," "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Keys" the surviving autograph manuscripts in Lovecraft's handwriting served as major textual source. The introduction for the book was written by James Turner, is informative and moving.

The contents of the book has been questioned by some, but I rather like it. First we have Lovecraft's two longest works of fiction, "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." They are followed by two very singular haunted house tales, "The Shunned House" and "The Dreams in the Witch House." The book ends with four tales of Randolph Carter (whom some have said in Lovecraft's fictive alter-ego), "The Statement of Randolph Carter," "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," "The Silver Key," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" is my favourite tale by Lovecraft (S. T. Joshi has worked on a definitive annotated text that will hopefully be published as single volume this year). It astonishes me that this work is, as we have it, an unrevised first draught. The story mesmerizes from first page to last. It contains some of the creepiest passages of pure horror that I have ever read. "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" was also left unpublished and unrevised at the time of Lovecraft's death. It is an exercise in pure phantasy, with moments of fascinating weirdness in the horror tradition.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter" was entirely based on a dream, and it remains an extremely popular tale, especially with amateur film-makers -- there have been several delightful film adaptations shewn at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon. It is a simple tale that contains a fabulous Gothic atmosphere that is peculiar to Lovecraft's early works, such as "The Hound" and "The Unnamable"; and, much later, "Pickman's Model."

Too many unimaginative and clueless "critics" have taken Lovecraft to task for what they call his "art-for-art's sake" pose. The worst assault that I have seen came from Lin Carter, in his LOVECRAFT: A LOOK BEHIND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS. Reacting to a letter that HPL wrote to Frank Long in which Lovecraft laments writing for "a boarish Publick," Carter responds, "In that passage you have much of what I would call the worst of Lovecraft, his weakness and his folly: . . . the ludicrous self-delusion of thinking himself an 'artist' . . ." This clueless attitude is also expressed by de Camp in his biography of Lovecraft, in which he condemns HPL for his "pose" as an artist. In his intelligent introduction to this Arkham House book, Jim Turner addresses this.

"If indeed Lovecraft had become a more positive, socially minded man after his New York experience, evidence of this emergent humanization should be apparent in the macabre fiction. His imaginative tales had never been an idle divertissement for Lovecraft but rather rose from an inner compulsion: 'Art is not what one resolves to say, but what insists on saying itself through one,' he explained in a 1934 letter. 'The only elements concerned are the artist and the emotions within him . . . Real literary composition is the only thing . . . I take seriously in life.'"

Lovecraft had fun writing his weird tales, no doubt -- but their composition was far more than a matter of fun. HPL was an extremely serious artist, one who strove for perfection in his work. He did not always achieve that perfection, but he often came close. I find it incredible that Lin Carter and Sprague de Camp and other ignorant critics cannot see for themselves, in works such as AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS or THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD, or even in something as simple as "The Silver Key," Lovecraft's very serious "artistic" intent and marvelous achievement.

This Arkham House book also includes the early "The Statement of Randolph Carter," which is one of Lovecraft's stories that had its roots in his vivid dreaming. Writes S. T. Joshi, "This story, as is well known, is an almost exact transcript of a dream that Lovecraft had in December 1919, as recorded in a letter of December 11. In the dream, however, the setting seems to be New England; in the story Lovecraft has apparently transferred the locale to Florida, if the mentions of the Gainesville Pike and Big Cypress Swamp are any indication. Lovecraft introduces Randolph Carter in this tale; his colleague, Harley Warren, is a stand-in for Samuel Loveman, the poet and amateur journalist, who figured in Lovecraft's dream. Lovecraft also introduces the element of the 'forbidden book'." The book mention'd in this tale, many agree, is not the Necronomicon. AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS publishes four of the Randolph Carter tales: "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (1919), "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1926-27), "The Silver Key" (1926), and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (1932-33). The last tale is a collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price.

This is an excellent collection of some of the finest writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Two of the long works (THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD and THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH) were never polished or published during Lovecraft's lifetime, and thus we have them in rough draft form. Still, the haunting novel of dark sorcery in Providence stands as one of HPL's great masterpieces.