At the Mountains of Madness

IMPORTANT-- This would be 4.5 stars IF it didn't have the HORRIBLE, LOUD, STARTLING music every 15 minutes, interrupting the story. The narrator is good enough. The story is VERY cool, especially for how old it is. But, seriously, the music will come out of nowhere and scare the CRAP out of you!!

This is the genisis of all those stories like The Thing, Alien vs Preditor. There is nothing like discovering where all the great sc-fi horror has come from. This is the seed of so much of what I have read in the last 20 years. In the begining there was Lovecraft.

Possibly. This is the second Lovecraft book I've tried and while the stories show great promise with their ideas, the actual telling of them makes them fall short of the mark. Lovecraft uses seven words, when two will do. This makes for an extremely frustrating listen as I wanted him to do was get to the damned point and go on with the story. The look started out strong. The plot moved forward at a nice pace and had me glued. However when Dyer and Danforth start their exploration of the lost city, the pace grinds to a crawl as Lovecraft tells us the history of the Elder Ones and the Shoggoths. While this information is welcome and necessary, it goes on for ages. The whole second third of the book focuses on this and there are whole chapters that consist of Dyer musing on these facts as he and Danforth move from room to room. By the time the book approached the end, I just wanted it to be over.

The discovery of the Elder Ones and the mystery surrounding them. I particularly enjoyed the sense of foreshadowing they gave as the dogs couldn't stand to be near them. You knew something was going t go terribly wrong.

Maybe. I found Herriot to be very underwhelming. Perhaps this is due to the way the book was written. But there was hardly any emotion to his performance.

Most definitely. Guillermo del Toro has been trying to make this movie for over a decade. I firmly believe that it would be far more entertaining as a movie, and if del Toro made it, you could be assured of brilliant creature design and effects. He also knows how to create that sense of the weird and disturbing.

I would have liked to hear more of the monstrous beings in the higher mountain range that even the Elder Ones were afraid of. The mystery surrounding these hardly-mentioned horrors intrigued me greatly.

I think many listeners will enjoy the stories of HPL even more when they are read by a good reader. Some of his style is hard for people to read compared to modern writers that they may like better at a first read. I've had more than one person that I have tried to turn on to his work tell me later that he too difficult to keep interested in long enough to finish the story. Especially some of the Cthulhu stuff can be very tedious to read, but if someone reads it to you it seems to go much faster and is even more enjoyable.

It's pretty tough to compare HPL to anybody else from his era. His style of writing wasn't always the most polished, but his creativity and originality was in a league of his own. I am surprised there haven't really been any modern filmmakers that have been able to nail any of his ideas on film. Most of the films inspired by his stories have been pretty lame which is sad because he really was ahead of his time in many ways.

FNH does a pretty good job, especially with all the difficult to pronounce names, etc. His vocal style is a bit monotone, but other than that I enjoy his reading very much.

I think I'll stay away from trying that...I'm better at criticizing than coming up with my own ideas!

Can't wait to download more HPL.

Great production value

That it's totally unabridged and you can drink in every detail.

Elocution intonation dramatization and even breathing

When they run from the Shogaths

This seems an excellently-worded and well-paced example of a Lovecraft story where I spend most of it saying

The way he pronounced

In the Mountain Deeps

Maybe. There may be more

Great British accent. He also made a convincing academic and brought some emotion to what could have been dry text.

The music at the end and beginning of each chapter grows old.

I liked the 'steampunk' feel of it- written at a time when Antarctica was little known and science was in early days it is a great 'alternative history' of polar exploration.

The structure of the story doesn't really do the ending justice- there as so many heavy hints only the dumbest listerner couldn't figue out what is coming next. That is Lovecraft's fault, not the productions'.

It is all narrated as the view of one party so this question is not relevant.

The Antarctic Horror?

Intriguing, captivating, spine tingling

William Dyer

excellent narration

Come see this movie even though it has Tom Cruise

This is the first work by Lovecraft I have ever read. I enjoy Ambrose Bierce and M.R James and I was looking for something in the genre. This was a bit more science fiction but I really enjoyed it. It got off to a slow start, but picked up and has great atmosphere. Great cold, windy night read.