at the mountains of madness and other tales of terror

This edition is particularly timely because it arrives in an era when we can so clearly see that Lovecraft grasped the complexity of planetary upheaval. This latest collection showcases some of Lovecraft’s most popular and enduring works, placing him as an indelible marker for explorations into the strange, the fantastical and the terrifying. Perhaps the descriptions of alien cities and cultures found in The Call of Cthulhu (1926), At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and The Shadow Out of Time (1934–35) could be read as an Alien Gothic as opposed to an American Gothic trope, but that is a subject for a much longer discussion. Gothic tropes run strongly through Lovecraft’s tales the locales are haunted, but they drown in the immense antiquity of geological aeons remote from human concerns – as opposed to the cultural artifacts of human civilization more commonly used in European and British gothic (though this material is also found in Lovecraft’s stories such as The Haunter of the Dark ). His dark, gothic tales, despite the florid prose, remain popular and food for consideration amongst not only scholars of literature, popular culture and philosophy, but also artists of a wide range of mediums and platforms. Lovecraft (1890–1937) have influenced much of the darker side of popular culture in the twentieth century, and continue to do so in the twenty-first.

At the mountains of madness and other tales of terror