In the Library
At the Mountains of Madness
H.P. Lovecraft, 1936
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 3 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 12
- Length
- Length 40k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge's mariner sails into the same polar ice and comes home with a story nobody wants to hear, cursed by what he saw at the bottom of the world.
£1.99
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Another expedition into the ice frames a story of scientific curiosity that uncovers a horror it cannot put back.
£1.99
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
M.R. James
M. R. James's scholars dig up old texts and relics that should have stayed buried, the same learned curiosity that carries Dyer's expedition past the point of return.
£1.99
About the book
A geologist on an Antarctic expedition crosses a range of unmapped black peaks and finds, in the city beyond, vast cyclopean walls carved with the history of a civilization older than humanity. H.P. Lovecraft serialized this novella in Astounding Stories in 1936, near the end of a life lived in genteel Providence poverty, drawing on Poe and on his own xenophobic dread of what lay beneath the surface of any known thing. The expedition narrator, Dyer, pieces together the murals and the dissection notes left by the Old Ones, the shoggoths, the unspeakable presence still alive in the deeper valleys. Lovecraft's prose strains, repeats, italicizes, runs at the limits of the speakable. The horror is that the universe is indifferent and that we are recent.