miércoles, 25 de abril de 2018

At the Mountains of Madness-Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Original title: At the Mountains of Madness

Author Name: H. P. Lovecraft (Howard Phillips Lovecraft)






ISBN: 0785834206

Original Language: English

I have not been able to confirm that there is a Spanish version.

Genre: suspense

Publisher: Castle Books

Current year of publication: 2002

Year of reading: 2017

Additional Information:

This is my first book that I read of this writer (H. P. Lovecraft). Maybe you will ask why I chose to read this book, it has two answers.
The first is that it is a tribute to the father of suspense and detective story, American, Edgar Allan Poe, and his only novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, as this work leaves an end unfinished or open to a second part, several Writers have tried to fill the void left by Poe, including my favorite Jules Verne, with the novel An Antarctic Mystery. I could not pass up the opportunity to read what another writer thought for continuity.


The second: I know that there are three films based on this novel and I have seen them all, (In the mouth of madness, The Thing and The Prince of Darkness.) I have also recently heard how several directors have tried to make a new cinematic adaptation without success, as there are several animated cuts and I have already tried the premature access to a PC game, Steam vasado in this novel, I will tell you that I think of that game one of these days.
Well the book is very good but the narrative form is not my style, at first I thought the book was a kind of part two, but I was wrong, because for me the purpose of the book is to explain the strange phenomena of the Poe's book, like those humans do in Antarctica and why they are terrified of everything white and shout Tekeli-li!


Resume of the work:


This story is narrated in the first person by the main character William Dyer, geologist, and professor at the Miskatonic University of Arkham. (I want to clarify that both the university and the city are a fantasy of H. P. Lovecraft, he also invented a river with the name Miskatonic.)
He is part of a massive expedition to Antarctica, which entails a large number of men, dogs, sleds, ships, and planes as well as a large number of supplies and equipment. The objective of this exploration is the obtaining of samples and cataloging of different rocks, minerals as well as the different soil levels. Departing on two ships from the port of Boston, Massachusetts on September 2, 1930. Once settled in Antarctica, January 6, 1931, the expedition will be divided into two groups since Professor Lake of the School of Biology, he was struck by a triangular mark of 30 cm that did not correspond to the area where the rock was, and he left to the northwest with a team of 11 people, leaving as main camp the settlement in McMurdo Bay.


From here all the communications between the two camp and the ship will be by radio, these communications comment the discoveries that the team of Professor Lake, realizes that would be the following: at the beginning he finds some rock formations or constitute alien to everything known at the time and to the great surprise He found a fossil or body shaped barrel and vegetable, with folded wings of 2.5 mt (8 feet) in the shape of a star. and to give the final touch 13 bodies not fossilized but only frozen, 8 of them in perfect condition and 4 only their parts. And as expected to give that touch that something is very wrong... The dogs are restless and dislike the smell of all the body's.
Professor Lake decides to take everything to the camp to make a more detailed study of everything he has found, meanwhile he sends a plane for the protagonist and Professor Frank H. Pabodie. But shortly after a great storm harasses the entire area counting all communications between the camps.

On January 25 the protagonist left with 10 men, 7 dogs, and a sled. Among this man was the student Danfort. they went to investigate Lake's camp that did not respond to radio calls. Once arrived at the camp and after doing some research. The official report that the protagonist gave to the world was that he found 11 dead in the camp because of the cold wind and Gedney disappeared, the rest was censored to the outside world. Actually, the camp was a terrible nightmare come true. No biological specimen was found for entire transport only remains, green 5-pointed steatite, fossil bones of the beings said by Lake, no dog survived, the camp was destroyed, the sleds disappeared, and the drilling machine destroyed, there were 2 damaged airplanes that They were left there. There were no books and scientific instruments. Of the 14 bodies mentioned by Lake, there were 6 buried upright under mounds of 5-pointed stars. It is believed that Lake's group did it. The remaining 8 bodies had disappeared, perhaps dragged by the wind. It is true that 11 people were found dead, including Lake, and that Gedney was missing.
The next day a research flight make only the protagonist and Danfort, and find non-human places, structures, and ruins that resemble paintings by Nikolai Roerich. At Lake Camp, other members arranged the 2 airplanes. The protagonist hid as much as possible the rest of the world so that nobody returned there. On January 28 they returned to the base but further north. Danfort is nervous since he saw something that does not let him sleep.

The Lake report opened the appetite of paleontologists and naturalists and say they will make a new expedition, called Starkweather-Moore. The protagonist will insist on dissuading them from going there.
they make a flight of more than 16 hours where they find entrances of caves, they constitute square, From the air they saw structures that never a man had seen, with strange geometries. They land and make an exploration on foot. They were introduced in caves and their labyrinths, leaving papers so as not to get lost. They miss the fact that there was no wind. In the same system they find all fittings of geometric drawings that spoke of a very advanced wisdom, in these drawings they discover that the pentagrams are the description of these nonhuman beings, come from the stars and as the Dyer  read the book of Necronomicon, ( this book is invented by the writer) the Ancients he call them. Then describe a series of events or the history of these creatures:
The Ancients could make trips in outer space thanks to their wings, when they came from space, annihilate a way of life on earth and create two new, gelatinous bubbles of about 4 m called shogoth and humanoids for their fun and food. The ancients reproduced thanks to a system of spores.
The Ancients, go to war with some seeds of octopus form created by Cthulhu, the Ancients lose and have to give the land to these creatures and they live in the sea. after a series of climatic changes the seeds die and the Ancients recover the land only to be seen in a war with the shogoth that was born in the water, since these were more intelligent. After exterminating them, star the invasion of the extraterrestrial race Mi-go. The latter almost succeeded in exterminating the Ancients, since the Ancients had lost the ability to fly to outer space. so they take refuge in Antarctica.
The protagonist (Dyer) and Danfort, continue their exploration of the tunnels, they are found with areas of unpleasant smell other smelling some petroleum base product, as if in another zone all the lost things of the camp, more ahead they find the sleds disappeared and soon find the dead bodies of Gedney and the dog that was missing, then find the entrance to a great abyss, to pass the abyss find the other four bodies of the destroyed Old ones, the protagonist understands that in the abyss there is Something worse than the Ancients and they start to take off as they are approach by the noise of something like Tekeli-li! They manage to trick him into the caves and come up to the surface and get on the plane and leave the place, meanwhile, Danfort sees something through the window that would leave him traumatized for the rest of his days.

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