At the Mountains of Madness

The cover illustration depicted here has little or nothing to do with this book -- at no point are human characters revealed to be some sort of undead skeleton. However, the image is appropriate -- it shows the horror that can lurk behind the ordinary, the banal, how normalcy can be pulled aside for a terrible revelation.

The story is told in a typical conceit -- as the sole survivor of an Antarctic expedition, the narrator is attempting to warn future explorers against disturbing what he and his companions had.

What Lovecraft is good at is building tension -- things start slowly for the expedition, with exploration and sample taking, until an isolated group makes a discovery "that will do for biology what the work of Einstein did for physics." This, of course, puts the expedition on the path to disaster. The isolated group goes incommunicado, and when a relief expedition arrives, they find the camp in disarray, the men and the dogs wildly slaughtered, and some specimens missing. It's implied, rather than outright stated, that these specimens had lain dormant, rather than dead, and had revived and perpetrated this.

What Lovecraft isn't great at is prose. There's a lot of repetition in terms of "we withheld these details from our reports, but now I must steel myself and reveal the truth," and "ill-prepared we were for dealing with things beyond our ken". It's effective, though, as repetition is a device of madmen, and Lovecraft's protagonists are having the limits of their sanity stretched.

The setting is almost a character in itself, in that Lovecraft spends an enormous amount of time describing the awful city of the creatures, and letting our protagonist read their murals and learn their history. It's very creepy, if a little convenient that a professor of geology is intimately familiar with the Necronomicon and other tropes of Lovecraft's universe.

I would recommend this -- it's not quite what I had expected, and reading works that Lovecraft has influenced makes this lose some of it's power, but it retains enough to remain fresh.

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

This book could be more accurately titled East African Adventures, Including that Time I Killed Two Man-Eating Lions, but that might be too conversational (and not nearly Victorian enough) for Col. Patterson. There are twenty-seven chapters in this book, and the ninth one is titled "The Death of the Second Man-Eater", so the majority of this book is clearly the other East African adventures. Luckily, Patterson's writing style is engaging enough that even without the excitement of the lions, it's not bad going.

I doubt that Patterson saw this work getting the audience that it eventually would -- in the brief preface, he states that he wrote this for the benefit of the friends who kept insisting that he put his escapades down on paper. The most famous (and interesting) of Patterson's adventures in Africa is his time building a railway in Kenya (then British East Africa) which was set upon by maneless lions (the man-eaters of the title) who dragged off many workers, to the point where the laborers refused to work on the railway, and many deserted. Patterson devoted much of his time at night to waiting for the lions, progressing to hunting them, finally having one stalk him. He eventually kills them and eliminates the threat, although not before many of his men are eaten. It's a fascinating, terrifyingly primal story, and Patterson renders it laconically, not really conveying the fear or sense of urgency, even though he himself lived it.

The remainder of the book is railway engineering, hunting in East Africa (rhino, hippo, many other lions, antelope, elephant, giraffe, etc). It's never all that boring, because it's easy to digest, but it does get a tad repetitive. The story of the lions is worth reading. The rest? Eh.

The Lost City of Z

David Grann's The Lost City of Z was widely praised, and I can certainly see why -- Grann keeps the narrative moving, while skipping between his experiences, and those of Colonel Percy Fawcett, one of the final figures of the Age of Exploration, who disappeared somewhere in the Amazonian jungle looking for the remnants of an ancient civilization. (Or not so ancient, a contemporary of the Maya, the Inca, and the Aztecs.)

Probably the best point of the book was how interweaving Fawcett's and Grann's story allowed Fawcett to slowly come into the foreground; in the beginning, he looks like a quietly competent man, the last of the Victorian era explorers. By the end, he seems like a madman on a spiritual, rather than a scientific, quest. The weakest point was that the long winding up was unable to produce a satisfying conclusion -- Grann spends the entire book working up to his Amazon trip, and then nearly immediately comes to a conclusion. While he's able to tie this in with the end of Fawcett's story, it feels rushed, pat, and not fleshed out. (Of course, given that Fawcett disappeared ~80 years before Grann began the project, in a jungle, Grann was unlikely to find anything other than he did, which is old Indian legends).

Overall, this is a fun pop-archaeology/anthropology/history book, with an interesting hook.