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Review of At the Mountains of Madness Volume II
Blurb from the publisher: 'At the Mountains of Madness, illustrated by François Baranger.
Return to the final days of the Dyer expedition in the remote Antarctic wastes. The letters from expedition leader Professor William Dyer grow increasingly more desperate as the expedition presses on, leaving sanity behind them. What they discover beneath the ice is meant for no living man to see, Cyclopean structures and alien landscapes that defy history itself. The final act of the Dyer expedition is a descent into cosmic horror and utter madness.
H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, first published in 1936, is one of the greatest classics of American horror literature. The most ambitious story Lovecraft ever wrote, it has served as a source of inspirations for filmmakers and authors in the decades since his death. This is the second volume of two.
François Baranger, an illustrator with experience working in both the film and gaming industries, was fascinated early on by Lovecraft's creatures and visions which populated the darkest recesses of fantasy. Having previously illustrated The Call of Cthulhu to great acclaim, this book is his most ambitious so far.'
What you get: Your EUR 27,07 or equivalent will buy you the full-colour 62-page At the Mountains of Madness Volume II, a reproduction of chapters six to twelve of H. P. Lovecraft's famous twelve-chapter story and the third book in Free League's impressive Mythos Illustrated line. In this edition, text is superimposed upon two-page illustrations by François Baranger. The book is a hardcover protected by a thin cardboard sleeve. This is a dead tree product only. There is no pdf edition, at least for the time being.
Volume II can be purchased either autonomously or as a bundle with Volume I at the discounted price of EUR 48,30.
For the purposes of writing this review I juxtaposed the text with the one presented in the 2011 edition of 'H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction' by Barnes & Noble. Its companion, At the Mountains of Madness Volume I was published more than a year ago. As expected, the two reviews share similarities in the descriptive parts.
Contents: The book comes in the rather unusual format of 36 x 27 cm. The objective is obvious: provide Baranger with the largest possible canvas. There are 29 drawings all in all. Only two of them are repeated, and that on the tome's sleeve. With only two exceptions where two drawings occupy one page each, one drawing occupies the book's full two-page spread. There are neither frames nor blank spaces. The drawings have breathing space for the text that accompanies them. Most of them are about impossible vistas and the insignificance of human presence in places man was never meant to be, others however delve into scenes of sanity-draining discoveries, archaeology and astronomy that should have never been, husks of forms alien to our world, action scenes, and more. Each drawing is directly relevant to the text that is superimposed above it.
The text is identical to that of the Barnes & Noble edition. One still reads 'aëroplane' and 'especial', just like Lovecraft wrote. Layout and typographical emphasis however are not. Certain sentences (or parts of sentences) have been emphasized through the use of a larger font.
The strong points: I'd be a fool to review Lovecraft's novel on its merits. The man started a genre on his own, and this book is a major part of it. As I wrote in the review of Volume I, I am fairly certain that literary students have written their theses around it, and that says something about its style, its goals, its subject matter and its enduring appeal. What is needed here is an answer to the obvious question: is there added-value in the imagery that currently accompanies the text?
Oh, yes.
Lovecraft is to a very large extent a writer that thrives on landscapes, be them physical or emotional. His vistas are phenomenal exactly because his vocabulary is advanced, using numerous narrative tricks along the way. The imposing imagery allows the reader to focus, to not become side-tracked by a word he is not intimately familiar with, to keep on with the flow of the text while allowing his feelings to take over. This is the case not only for adult readers knowledgeable of Lovecraft's work, but also of younger audiences. These images can help you concisely retell the story to readers who, be it because of age or any other reason, would not be in a position of accessing it. And no, if 'simplification' is the first word that comes to your mind, that's not it. This is the transposition to another medium, a visual one, with a grandeur and detail that the author himself would have immediately endorsed.
I would also be a fool to objectively comment on Baranger's work. Subjectively I know that some hit home more than others, that however is valid for everything. At the end of the day, Baranger's drawings are as complex and elaborate as Lovecraft's writing. Since the text is heavy on panoramas, they rather expectedly get the lion's share of the book. Even so though, the artist balanced them well with action scenes, images from the past, purposefully hazy imagery and what have you. Like in the previous volume, images don't always refer to the most obvious part of the plot; I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Baranger is daring enough to combine minutiae with hair-raising imagery (alien corpses, a man screaming in terror) not to mention address the ever-present question of what Danforth actually saw. The answer lies somewhere between geometry and beauty, in case you are wondering, and it is not a trite image of shock horror. It is not horrific at all in fact, until you allow it to become so.
In its closing pages the book repeats verbatim the contextualization of Lovecraft's racist views that was also used in Volume I. It is one of the best texts I have seen on the matter. There's no sensationalism, no name-calling, and no hysteria. Free League professionally places his views in the context of their time, distances itself from them, and defends its decision to publish Lovecraft's works. Other publishers involved with the Mythos can learn a lesson or two.
The weak points: Like I wrote in Volume I, if you are interested in starting your journey into the Mythos, the present volume is not the most efficient way. You get half a novel for EUR 28, when you can buy all of Lovecraft's fiction for around EUR 20. The Barnes & Noble edition and the Knickerbocker Classics edition are mere examples. You are buying this for the narratives being married to authoritative imagery by Baranger; not for the reading pleasure alone.
I still feel that the novel should not have been broken down in two different volumes. On the other hand, and after a few days during which the volumes were only sold separately, the publisher now offers them as a bundle with a discount of over 10%. It's a good gesture, even though I expected more, be it on the discount itself, or the volumes sold with a little extra, like within a luxury sleeve.
Depending on how dark an image is, letters are printed in either black or white. Taking the nuance of the drawings into account however, the text is not always as clear as I would have wanted it to be. Depending on your light source, the volume might not read as easily as a traditional black-upon-white book. A fimbriated font or a different font altogether could have been the answer. The editors should have been more daring in that respect.
I was hoping for ample behind-the-scenes information and material. It didn't happen in Volume I, and it does not happen here either. The Barnes & Noble edition dedicates a meaty paragraph on where Lovecraft drew inspiration from, what influenced him to write the story, not to mention how the story was initially rejected and languished for five years before it saw print. Admittedly, all this information can be found in wikipedia, yet this is kind of detail that make luxury editions shine.
In the dreadful practice that started from the line's first book already, and at a frequency of more than once for every two-page spread, the font size changes in order to emphasize a particular phrase. I am not talking about the standard practice of capitalizing the starting phrase of a chapter, or of copying a phrase on the margin in order to attract readership like newspapers do. I am talking about being confronted, sometimes in mid-sentence, by a phrase which the editor felt should be emphasized, and has a different size than its immediate surroundings. This phrase, at least to some extent, is linked to the imagery that adorns the page. Sometimes it is a phrase as simple as 'Labyrinthine complexity', emphasized alone inside its surrounding sentence outside of any context; in other cases they are full, long sentences, like 'Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which we were'. Sometimes the link is obvious, sometimes less so. In older publications that phrase would have been repeated under the image or even inside it. That practice worked, more or less.
The current approach however does not. It undermines the text. It distracts. It is the tantrum of a tyke desperately seeking attention, as if the reader cannot readily discern what the image relates to within less than two pages of text. How condescending to the reader, not to mention the writer, can a publication be 85 years after the original saw the light of day? As long as this deplorable practice continues, the line cannot reach its full potential. Whatever Lovecraft wanted to annotate he already did through a rather generous use of italics. Here, the editor does not consider it necessary to explicitly state that the enlarged fonts are a current insertion. I wonder how many volumes it will take for the line to drop this parody and let the reader enjoy both the text and the images without moronic prompts.
Conclusion: If you bought At the Mountains of Madness Volume I you have to buy Volume II. The imagery is unparalleled, and accentuates the immersiveness and the narratives to the fullest. Yet, under no circumstances does it need any preposterous editorial alterations, as if the book addresses itself to illiterates. I can't fathom why one would insist on the same mistake three volumes in a row now, when it clearly doesn't work.
For more info on At the Mountains of Madness Volume II visit Free League Publishing at https://freeleaguepublishing.com.
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