*At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness -H.P. Lovecraft
Never in the entire novella did H.P. Lovecraft frighten me. The build-up was incredible, almost viral, and in the end, it was all. The monsters’ origins, their habitat, their sculpture, their history, their diet, economic glitches, decline and wars and they turn out not to even be the monsters, or at least can’t be blamed for acting monstrous, and in the remaining ten pages we are given a glimpse of the long-built-up “unspeakable terror” and it’s a giant blob resembling a subway car… Well… the imagination was pointed. The language was steeped.
“What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.”
Lovecraft obviously knows all the synonyms for scary.
But what I love most of him is his name. And second most, his writing. But his allegory never struck.
“Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name—cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness.”