When writing my review yesterday for part 1 I forgot to mention one of the biggest feathers in the cap of this Lovecraft story: it inspired John Carpenter’s The Thing, the greatest movie ever made.
In part 2, we’ve moved beyond the Lake Camp and the horrors therein and to the mysterious city on the plateau that lies beyond the mountains of madness. This city is one of the chief reasons why visual representations of this story are so beneficial, as you get to experience the grandness without reading eight pages of stilted descriptive text. Following that, the next best part is the creatures themselves. Each artist who approaches this story seems to revel in showing the Elder Things in their prime, flying through space and showing impressive underwater movement. They also uniformly lean into the battles between the Elder Things and the Shoggoths/Mi-Go.
Sidenote: Lovecraft loves using the Shoggoths as his sort of ultimate horror, where nothing can apparently be worse than a gibbering pile of ooze that looks like it’s full of bubbles (except of course for whatever Danforth saw…). I don’t really get it. Yes they’re upsetting, but for example in Innsmouth, a Shoggoth is meant to be even more horrible than the infinite number of fish monsters beneath Devil’s Reef, and I just don’t get it. The true horror of Lovecraft is the unknown and humanity’s teeny tiny place in the footprints of titanic entities. The secondary horror is the monsters and how creative and descriptive they are, so why then is the ultimate threat the least descriptive critter?
Not a ton more to say since most of it was said in the Part 1 interview. Same recommendation as before: pounce on the chance to read a non-racist Lovecraft story. 10/10.