At The Mountains of Madness, free e-book!

Vertigo said:
Could one of you guys advise on how to determine what version of this book you might be buying. I've taken a quick browse in Amazon and I can find no reference to the origins of any of the editions for sale there.
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Why buy it when you get it for free from the site in the link I posted!
 
Yes, JD, looking closely at that edition I am pretty sure it is the text as published in the magazines and I'm also sure pretty much all the cheap (less than £1) ebook editions are also based on the magazine.

I have checked out a couple of cheap "complete" collections in ebook format but looking into them they are filled with typos (actually probably scanning errors). For example:

"so they hired a boat and started off govnd by the dotted lines of they chart in 4 weeks the reached the place where directed & the divers went down and came up with an iron bottle they found in it the following lines scribbled on a piece of brown paper"

This is precisely as the text is, including punctuation (and lack of it). I think I would just give up after a few pages of that! This, by the way, was from the "Delphi Classics" Kindle edition.

Sadly I think many ebooks produced from earlier works (pre digital storage) are often un-proof read scans of the original published works.

I suspect investing in a printed edition is probably worthwhile in this case.

And thanks for the identification tips JD!
 
Well that is always a problem for me too. However the implication of what has been said in this thread is that criticism of the Astounding version is not just about typos but that they made sufficient changes to the original text that HPL pretty much disowned that 'version' of his story. And that's what worries me. If I'm going to dive into the world of Lovecraft then I really want to at least start with an edition the author himself liked.
 
To those interested, here is my post in the other thread about the faults of the earlier editions:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/1673928-post4.html

And here is Lovecraft's own reaction:

But hell & damnation!... In brief, that goddamn'd dung of a hyaena Orlin Tremaine has given the "Mts." the worst hashing-up any piece of mine ever received -- in or out of Tryout [an amateur journal he had often been published in]! I'll be hanged if I can consider the story as published at all -- the last instalment is a joke, with whole passages missing....

But what I think of that decayed fish Tremaine wouldn't go in a wholesome family paper! I'll forgive him real misprints, as well as the lousy spelling used by Street & Smith -- but some of the things on his "style sheet" are beyond tolerance! (He changes "Great God!" to "Great Heavens!")

Why, for example, are Sun, Moon, & even Moonlight (!!) always capitalised? Why must the damn fool invariably change my ordinary animal name to its capitalised scientific equivalent? (dinosaurs = "Dinosauria" &c) Why does he change subterrene to subterrane, when the latter has no existence as an adjective! Why, in general, an overcapitalising & overpunctuating mania? ... I pass over certani affected changes in sentence-structure, but see red again when I think of the paragraphing. Venom of Tsathoggua! Have you seen the damn thing? All my paragraphs cut up into little chunks like the juvenile stuff the other pulp hacks write. Rhythm, emotional modulations, & minor climactic effects thereby destroyed.... Tremaine has tried to make "snappy action" stuff out of old-fashioned leisurely prose....

But the supremely intolerable thing is the way the text is cut in the last instalment -- to get an old serial out of the way quickly. Whole passages ... are left out -- the result being to decrease vitality & colour, & make the action mechanical. So many important details & impressions & touches of sensatino are missing from the concluding parts that the effect is that of a flat ending. After all the adventure & detail before the encounter with the shoggoth in the abyss, the characters are shot up to the surface without any of the gradual experiences & emotions which make the reader feel their return to the world of man from the nighted aeon-old world of the Others. All sense of the duration & difficulty of the exhausted climb is lost when it is dismissed objectively in only a few words, with no hint of the fugitives' reactions to the scenes through which they pass....
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-- letter to Robert H. Barlow, 4 June 1936, cited in vol. 2 of I Am Providence, p. 974​

Between the two, you should get a fairly good idea of how this story in particular was mucked with....
 
Doesn't mince his words does he:)

I found ATMOM on the site you posted and a quick comparison showed that Astounding do indeed appear to have broken up his paragraphs. Not in itself a terminal issue. I haven't taken the time to look for missing passages which is, of course, far more serious than the paragraph rearrangments.

Thanks for the link JD. That will let me dip my toes, and see whether I'll end up out of my depth!
 
Vertigo said:
Doesn't mince his words does he:)

I found ATMOM on the site you posted and a quick comparison showed that Astounding do indeed appear to have broken up his paragraphs. Not in itself a terminal issue. I haven't taken the time to look for missing passages which is, of course, far more serious than the paragraph rearrangments.

Thanks for the link JD. That will let me dip my toes, and see whether I'll end up out of my depth!
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No; in private correspondence at least, HPL was never one to shy away from expressing his unvarnished opinions. It sometimes ended up with him in hot water (see his correspondence with Vincent Starrett, for instance), but he stuck to his guns, nonetheless.

Incidentally, it is likely that he was mistaken in blaming F. Orlin Tremaine for the butchering of his manuscript here; it was more likely to have been a sub-editor of the magazine. Nonetheless....

I suppose the breaking up of the paragraphs is the sort of thing which most people wouldn't recognize as important, really, these days, when we're so used to a much choppier style of writing; but at that point (and, for that matter, with anyone who is used to writing as rhetoric even today), the difference is actually quite notable; it alters the flow and emphasis and, therefore, the cumulative (if subtle) effect of a tale, and can end up giving a vastly different impression in the end. Try, for instance, breaking any of Henry James' longer paragraphs (sometimes several pages long) into the sort of paragraphing we see today, and I think you'd definitely be able to tell the difference. It alters the work to a remarkable degree. Whatever his faults, Lovecraft was a very meticulous writer, and agonized and debated over each and every single word of his stories; testing, rejecting, substituting, rephrasing, transposing over and over again to achieve a very specific effect. He is one of the few writers of the weird in the past century -- at least, American writers -- to have been so painstaking with the smallest detail.* With such effort put into the work, it is no wonder he exploded when what he considered to be his very best work was subsequently hacked and slashed as it was....

*There are various places where one can see reproductions of his manuscripts, including pages from the MM, and going over these is tremendously constructive. In fact, the opening page of this story, as reproduced in H. P. Lovecraft: Nightmare Countries, is almost impossible to read due to the various interlineations, marginal notations, and the like which he used to improve the connections between the various portions of the text to each other. He was most definitely a writer of the old school... every bit as much so as Tolkien, and it took more than twelve volumes for Christopher Tolkien to even begin to give an accurate conception of the pains his father took with such things.
 
After having recently delved into Roberto Bolano I can certainly see how such changes to the paragraphs could detract from and even spoil a piece of writing. So I'm definitely not blaming him.

Interesting information JD. I have now definitely moved it fairly high in my TBR pile. I'm really not a reader of horror but I may be making the mistake of painting classic 'horror' with the same brush as modern 'horror' (I've not got around to that longer essay on horror and the sublime yet. Essay? More like short book :)). It was Shelley's Frankenstein that started me thinking that I should investigate further!
 
Vertigo said:
I'm really not a reader of horror but I may be making the mistake of painting classic 'horror' with the same brush as modern 'horror'
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Exactly the boat I'm in. I've always been a fan of Poe and have recently gotten into the 30s Universal horror flicks and that's probably what's made me think of revisiting "horror". For some reason, I can take action gore and I can take non-gory horror but hate gorror, which is mostly what modern horror seems to be. But the thrills-chills-spills of supernatural-gothic-dark whatever can be pretty cool. Anyway, I'm busy reading other things but I did read "The Beast in the Cave" real quick, a very early, simple Lovecraft tale and, yeah, he's a bit verbose and overdone but it's effective enough and Poe-ish.
 
J-Sun said:
Exactly the boat I'm in. I've always been a fan of Poe and have recently gotten into the 30s Universal horror flicks and that's probably what's made me think of revisiting "horror". For some reason, I can take action gore and I can take non-gory horror but hate gorror, which is mostly what modern horror seems to be. But the thrills-chills-spills of supernatural-gothic-dark whatever can be pretty cool. Anyway, I'm busy reading other things but I did read "The Beast in the Cave" real quick, a very early, simple Lovecraft tale and, yeah, he's a bit verbose and overdone but it's effective enough and Poe-ish.
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Yea me too. I find modern horror is trend driven, so its either gore or vampires/zombies. Boring.
Its why I favour classic, gothic horror. An exception was Hell House by Richard Matheson which is kind of a classic haunted house tale written well. Also F. Paul Wilson's The Keep which was set in WWII.
 
Actually, these days we have a plethora of really good "horror" (or, if you prefer, weird) writers, such as Laird Barron, Cody Goodfellow, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jeffrey Thomas, W. H. Pugmire, Joe Pulver, Sr., Thomas Ligotti, Charles Stross, Ann K. Schwader, Kage Baker, etc., etc., etc. Now, each of these has written "Lovecraftian" horror, but none are by any means limited to that; far from it. And each has his or her own unique voice and vision. They aren't always issued via the major publishers (though nearly all have been, either solo or in anthologies), but every one of them (as well as a number not mentioned) has helped to broaden the "horror" field....
 
I confess I rely on the web mostly. Nearest new book store to me is 25 miles away and once I get into a bookstore I don't get out for a looong time, so a visit basically writes off an afternoon at least! Besides I have so much on my TBR and Wish lists that I don't need to go browsing!

Bottom line this place is my book browsing these days, with examples like this one constantly topping up my lists!
 
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