Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish visions, H. P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, . The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition’s uncanny discoveries – and their encounter with untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization – is a milestone of macabre literature. At the Mountains of Madness is a very good introduction to Lovecraft’s mythology of the Old Ones and the glories and horrors that preceded humankind and that still linger in places. It is a good novella on it’s own, and helpful to understanding events and creatures in his other works.