One of the best stories of Lovecraft

With "The Mountain of Madness", written in 1931, Lovecraft permanently affix his signature as an outstanding writer. Scientist, but at the same time pretending that science reveals a nightmarish truth we wrote here a masterpiece. Rather apart in the Lovecraft universe, because the characters venture outside of New England, lived in pe lant narrative has been written in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe ("The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym") although at the facts, the texts are quite different. But we can consider this much better after that "The Ice Sphinx" by Jules Verne (1897) because, with its imagination both passionate about science and terror, Lovecraft describes a growing exploration to the horror. The presence of creatures who lived in the pre-Cambrian, the discovery of the abandoned city (but it really is), anatomical description of these creatures, their history through paintings, all combine to show us a brilliant novella. .. And when the narrator begins to cross the line and feel compassion for these creatures, here are other entities that arise and revive the horror, the story ending with delusions Danforth, which actually reveals nothing but promises a nightmare world that the spirit of man can not bear.

The narrative is followed by "In the abyss of time", a rather parralèle text to the Mountains of Madness, written in 1935, insofar as it contributes to demolish the so-called "myth of Cthulhu." Indeed, there is also a purely text SF, not a mix of SF and fantasy. It is not for nothing that the text was published in "Astounding Stories" because Weird Tales was not angry. We Lovecraft describes a race of extraterrestrial entity controlled by the time inversion of mind ... but shhh, do not say more! Still, if the first part is a bit long since the narrator continues to want to find a rational explanation for what happened during his strange amnesia, the second part making up for all the trip to Australia and object that will definitely convince the hero of the reality of his alleged "dreams."

Two new not to be missed, but they can be found in other books richest texts (I think Denoël folio editions titled 'In the abyss of time ", or better still the anthology published by Laffont and directed by Francis Lacassin).