H.P. Lovecraft’s at the Mountains of Madness, Volume 2 by Gou Tanabe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The concluding volume follows Professor Dyer and Danforth as they fly out to the ancient ruins, to discover the fate of Gedney, the still-missing expedition member, and to explore the remains of a long-dead civilization.
This is where things get weird and Tanabe does a great job with the illustrations, constructing the baffling, maze-like remains of the Old Ones’ sprawling city in grand detail. Staying faithful to the story, Dyer and Danforth come across the giant albino penguins and…other things.
All visual adaptations of Lovecraft must grapple with the same dilemma–how do you illustrate things that, per the prose, will drive people mad merely be seeing them? Tanabe does this in two ways–the first is by depicting the shoggoths as so physically weird that it’s difficult to tell what they are, other than organic, immense and heading straight for you. In the second way, Tanabe allows the reader–equipped with his hundreds of illustrations of the labyrinthine ruins as background–to imagine what drives Danforth mad, with no description offered. And it works.
Highly recommended, particularly for those who have already read the story. This is a great adaptation and short of the seemingly ill-fated Guillermo Del Toro film, may be the best we will see.
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