11811

I'm giving up on page 64. This sounded like the perfect lovechild of [b:At the Mountains of Madness|32767|At the Mountains of Madness|H.P. Lovecraft|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388341769s/32767.jpg|17342821] and John Carpenter's THE THING ([b:Who Goes There?|6468870|Who Goes There? |John W. Campbell Jr.|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347690698s/6468870.jpg|19210812]). I got what I was looking for and I didn't like it. It was as over-descriptive as Lovecraft often is - A shadow on a mountain may take a page to describe. The plot was also too much like both Lovecraft and Carpenter in that it felt like an underfunded re-make of both of those stories simultaneously.

And then there was the problem of everything being so inconceivably horrifying that the author could not actually tell me how horrifying it was. Lovecraft and Curran both have a bit of a habit with that.

For example: "Their tiny minds could not hope to contain or understand what it was they were seeing" (p54) and "It was almost too much to conceive of. It was too obscene, too deranged, too, hideous" (p59) etc, etc...

So wtf is it? Can't tell ya. Too horrifying.

This is my first negative experience with Tim Curran. He's near the top of my favorite authors today. Unfortunately, this is the first of his stories that completely fell flat for me.