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Rating: Fear, an overwhelming presence, always waiting around the corner of consciousness, relegated by our hopes to blend with superstitious and irrational fears, which we dispel with efforts of reason or by clinging to crucifixes and sacred symbols. "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," Lovecraft wrote in his essay on "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927). And what if suddenly the events of life led us to surpass the usual conception of things we should fear, and unimaginable vistas opened up before our eyes, contradicting and overturning the mental order with which we had until then conceived the universe?
This is what happens to the narrative voice, protagonist of the masterful masterpiece of the "solitary" of Providence, a man of science who begins his narrative warning humanity against the exploratory fervor that seems to have pervaded it towards the Antarctic continent, which at the time (we are in 1931) was still almost unknown. The discussion unfolds in the form of a scientific report, the vocabulary used is the technical language of geology and biology, a choice that alienates the reader to the point of almost making them believe they are reading about real events, because we are not facing a simple tale of monsters, vampires, ghosts, or aliens, but a masterpiece that transposes horror into a cosmic dimension: if in tales like "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Whisperer in Darkness," the unfortunate protagonists came into contact almost incidentally with alien, malevolent, and inconceivable entities, escaping them in ways that left the doubt of having only imagined, or driving away the threat at least for years enough to feel safe from their assaults and delaying their plans of intrusion into our world (no victory can be definitive because "that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die"), now the members of the Arkham University expedition are forced to venture into a treacherous and mysterious territory beyond the apparent dangers of the icy polar desert, until the unsettling discovery of fossils of beings yet to be classified, and the cyclopean city erected by forgotten hands which can be none other than those of the mythical Great Old Ones mentioned in the dark "Necronomicon."
Like in a dream, the wall of geological eras is broken down and the protagonists find themselves wandering in this metropolis of extra-human dimensions, of which the author meticulously describes, even the friezes of the buildings that allow the reconstruction of tales linked to inconceivable eons, to ages so distant that life had yet to evolve from the primordial soup. The evidence of this is all around them, combined with a sense of dark and latent threat bearing the name of Shoggoth, and the search for some missing expedition companions leads them recklessly into the underground levels of the city ruins, deeper and deeper, toward the abyss, where they will find... madness. Or rather, the ultimate revelation, equivalent to the definitive breaking in the scientists' minds of a balance, the renunciation of some evaluation parameters of what we call reality, even to the refusal of knowledge, on which the path of humanity's technical and spiritual progress is based.
It remains, as in "The Call of Cthulhu" (and indeed here developed to its extreme consequences), the belief that the deepening of scientific knowledge can only lead man to the direct experience of the horror of the terrifying order of an impersonal and chaotic universe, so as to appear to us terrifyingly, intolerably malevolent, and where man cannot find a place, except with the wrenching awareness that the appearance of the human race can be equated to an irrelevant accident, a nothingness, or by seeking refuge in reassuring ignorance that would take us back to a new Middle Ages. Hence also the touching paragraph in which the protagonist, faced with this Apocalypse (in the sense of revelation, of unveiling), manages to feel a certain affinity even with creatures called the Great Old Ones: gods? Creators of life on Earth? Aliens? No, he defines them as "Men," very great and yet defenseless like us before the infinite and blind universe and its most inscrutable inhabitants.
The incredible revelations, the inconceivable and unbearable final horror, the icy and chilling atmosphere of the Antarctic snows make this short novel, snubbed by the press of the time, an essential chapter of Lovecraftian production and universe. If in Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," declared (thematic, of course) source of inspiration for this story (also mentioned in the enigmatic line "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"), the protagonist ends the narrative shortly before the final revelation, sparing the reader the truth and at the same time sparking their imagination prompting them to make hypotheses, here instead the author drags the reader into a world from which he spares no detail, revealing ruins and alien landscapes not intuited in some remote recess of the black universe far from us, but sites materially just around the corner.
The siege of the abyssally malevolent (or abyssally indifferent, who knows) cosmic entities that encircle our unaware and tranquil world tightens...
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