Welcome to Litsy!

"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference between those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
- The Silver Key ?️

"Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times he was snatched away while he paused on the high terrace above it."
- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Included in the anthology I'm reading, this story is more whimsical than "At the Mountains of Madness", though it is linked to Lovecraft's horror stories through its main protagonist, Randolph Carter, and a selection of Cthulhu Mythos gods, notably Nyarlathotep. ⬇️

The title story is one of my favourites of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories. If "The Call of Cthulhu" is his "Lord of the Rings" then this story is his "Silmarillion" - ok, Tolkien is orders of magnitude greater in terms of literature and sheer depth and complexity of conception, but Lovecraft is great in his own area.
There is no dialogue as the story is the first-person statement of polar expedition lead, William Dyer, who may be a great ⬇️

"Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames - for they rested and slept upright with folded down tentacles - and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books."

Similarly to the Elder Things, I like to know my books are safely shelved and racked before I settle into my sleeping frame and fold down my tentacles for a quick millennium-or-two nap. ???

My flibbertigibbet brain is struggling to settle, so I'll feed it something I've chewed before, although not previously this edition, which as well as the title novella includes several Dreamland stories which I also like.
Ian Miller's cover art of an Elder Thing is fantastically chaotic & likely to induce the madness that overruns an ill-fated Antarctic expedition.
Lovecraft's aliens evoke the strange body plans of the vastly ancient Ediacaran ⬇️

The horror in "At the Mountains of Madness" is not in sadistic descriptions of slashings, torturings, mutilations and bloodletting, but rather in the slow build-up of the feeling that humanity is not alone in the universe and that the other inhabitants, if they consider us at all, don't really think much of us. The only times the history of the Elder Things mentions us it is as either an amusing animal kept for entertainment or as a foodstuff.