Wonder & Madness

Wonder becomes obsession. Discovery becomes madness.

In Wonder & Madness, Bell & Brier Press brings together two of H. P. Lovecraft's most ambitious and enduring works: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness.

In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a young antiquarian's fascination with an infamous ancestor leads him into forbidden histories, occult experiments, and secrets that refuse to remain buried. As the past begins to intrude upon the present, questions of ancestry and identity give way to something far more terrible: the possibility that death itself may not be an absolute boundary.

In At the Mountains of Madness, an expedition into the unexplored Antarctic interior discovers the ruins of a civilization older than humanity. What begins as an extraordinary scientific revelation becomes a descent into the prehistoric history of life on Earth-and into evidence that some things believed extinct may merely have been waiting.

Taken together, the novels reveal Lovecraft at his grandest scale. One begins amid the ancestral houses, graveyards, and hidden chambers of New England; the other ventures across the frozen wastes of Antarctica and into the remnants of a prehuman world. Yet both are driven by the same terrible impulse: the desire to know what should perhaps have remained unknown.

Volume III of the Bell & Brier H. P. Lovecraft Collection.