>>96235989
>the Dunwich Horror //was// blasted with guns, dumbass
I have forgotten most of what I read. It's been 10++ years. I just remember what pleased/annoyed me most.

>recording Zann's music for orchestra as an offensive measure is missing the point of the story
Conceded.

>complaining about realism in a science fiction story means you won't enjoy any science fiction story
In my defense I'm not complaining about the unrealism of the SF components - shoggoths, twisty cities - just the backdrop of realism being done in a rush. Imagine seeing a rock face carved with Tomb Script Mandarin or First Dynasty Egyptian without knowing either language, and knowing what is said in a matter of hours.

>Would you rather have had Lovecraft completely shift the tone of the story and have his protagonist spend dozens of months in Antarctica, decoding the hieroglyphs, only to THEN have the shoggoth appear
Lovecraft has unholy heathenish artifacts in his other stories, Call of Cthulhu being one; make the inscriptions on, say, a ritual altar the Rosetta, plus two years of prior research at Misk. U. yielding a working lexicon of key terms/expressions from the Rosetta cross referencing other dead language texts, THEN handwave interpreting the hieroglyph wall to half a day.

I'm not sure why you seem to think Mountains of Madness needs to have the Aristotlean unities of "same place same day same people"; that's a formula for dramatic tragedy, which first requires a Heroic (ie Mortal Paragon) MC, and some kind of hubris. MoM is not a dramatic tragedy; none of the exploration team are that kind of heroic, no hubris, aka "overweening pride" detected, and the expedition does not end in personal tragic horror, like Oedipus losing his eyes. I say throw out the Aristotlean formula. Dragging out the pacing past Aristotlean Unity will not hurt a horror story; see the hunt for Dracula, the first Alien, and The Thing. A lot of good horror are slow-cooked dread.

con