Non-fiction: David Haden: Ice Cores (2011)
Ice Cores is a collection of miscellaneous notes and ephemera about H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness. Billing itself as a collection of essays, it’s barely a book at all, and the essays are just a jumble of notes and suppositions regarding some of the historical circumstances of Lovecraft’s writing. Phrases like “I imagine”, “must have been” and “this was probably” recur with such frequency that the whole thing starts to feel like guesswork.
Here’s my favorite sentence from the book: “One wonders what this free-thinking atheist might have thought of Ayn Rand’s science fiction novel Anthem…”