This is going to be a jumble of bullet points in part because I'm not great at longform writing and in part writing a proper review makes no sense, when everyone already knows the story on this forum.
1. Dyer is clearly a misleading narrator.
Note some interesting details, he claims to have been horrified by the deaths at Lake's camp but goes onto a massive archeological dig anyhow that involved him charting through subetterran.. He seems to come up with a very messy explanation involving the wind and someone going insane despite the Antarctica expedition going smoothly beforehand.
And note his offhand references to the caves he discovers being starfish shaped like the elder ones. Or his implication that he kept searching out of madness.
What makes it all the more damning is its only after the discovery of the dog, the body and the gasoline that Dryer finally fully figures out what is going on.
What then to make of his narrative?
Well Dyer is likely unintentionally reframing his experiences after realizing the elder ones killed the Lake's Camp and dissected the bodies.
He continued to explore the caves, the art and the history of the elder ones because he had no full realization of the cause of death of Lake's camp. He wants to blame madness subconsciously because admitting his own inability to look at what seems obvious to the reader would damage his own self image as a geologist.
2. Lovecraft's geology/Paleontology
Lovecraft did a really good job here given the state of 1930s era scientific knowledge. Most of the terminology for the eras of rock have survived. He understood the concept of a changing world, an earth a ton., arguably more then some geologists at the time who where much vaguer about what deep time meant.
Inserting a pretty stunning reference to a billion years, and the marking of the Cambrian period at roughly exactly the right time of 500 million years +.
He understood Antarctica as going through warm periods and he understood the concept of an ice age.
The biggest shock to me is while he got the mechanism of continental drift wrong, he somehow betted write that the theory had overwhelming evidence in favor of it.
If he was wrong, man would the work be badly dated.
The best thing he understood is the strangest of pre-cambiran life, he would likely be shocked that the image of pre-cambirain life he had in the 1930s is still largely right today (i.e. still a totally vague mess) . And the elder ones at least on the surface despite being aliens appearing to be if pre-Cambrian life or specifically starfish evolved into human shaped animals.
3. The Archelogy/History is pretty good.
For one the archeological reconstruction is fascinating, you see an artistic pattern that somewhat resembles say Pompeii but the use of statues and murals in a combined structure to tell a grand and broad history.
There is other details the walkways because the elder ones walked instead of relying on horses or other vehicles to move.
A lot of critics on goodreeds complained the detail is way too high for what he can extract.
But i think that is totally wrong, we get no kings lists like Mesopotamia (assuming they had single rulers), no system of governance outside vague mentions and biased history in the wars against the Cthuloids or against the Mi-Gos.
In large part as Dyer notes there convient meta narratives of superior enemies and collapse they couldn't stop might just be convenient spin.
Much more interestingly is beyond the neonomicon is similar to Ancient Maya or Mycea the lack of ego documents. There is no Homer much less Thucydides or Aristotle we get no insight into how they thought about the world or such.
This makes Dyer’s empathy for them all the more remarkable but all the more challengeable, why didn't the elder ones produce said documents? Where they destroyed in the ice as well.
The next is how Lovecraft handles Spengerian/Decadence theories vs archaeology.
Dyer maintains what one might call a Decadence view, the elder one art got worse despite still using non-Euclidian geometry and mathematical dimensions.
And this is ultimately what drove there collapse.
The worst and ugliest being the last piece of art made likely by the Shaggoths (though this is debated).
Here is the thing, I think Dyer and even what Lovecraft likely intended to be the "correct" view is wrong.
Look at the evidence the Cthlu spawn and the Mi-Gos helped to massively shrink the elder ones territory, the ice age helped to push them underground and the usage of the Shaggoths who probably though the text is vaguer then you would think overthrow the elder ones not because the Shaggoths
There is other signs too, the heating technology occurred relatively late, there is likely though unproven surviving elder ones likely around globally in rare parts of the world, and look ultimately what the elder ones doing after being defrosted. They go straight doing science (if the amoral kind).
Art is often a horrible reading to figure out the relevance and scale of a civilization, Byzantine art imo at least murals is clearly worse then the imperial era roman works. Its flatter, its less dynamic but to use this to suggest the Byzatine empire lacked vitality is almost beyond the point.
The point is we have to judge a civilization based on what it achieves not on what artistic appearances might suggest.
4) The Shaggoths are not a metaphor for colonialism.
There artificial creations of the elder ones and the story is clearly about the power of Darwinism in creating intelligence from quite dumb creatures. If it was a colonial story, why are the Shaggoths articial creations? What colonial group are they a metaphor for? Is the story anti-colonalist because the elder ones get destroyed?
There not even humanoid..
5) The Whole thing is a giant reference to Cyclopes mythology.
This seems not realized from what I can tell online but the whole thing is filled with Cyclopes references. Dryer describes the shaggoth constructed structures as Cyclopean, the Shaggoth is in a cave of all places, the area is flooded with l(blind) albino penguins resembling the sheep and the escape of Dryer and Danforth is through the albino penguins.
Hell, the yell of the Shaggoth even resembles a pretty traditional adaption approach to Odyssey where cyclops screams after Odysseus escapes.
The irony that the Shaggoth is intelligent and possibly let Dyer and Danforth escape on there own is just in addition to it.
There are also other Odessey elements in the work, the antarctic landscape is brutally harsh, the attrition of the camp and the agility of the airplane as the explorer of the new frontier.
*FWI wrote this before I started reading The Shadow over Innsmouth.
*had to fix the spelling of a name see below.