88 pages
Published 1918
Read from October 22 to October 23
Rating: 0.5 out of 5
Back in Caspak one last time, finally wrapping up the shitty trilogy that began with The Land that Time Forgot and The People that Time Forgot. No surprise, today our generic pulp hero is some dude named Bradley — so generic that he’s never given any other name. Lieutenant Bradley is little more than a military robot, crisp and efficient, “indifferent” to danger. The men under his command blend into one another. The switch to third person narration makes their characterization feel somehow even shallower than what we saw in the previous two books. I didn’t know that was possible. (Can a character have zero dimensions? If he's written by Burroughs, he can!)
This concluding novella is a rote retread of the standard bullshit we’ve seen before: racism, life-is-cheap violence, ownership-kink misogyny, colonialist might-makes-right moral nihilism. The big new gimmick here is the Wieroo, winged man-things mentioned in People but centered here for the first time. As pulp adversaries, the Wieroo (and their village of piled human skulls) bring a sort of proto-sword and sorcery vibe that I think pairs well with pulpy dinosaurs and sabertooth cats. There's even a dungeon-crawl of sorts beheath the Wieroo city. But of course Burroughs sucks, and his execution of the winged-man concept leaves much to be desired.
Abyss is a slog. Bradley is desperately uninteresting as a character, and the Wieroo wear out their novelty in record time. The only reason I read it at all was because the three novellas were printed in one volume, and I was fool enough to buy a copy.
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