2025 read #41: The Greatest Adventure by John Taine.

The Greatest Adventure by John Taine

256 pages

Published 1929

Read from May 2 to May 5

Rating: 1ish out of 5

The period between 1912 (when Doyle’s The Lost World was published) and somewhere around the end of WWII (when the subgenre appears to have been discarded in the postwar reshuffle of sci-fi) was the heyday of the lost world story. They ranged from the horribly written and horribly racist (The Land that Time Forgot) to the still racist but at least somewhat interesting (The Face in the Abyss). The ’20s and ’30s, in particular, seem to have been rife with lost worlds now forgotten.

The unpromisingly titled The Greatest Adventure is one such novel, a book (and author) I’d never heard of until I happened upon a pulp reprint from the 1960s. With its simple, direct prose, bubblegum-wrapper approximations of humor, and telling-not-showing exposition, it reminds me of a 1930s boy’s adventure novel I read a long time ago.

I’m not wholly convinced that Adventure was intended for an adult audience, though I acknowledge that boy’s-life and man’s-life adventure stories had considerable overlap at the time. An odd beast, the book has neither the just-like-you sidekick of a boy’s-life, nor the horniness and cynicism I’ve come to expect of a man’s-life.

Regardless of its intended audience, this book is not that good. The same character beats / punchlines keep repeating, failing to enliven a rote adventure narrative. (If you took a drink every time Ole Hansen says “I have a theory,” you’d be dead.)

The “dinosaurs” here are some of the least interesting I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It’s as if Taine overheard someone in another room say the word “dinosaur,” and he winged it from there. The monstrous saurians that populate his Antarctic are torpid masses of armored flesh “three hundred feet long.” We’re a long way from Doyle’s active (and relatively well-researched) dinosaurs, which leapt off the page a mere seventeen years earlier.

The discrepancy does get explained in the text (spoilers: they aren’t really dinosaurs). I suppose it’s interesting enough on a history-of-sci-fi level that this is more of a prototype of a genetic engineering story, but I’d have much preferred another retread of The Lost World over what we get here. If anything, with its climactic twist, Adventure turns out to be closer to The Andromeda Strain than to Jurassic Park.

The book’s sole redeeming feature is Edith, a modern young woman who learns to fly airplanes and stabs a pseudo-dinosaur in the eye.

2024 read #120: Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends, edited by John Miller.

Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends, edited by John Miller

350 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 8 to October 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

As autumn cools (however reluctantly, in our age of global climate change), it seems fitting that my next British Library collection should be a chilly one. (It’s also the last one I own that I haven’t read. Technicalities.)

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“The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon” by James Hogg (1837). A novella of some 80 pages, yet in spite of its early date, I found it engagingly readable. (There is excellent English prose dating much further back, of course, but when writing from this era is bad, it’s bad.) Hogg’s narrative voice has a cheeky thread of satire woven through it. His rustic sailor recounts the scientific bent of his captain with irony and indifference, and the story generally spoofs the tropes of the shipwrecked survivor genre, particularly the castaway’s newfound piety and trust in Providence. Allan praises his God and the Bible, yet remains an awful and unrepentant cad. His first impulse after the shipwreck is cannibalism; only his inability to access his late crewmates redirects his focus to the ship’s supplies instead. Once he gets into the wreck, he drinks a hogshead of brandy in a closet for a whole month, waking with a beard. Allan proceeds to orphan, then tame, a polar bear cub he dubs Nancy. The two of them go on a whirlwind tour of the Arctic, riding in comfort on a mountainous iceberg. When they find a lost settlement of Norwegians, Allan earnestly tries to become a bigamist, then abandons his children to polar bears when he gets a chance to escape, all while praising his Lord. They story would have been a classic at a quarter of the length, but even as it is, I’d give it a solid C+

“The Moonstone Mass” by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1868). There isn’t much substance to this tale about a man who, desirous of fortune, heads out in search of the Northwest Passage, gets stranded on a block of ice, and is tantalized by an unobtainable lump of moonstone. Spofford tries to turn it into a prose poem of the far north, but the tastes of the era make it seem stuffy rather than evocative to modern eyes (or to my eyes, at any rate). D+?

“The Captain of the ‘Polestar’” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1883). The least offensive Doyle story I’ve read as an adult, though he still pulls his characters from his catalogue of racial stereotypes and physiognomic bullshit. At its heart this is a ghost story, though one that doesn’t make a lick of sense if you think about it for a minute (why would a young woman murdered in Devonshire lure her sweetheart to his death in the Arctic?). Unsurprising coming from the pen of the Spiritualist evangelist who would later inflict The Land of Mist upon the living. Overlong, but it could have been worse? D+

“Skule Skerry” by John Buchan (1928). It's a stretch to include this tale of a liminal isle in the Orkneys in a collection of Arctic fiction, but I'm glad to have the chance to read it. This feels like the sort of story Robert Macfarlane would weave an essay around, linking it to, say, the work of some 1980s woodcarver, the back to the land movement, and the impact of overfishing and plastic pollution on shorebirds. But that's enough Robert Macfarlane fanfic for this review. “Skule Skerry” is, when you boil it down, the story of a comfortably well-off man who gets nervous on an island, yet it's so beguilingly described that I can't complain about it. C+?

“The Third Interne” by Idwal Jones (1938). Of all the stories of the Far North that found their way into Weird Tales, surely some of them would have been more apt for this anthology than this “mad science in a Siberian prison” number. Seemingly inspired by the supposed experiments of Sergei Brukhonenko, this piece certainly fits the bill for a lurid Weird Tales page-filler, but wasn’t what I wanted here. At least it was written serviceably well. C-

“Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: The Haunted Blizzard” by Aviaq Johnston (2019). Brief but good modern day yarn about a supernatural shadow lurking inside a blizzard. B

At this point, poised between the Arctic and Antarctic sections of the collection, I spent another week (hopefully the last) attending to a family crisis on Long Island. I couldn’t find the book, and assumed I left it at home. I tried to interest myself in other books, but nothing stuck. While packing for my trip home, I found I’d brought Polar Horrors after all. So I didn’t read for a week for no good reason.

Anyway. At least I’m home now.

“A Secret of the South Pole” by Hamilton Drummond (1901). I struggled to get into this one, in part because it always takes a while to get back into reading after an extended pause, in part because of the narration, which is filtered through the dialect-heavy speech of an old salt. I did enjoy it as an early precursor of weird fic. Three sailors find a drifting derelict, centuries old, with a mystery — and death — in its hold. Maybe C-

“In Amundsen’s Tent” by John Martin Leahy (1928). In the right hands, pulp can be an amazing aesthetic. But then you get stories like this one, which remind you why pulp was a term of dismissal for so long. I wanted to enjoy this early prototype of polar creature horror (published a decade before Who Goes There?), but the framing device yammers on at length, dropping character names like Bond McQuestion and Captain Stanley Livingstone. The meat of the story was equally amateurish, with awkward dialogue and repetitive, antiquated rhetoric. Leahy strains toward cosmic melodrama, but lands in the vicinity of silly: “It would mean horror and perhaps madness!” Still, there’s a kernel of a cool idea in here, buried under Leahy’s unpracticed efforts. Maybe D

“Creatures of the Light” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1930). Tediously overlong novella that reads like a paint-by-numbers of 1930s sci-fi: Life Rays! Eugenics! Psychic powers! An electric super-plane! A secret facility in a verdant Antarctic valley! A hunchbacked super-scientist breeding the Adam of a new age! Replacing placental gestation with Leyden jar mothers! At least, I’m pretty sure it was all meant as a broad criticism of the contemporary scientific eugenics movement, though Ellis never extricates herself from the more casual layman’s eugenics of her time, with physically perfect modern man Northwood growing disillusioned and disgusted with the methods (though not the ideals) of the disfigured Dr. Mundson. There's some faint entertainment value in how ludicrously au courant this story is, but it's a lot of eugenicist garbage and internalized misogyny to slog through. D

“Bride of the Antarctic” by Mordred Weir (1939). Refreshingly competent prose and storytelling elevate this Antarctic ghost story. Predictable but enjoyable. C+

“Ghost” by Henry Kuttner (1943). Charming techno-ghost story set in an Antarctic supercomputer complex (though Kuttner employs the delightful term “radioatom brains”). The story’s reliance on outmoded psychology theory dampens my enthusiasm a bit, but I’ll still give it a respectable C

“The Polar Vortex” by Malcolm M. Ferguson (1946). After his death, Lemming, a multimillionaire who dabbled in science, is revealed to have orchestrated a sadistic “experiment” at the bottom of the world, exposing an unsuspecting layman to the immensity of the night sky. It’s certainly a concept, I suppose, but this story left me flat. A shrug. D?

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And that’s all for this collection! Somewhat disappointing, especially considering how many stories could have fit the bill for this anthology. But there were several okay stories, and I’m not sorry I read it.

2024 read #119: From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, edited by Mike Ashley.

From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, edited by Mike Ashley

317 pages

Published 2018

Read from October 4 to October 8

Rating: 2 out of 5

Back at it again with another themed volume of public domain tales from British Library. With life stuff continuing out of my control, I want escapism, but can only manage bite-size morsels. Short stories are the obvious choice, and these collections are often more fun than strict reference to quality would suggest.

This volume differs from the other BL books I’ve read by presenting its stories out of chronological order. I suppose some thematic structure might emerge as I read.

Into the briny deeps!

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“The Ship of Silence” by Albert R. Wetjen (1932). This is an ably-written and winningly atmospheric tale of a derelict ship found adrift, Mary Celeste-style, the sole clue to the crew’s fate found in the screams mimicked by a parrot. Gets surprisingly good mileage out of never actually solving the mystery of the disappearance, and never showing us the monster (which is heavily implied to be prehistoric). A respectable B-

“From the Darkness and the Depths” by Morgan Robertson (1913). Another solid entry, hailing from that early period of modern physics when “Röntgen rays” were cutting edge, and the possibilities of other rays seemed endless. Talk of rays (and the applications of ultraviolet photography) is only a prologue to a yarn about an invisible creature shaken loose from the seabed by the eruption of Krakatoa, and the capsized mariners who must contend with it. “Darkness” isn't at the same level of pulp storytelling as “Ship of Silence,” but for what amounts to a man's-life adventure with a high body count, it's creative and atmospheric. C+

“Sargasso” by Ward Muir (1908). Ah, the peril of the Sargasso! It’s right up there with quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle on the list of childhood anxieties. This story’s diary format puts us at some remove from the action, but otherwise it’s a deliciously pulpy tale of seaweed that seems to have a mind of its own, and the creatures that prowl its surface. Could easily be a seafaring D&D encounter, which I count as a recommendation. C

“Held by the Sargasso Sea” by Frank H. Shaw (1908). Published the very same month as Muir’s story above. Clearly, the Sargasso was a pressing concern in 1908. A persistent anti-union, anti-working class vibe clouds this piece, which is about the bond between a ship and her captain, and what the ship does after its worthless layabout crew mutinies. The narrative mocks the mutineers for wanting to get rich without labor, as if the capitalist class didn’t have a monopoly on that endeavor. Even aside from its distasteful classism, this just isn’t an interesting story. D-

“The Floating Forest” by Herman Scheffauer (1909). Mediocre old melodrama about insurance fraud (and its comeuppance) on the high seas. Overwrought, disjointed, and not especially interesting, although I did enjoy the concept of a floating wreck accumulating vegetation before drifting into the open ocean. D?

“Tracked: A Mystery of the Sea” by C. N. Barham (1891). The turn of the century fad for the occult manifests in this soggy story of a "clairvoyante" locating a lost ship. Barham's phraseology reads like an early 2000s forums dork straining to emulate Victorian diction: "The narrative will be unquestionably denounced as an utterly unreliable romance. It will be accepted as a positive proof that the writer is wholly destitute of the critical faculty. Nay, more: not a few will from henceforth conclude that I am facile princeps in the reprehensible art of lying." This, mind you, arrives four pages into a preamble on clairvoyance and somnabulism. Just a bad time all around. Maybe F+

“The Mystery of the Water-Logged Ship” by William Hope Hodgson (1911). Not as engagingly weird as the other Hodgson pieces I've read; in fact, it gets a trifle repetitive. Nonetheless, this tale of a drifting derelict, and the surprisingly populous yacht that tries to salvage her, is welcome after the last few stories. Vague spoilers: the mystery’s denouement is in the idiom of Jules Verne. C-

“From the Depths” F. Britten Austin (1920). A German officer, formerly a submarine commander during the Great War, passes himself off as a Swedish captain, commissioned for an operation to salvage ships sunk by U-Boats in the war. Inevitably, we get vengeful ghosts communicating in Morse code. The melodrama of it all almost works. Characterization is next to nonexistent, but I’ll be generous and say C-

“The Murdered Ships” by James Francis Dwyer (1918). A scuttled ship seeks vengeance on the crew that did her in. Nothing especially interesting to me. D

“The Ship That Died” by John Gilbert (1917). Continuing the Great War preoccupation with “dying ships,” this one is kind of a pointless yarn, enlivened only by the imagery of a ship rotting and sloughing away (which is, inevitably, explained by a throwaway reference to an unknown ray). Not much else here. D?

“Devereux’s Last Smoke” by Izola Forrester (1907). The ghost of a Broadway man haunts his young widow when, on her way to remarry, she takes the selfsame steamer he died on. A strain of internalized misogyny sours this one, which felt rote even without it. D

“The Black Bell Buoy” by Rupert Chesterton (1907). A tedious affair about a haunted buoy that, once again, becomes an instrument of vengeance. D

“The High Seas” by Elinor Mordaunt (1918). One brother bullies the other from childhood into long-standing murderous rage, then they happen to ship together on the same crew. Incredibly tedious and unnecessary retelling of Cain and Abel. Nothing of interest to it whatsoever. Maybe F+

“The Soul-Saver” by Morgan Burke (1926). Finally, a touch of strangeness that isn’t just a vengeful spirit or some such. Captain Morbond is a violent bully of a man who, over the course of his career, beat two people to death, and he insists that their souls came into his keeping as little white mice. Well, I guess the souls do get a taste of vengeance in the end. Maybe C-

“No Ships Pass” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1932). An astonishingly modern story that, as editor Ashley notes, could have served as the inspiration for Lost. Shipwrecked mariners over the centuries have found themselves within swimming distance of a magical island. Saved, they soon discover it to be inescapable, a limbo where they can never leave, never age, and never die. I could easily see this getting published sometime in the 1990s, antique gender norms and all. Not perfect, but a solid enough B-

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And that’s it for this collection! It began so strongly, yet Ashley’s selections quickly veered out of my own personal sweet spot for old pulp. Ah well. 

2024 read #112: A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille

Illustrated by Gilbert Gaul

291 pages

Published 1888

Read from September 14 to September 16

Rating: 1 out of 5

Published posthumously, perhaps a decade or two after it was written, this is a Victorian social satire dressed in a guise of antipodean adventure. It’s chiefly notable as an early example of a prehistoric lost world novel, written long before the publication of Doyle’s own The Lost World.

Sadly, instead of dinosaurs, Manuscript’s primary focus is its clumsy satire, depicting a topsy-turvy land where Victorian mores are turned on their head. Poverty is esteemed! People compete to give their riches away! Death is joyously sought after! Darkness is embraced and light is shunned! To be cannibalized is an honor! Women can do things!

It’s never a question of whether an old adventure novel will be horribly racist, but of how horribly racist. A Strange Manuscript is pretty damn racist. Maybe not The Land that Time Forgot levels of racist, but still bad. Our narrator dwells at length on the horror and revulsion he feels upon meeting some brown people in Antarctica. He flees from them, and finds himself among the Kosekin, a vaguely Mesopotamian civilization at the South Pole. Yet even there, in the midst of bird-drawn carriages, tree-fern-lined streets, and majestic pyramids, he’s magnetized by a random white girl he meets in a cave. De Mille proceeds to heap up vile Victorian antisemitism in his profile of the Kosekin.

As for the prehistoric aspect of De Mille’s lost world — the sole reason I read this antiquated volume — it’s incidental at best, a mere curiosity to add flavor to the setting. (To be fair, when this book was written, even scientists weren’t acquainted with many dinosaurs, and even those were fragmentary beasts, poorly understood.) There are a couple ceremonial saurian hunts, one at sea, one on land, which serve only to demonstrate the Kosekin’s eagerness to die.

There is a cool scene where our hero rides on a giant pterodactyl under the light of the aurora australis, which, while it doesn’t erase any of the book’s bigotry, at least makes for a memorable moment. Manuscript has long since been in the public domain, so maybe James Gurney could repurpose the scene for another Dinotopia book.

2024 read #76: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.*

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne*

Translator uncredited

291 pages

Published 1864 (English translation published 1965)

Read from June 30 to July 2

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread

I had hoped for better, revisiting this book.

When I read Five Weeks in a Balloon back in 2015, I learned that Jules Verne had been substantially more racist than I’d picked up on as a child. Journey to the Center of the Earth had been a formative book for me; more importantly, I remembered it as a fun paleontological adventure tale without much opportunity for unhinged racism. I must have read a bowdlerized translation, however, because before his characters even leave the house on Köningstrasse, Verne found ways to be casually racist.

Another adult realization: what an abusive piece of shit the character Otto Lidenbrock is. He verbally and psychologically abuses his nephew and his servant, and subjects them to starvation when he’s fixated on something. The saddest thing to me is to observe how much I normalized all this as a child. With an abusive parent of my own, I didn't even register Professor Lidenbrock’s behavior when I was a kid; that was just what adults were like in my world. Oof.

The story is nothing more than a standard boy’s-life adventure run through a filter of primitive early geoscience. Once the party climbs Sneffels and begins their interminable descent, my nostalgia took over, and I had a decent enough time. Nonetheless, by just about any measure, this isn't quality literature. Verne’s style hews closer to fictional travel guide than to trifles like plot or characterization.

Coming back to the topic of different translations: I can’t be sure, but I think the translation I read as a kid was far better than this one. The prose is amateurish, overly formal, lacking in fluency and flow. Perhaps it’s closer to how Verne wrote in the original French; it does feel an awful lot like antique writing for children.

2024 read #55: Lumberjanes To the Max Volume 2.

Lumberjanes To the Max Edition Volume 2

Created by Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson & Brooke Allen

255 pages

Comics originally published 2016

Read from May 11 to May 12

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Every bit as endearing and vibrant as Volume 1, Volume 2 suffers somewhat from its lack of a cohesive throughline. It seems clear that the runaway success of the first Lumberjanes storyline prompted a quick continuation to keep selling fresh issues. These story arcs, while delightful on their own, lack any overarching plot; they feel like a string of filler episodes after the brilliantly constructed miniseries of the first book.

Most of the characters get lost in group scenes, without the character moments and attention to detail that made the first collection so delightful. Some characters do get important moments, but the voices of the broader cast feel muted. (Or maybe I found it that way because I’m fog-headed from being sick for the first time in about five years.)

The storyline set in the dimension of lost things — which features spectacles-stealing dinosaurs — was of course a personal favorite. The bonus story, “Mixing It Up,” was another highlight, sweet and charming.

2024 read #37: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

214 pages

Published 1954

Read from March 20 to March 25

Rating: 3 out of 5

As a precocious reader whose parent seldom let them access anything more recent than the Edwardian era, I’ve been something of an Anglophile my whole life, swooning over misty mornings on the downs and the ancient lines of hedgerows depicted by Doyle. And as a lifelong history nerd, Roman Britain was long a special interest of mine: an era of long-distance trade, culture contact, and people moving between continents long before any modern conception of “race” had been invented, with Britain itself a wooded land of fog and wolves at the edge of the world. It’s a shame that the definitive modern fantasy novel about Roman Britain (The Mists of Avalon) was written by one of those sex predators all too common in twentieth century SFF. I’ll certainly never make the effort to read it.

The Eagle of the Ninth got name-checked in one of the British histories I read in recent months, possibly In the Land of Giants. And for the most part, it delivers on what I’d want from an adventure novel set in Roman Britain. Its historical accuracy is debatable, but Sutcliff vividly depicts the culture and day to day life in Roman fort and town, from food to clothing to smells and sounds. The dialogue has a formal rhythm that makes the characters truly feel like they’re from a culture distinct from the reader’s. Sutcliff’s descriptions of nature beyond the walls are impeccable, poetic, worthy of any contemporary British nature writer:

He heard the bees zooming among the bell-heather of the clearing, smelled the warm aromatic scents of the sun-baked birch woods overlaying the cold saltiness of the sea; singled out one among the wheeling gulls and watched it until it became lost in a flickering cloud of sun-touched wings.

Most unexpectedly for 1954, there are distinct queer overtones to the companionship between disabled Centurion Marcus and manumitted Brit Esca. It’s no The Last of the Wine, but it’s far more emotionally tender and more intimately portrayed than I would have expected.

That said, Eagle absolutely shows its age. There’s the whole thing about Marcus purchasing Esca as a personal slave in the first place. (Accurate to the time period, but a dubious way for a writer to begin a relationship between two fictional characters, by modern standards.) There’s a line about how hereditary slaves, unlike those captured in battle, are simply used to slavery and don’t mind it. There's also a hugely uncomfortable age gap relationship between Marcus and a teenage girl named Cottia. Again, possibly accurate to the time period, but a questionable choice for a modern writer to make.

2024 read #22: Lumberjanes To the Max Edition Volume 1.

Lumberjanes To the Max Edition Volume 1

Created by Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson & Brooke Allen

271 pages

Comics originally published 2014

Read February 17

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

One of my holiday presents from my partner R, this lovely hardback omnibus collects the first eight chapters of the Lumberjanes series, which I’ve wanted to read for years, plus an additional short: “A Girl and Her Raptor.” What could be more up my alley? It’s the perfect way to get out of this reading slump I’ve found myself in the last week or so.

Surprising no one, I love Lumberjanes. The characters (and their designs) are vibrant and endearing. The writing is quick-moving, the story unexpectedly moving, the setting instantly iconic. It’s as close in spirit to Gravity Falls as you can get while still being its own wholly distinct thing, with the added bonus of its scout camp vibe. Summer camp and eldritch adventures are two flavors that should get combined far more often.

I never got to experience anything like summer camp. I get the sense that the reality falls far short of its portrayal in pop culture, even without all the added dungeon crawls and strange mystical creatures you find here. But I’ve been jonesing to write summer camp stories — and really, anything that falls under the broader “kids on bikes” umbrella — for a while now. No doubt it’s an escapism thing, given how shit our actual timeline is. It’s also about reclaiming the childhood I never got to have. So it’s no wonder I love this book.

Plus: dinosaurs! Raptors and summer camp also pair exceptionally well. While the raptor interlude is brief, and certainly not a match for Lost Time, it packs in a lot of fun (and friendship bracelets). And honestly, having such a prominent comic book do a “dinosaurs in the summer camp” arc only encourages me to work on my own “summer camp among the dinosaurs” story (which is fully distinct from Camp Cretaceous, thank you very much).

2024 read #19: Action Stories, December 1940 issue.

Action Stories, December 1940 issue (16:1)

Edited by Malcolm Reiss 

132 pages

Published 1940

Read February 5

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’m reading this for one reason and one reason only: the cover art for “Exiles of the Dawn World.” I have no illusions that anything here will live up to the pure pulp silliness promised by that cover. You can pretty much guarantee that the cover will be the best part of a magazine like this, anyway.

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“Ghost-Brand Maverick” by Jay Karth. The title is the best thing about this paint-by-numbers western, which has nothing to do with ghosts. Our hero, Ed Flane, has “opaque” blue eyes and no personality beyond stoic manliness. He arrives in town, supposedly fresh out of prison on a governor’s pardon; Ed had been locked up for killing his own father, but was let go on “insufficient evidence.” Naturally, the moment he sets foot in town, manly honor demands he fistfight a dude named Rick, who promptly dies. Ed Flane knows it’s a setup by local bigwigs hoping to take over his ranch and cover up who actually killed Ed’s dad (and not, like, Ed’s responsibility whatsoever for fighting Rick or anything). There’s also a gray-eyed waif who’s in love with Ed, but her father wants to shoot him; then her father ends up dead, etc. There’s even a twist reveal of lookalikes, assumed identities, and a second Ed Flane. It feels like a pressed and shaped chicken patty of a story, a product squirted out for rapid consumption and immediate digestion. I suppose it could have been worse? If I had to say something positive about it, “Maverick” does a decent job at escalation, adding fresh complications to Ed Flane’s situation. D

“Exiles of the Dawn World” by Nelson S. Bond. Stage magician and sometime ghost-exorcist Jeff thinks he’s investigating a standard haunted house in upstate New York; city reporter Beth thinks she’s exposing Jeff as the con he is. Instead, through a hidden passageway in a bookshelf, they discover Dr. Franz von Torp and his secret time-travel laboratory. Von Torp, to preserve his secrets, orders them into his time-machine; in the struggle, all three end up “a million years ago,” which turns out to be a pulpy mishmash of cavemen times and dinosaur swamps. Jeff’s magician coat comes in handy when befriending the local Cro-Magnons. Most of the fauna is a smattering of Cenozoic beasties — Dinoceras and Coryphodon get name-checked — but dinosaurs finally appear in the climax, specifically tyrannosaurs ridden by war bands of Neanderthals under the mad scientist’s command. Like “Maverick” above, this story is a checklist of pulp tropes run through with abandon. Weirdly, “Exiles” shows its age worse than the western does, particularly in its general attitude toward women. Still, it has cavemen fighting tyrannosaurs with fire arrows, which is exactly what I came here for. D-

Content warning for two next stories: sui ideation.

“Boothill Bait” by Tom J. Hopkins. Back in the saddle with another western, this time following Joe Fergus, a steely, stoic man with an actual character trait: he wants to die, but can’t seem to make it happen, not even in shootouts with bandits. When Fergus finds a town, nicknamed The Graveyard, where marshaling is a sure ticket to six feet under, he rushes to volunteer. That’s the only interesting wrinkle to this dud. Despite that setup, Fergus lights out for an even deadlier town down in Mexico the moment someone tells him about it, chasing another man who just wants to die. “Boothill” is trying so hard to be brooding and fatalistic, but it’s just silly. (And ultimately racist.) F

“The Devil’s Sink Hole” by Albert Richard Wetjen. I was premature when I said a suicidal hero was an interesting wrinkle, because we got another one: Stinger Seave, a former South Seas “trader” who has gone back to ruthless adventuring in his old age, after a bank collapse erases most of his colonialist wealth. Seave is frail, his mustache white, and he’s clean out of fucks to give. So the governor of colonial New Guinea offers to make him a magistrate on the frontier. Stinger could have been an interesting character, but this story is an exercise in colonialist bullshit. It’s just an especially vile western with palm trees. F

Clearly we peaked with the first two stories. We’ve long since  reached the point of diminishing returns.

“The Rider of Lost Range” by Bart Cassidy. Another western. Two bygone “pards,” Buck and Rooney, grew up and got ranches next to each other, but now they suspect each other of rustling their calves, because it’s manlier to stew in unfounded suspicion than to have an open and honest communication. You’d never guess, but a third man is behind it all, putting them against each another while he steals their cattle! (I sussed out the twist by page two.) The one redeeming feature of this tale is its depiction of high park and mountain scenery. There’s also a secret cave behind a thundering waterfall, leading to a grassy range open to the air, which is implausible but fun. Maybe F+

“Murder Sands” by John Starr. A tale of two men in the French Foreign Legion: a standup American sergeant, and a vicious bully of a Dutch lieutenant. The American noncom punches the Dutch officer, gets only light punishment due to past heroism, and now the Dutchman plots vengeance. Consistently uninteresting tale from the desert frontiers of colonialism. F

“Tejano!” by Harry F. Olmsted. All about some “loco” white dudes cow-punching in the Big Bend country. Murders and rustling and revenge get rattled off at breakneck pace, with all the standard racist western tropes. I almost wonder if this was some awkward attempt at a satire of pulpy westerns. No thanks, either way. F

“Fate Fans a .45” by Walt Coburn. Jack Badger, cowpoke turned investigator, traipses down to Mexico about a train robbery, following a hunch it was set up by someone on the inside. (Turns out Jack’s dad was killed in the robbery. It’s a vengeance story, because of course it is.) Insipid stuff, and excessively long, to boot. Didn’t expect much from this one, but what a flat way to end this issue. F

—

For a moment there at the start, I had thought this magazine might have been more than meets the eye — only a little, maybe 5%, but still, more interesting than it would seem. But no, they merely front-loaded it with the best stories, and even those two were marginal at best. The rest was pure pulp filler. Not surprising, just disappointing.

2023 read #139: The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt.

The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt

278 pages

Published 1931

Read from November 27 to November 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Who’s ready for a colonialist old dungeon crawl adventure from the early days of dark fantasy pulp? We got your ivory-skinned Atlantean princess, we got your winged serpents, we got your lizard people and your snake people and your spider people. We got your ancient evil giving orders and weeping gold through a stone face in a cavern. We got your shitty, all-pervasive racism and sexism. There’s even an evil garden! And mixed up in all of it, we got your standard interchangeable white dude, all effortless confidence and fisticuffs, trampling through the lost world, hoping to get the girl as a literal reward.

Today’s special boy is a lump of masculinity named Graydon, an American mining engineer recruited by adventurers to help steal hidden Incan gold. The group speed-runs The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in record time, with Graydon punching out professional adventurer Starrett by page 4, and the others drawing guns on Graydon by page 14. Graydon alienates his companions by rescuing the ivory-skinned Suanna from their clutches. Suanna, in turn, guides the adventurers into her Atlantean lost world, a hidden valley high in the Andes. Her people call themselves Yu-Atlanchi, but come on — it’s Atlantis.

In a pleasant surprise, the land of Yu-Atlanchi has dinosaurs! They aren’t scientifically rigorous dinosaurs by any means — even by the 1930s, only a pulp writer would amalgamate iguanodonts and theropods into one toothy, pointy-thumbed beast — but an elf-coded Atlantean in green, out hunting on dinosaur-back with a pack of dinosaurian game-hounds, was a pleasure I wasn’t expecting when I picked up this book. We’re also treated to a high-speed dinosaur race and a gladiator fight against a small theropod. Dinos don’t fill many pages here, but the mix of genres and vibes is exquisitely D&D-esque.

And really, the pulpy roots of D&D are what draw me to books like this. Wizards of the Coast alienated everyone with its shady business practices, its AI art, and its misplaced loyalty to racist old tropes. D&D was a huge part of my life for a number of years, though, and I’ll always be fond of the vibe. The titular Face itself could be a direct inspiration for the eidolon of Moloch, which graced the player’s handbook in the first edition of AD&D.

Merritt tosses so many elements into his pulp stew that sometimes it can’t help but be entertaining. It helps that his prose, while conventionally forgettable, is miles better than Edgar Rice Burroughs’. Ultimately, though, Face is predictably mired in the mores of its time, in its vile racial theory and foul gender norms. Fun it may be in spots, but that’s impossible to overlook.

2023 read #127: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

309 pages

Published 1935

Read from October 31 to November 2

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I first got it into my head to read this book way back in the first year or so of this blog, when I was checking off all the high school lit classics that had escaped me before. The fact that no library in Suffolk County owned a copy, and the difficulty in tracking down a used copy for a reasonable price, lent it an unearned mystique in my overactive imagination. I conceptualized Treasure as a pulp masterpiece on the same level as The Ox-Bow Incident, an exercise in stoic poetry, of weather-worn men tortured by the social constraints of performative masculinity and the violence it entails.

Having finally found myself a used copy, I find the reality of Treasure deflates all those idle speculations. It’s closer in spirit to The Road to El Dorado than it is to Blood Meridian. It’s a rangy satire of pulp adventure fiction, poking fun at the easy glory and masculine mythology of pulp magazines. It’s also an extended meditation on the acidic grip of greed, both on the minds of individual people and on societies built on capitalism. Perhaps it was some garbled hearsay of this that sketched my imaginary understanding of Treasure.

Our heroes, Dobbs and Curtin, are two American men weathering the Great Depression and failing to make a quick buck down in Mexico. In the current parlance, the two of them share a single brain cell. The first section of the book follows their job-hunting misadventures in the oil fields and the jungles — bumming pesos, getting scammed by bosses, hiding in a tree from a beast that turns out to be a burro. Bold adventure this is not. Hell, after introducing Dobbs in the first two pages, the book spends the next ten pages delineating the shittiness of a particular flophouse. Atmospheric digressions seem to make up about half the book.

In the end, of course, there’s betrayal and murder, the descent into paranoia, but the characters stumble into it the way they’ve stumbled into everything else, through the power of suggestion and self-delusion. 

2023 read #122: Out of Time’s Abyss by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Out of Time’s Abyss: The Tale of Bradley by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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.

2023 read #121: The People that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The People that Time Forgot: The Adventures of Thomas Billings by Edgar Rice Burroughs

92 pages

Published 1918

Read from October 21 to October 22

Rating: 1 out of 5

The only reason to read this book, aside from a stubborn desire to complete the story begun in The Land that Time Forgot, comes at the start of chapter two. Our new paragon of white American masculinity, Tom Billings, has launched his “hydro-aeroplane” to search for his friend Bowen Tyler, lost in the mysterious land of Caspak. Almost immediately Tom finds his biplane attacked by an enormous “pterodactyl,” and engages his machine guns to dogfight it. There — I spared you the need to ever read the rest.

People has the sense to plop us right into Caspak instead of farting around with some convoluted sequence involving multiple sunken ships and multiple takeovers of a U-Boat. It is better-paced and, in general, far closer to what I had expected this series to be — full of prehistoric adventure, narrow escapes, nocturnal confrontations with cave bears, and so on. It never becomes as fun or engaging as Doyle’s The Lost World, but at least it reaches a benchmark of readability that eluded The Land that Time Forgot.

On the other hand, this is a vile, racist book. Its plot is structured around shitty early 20th century “race theory,” with individual people evolving Pokémon-style through the “stages” of human evolution from ape to white guy. (This has less to do with Darwinism and more to do with the Christian white supremacist “Great Chain of Being” ideology that appropriated Darwinism to justify itself.) Plus there’s the proto-Gorean “this she is mine” bullshit, a pulp power fantasy of sexual ownership. Then there’s Tom’s internalized revulsion at his miscegenation with the redoubtable Ajor. On top of that, all of Caspak wallows in a drearily modernist “kill or be killed” philosophy. There isn’t anything you can do to save or excuse a book like this. (Though it does contextualize “Maureen Birnbaum at the Earth’s Core.”)

2023 read #120: The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs

91 pages

Published 1918

Read from October 20 to October 21

Rating: 0.5 out of 5

Somehow I’ve gotten to age 40 without reading any Edgar Rice Burroughs. I suppose it isn’t difficult; I haven’t read anything by Lovecraft, either, and don’t feel like either one has been a great loss to me. But Burroughs fit so precisely into the “boys’ adventure” pigeonhole — basically all that my abusive, controlling father permitted me to read as a kid — that I’m mildly surprised I never read him before. Particularly this trilogy, his attempt to emulate and cash in on Doyle’s The Lost World.

I did try to read The Land that Time Forgot in that same dino-obsessed period when I first read The Lost World; I found a copy in a library when I was 12 or 13. But there’s so much unnecessary crap to wade through just to get the story started. A man on a Geeenland rest-cure finds a Thermos bottle with a narrative inside; it relates how some dude named Bowen Tyler survived a U-Boat attack with a young woman named Lys La Rue, how they were rescued, were sunk again, wound up in a U-Boat with Lys’ German fiancée, blundered their way into the South Pacific, and so on and so forth. It’s all deadly dull. We don’t even reach Caspak until almost halfway through. It defeated my interest, and not just as a kid — I tried to read this several times as an adult before now.

(I’ll take this moment to note that I had some confusion about whether the Caspak series was three novellas, as it was originally published, or one novel, as it was later printed. I’m going with three novellas in my bookkeeping here, because they seem — from a casual glance — to have different narrators and represent separate adventures.)

Contrasting this slim but tedious book with Doyle’s The Lost World serves only to make me wonder why Burroughs was ever popular. Where Doyle’s brisk storytelling wove an engrossing adventure with lively characters, atmosphere, and memorable incidents, Burroughs pens a plodding, forgettable affair, full of flimsy plot contrivances and banal fistfights. Like, how do you make pulp boring? Burroughs found a way.

Once we get to Caspak, this trend continues. Contrast Doyle’s evocative Maple White Land, with its then-current scientific depictions of iguanodonts, stegosaurs, and allosaurs, with Burroughs’ slavering multitudes of indistinguishable saurians. We rarely get descriptions more exact than “huge thing.” Even worse, the shitty racism of the time is even more front and center here than it is in the (already very racist) book by Doyle. “Each race of proto-man evolves toward the white man” was the detail that made me give this book a worse rating than anything I’ve actually finished for this blog.

In short, I found nothing whatsoever to recommend The Land that Time Forgot. And I still have two more Caspak novellas to go. I’m just stubborn enough that I think I’ll finish them just so I can check them off and never think about them again.

2023 read #112: Lost Time by Tas Mukanik.

Lost Time by Tas Mukanik

With inks by Winter Jay Kiakas

240 pages

Published 2023

Read October 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

In one of the last recorded instances of Twitter being useful to anyone, I happened upon Tas Mukanik tweeting about this book just the other day, and promptly lined up my pre-order.

For a few years now I've felt we're overdue for another dinosaur fiction renaissance. Maybe not to the same degree we saw in the 1990s, and maybe not in adult fiction, but absolutely in YA and middle-grade. Every so often I check out the YA section of the chain bookseller and I'm surprised that there aren't any love triangle trilogies set in a technomagical royal court banished to the Late Cretaceous. (Or at least more books than one spun off from Jurassic World.) Do I have to do everything around here myself??

So Lost Time was quite the welcome find. It’s the heartwarming tale of Evie, an accidental time castaway, who raises Ada, an azhdarchid pterosaur, from an egg. It hits some of my favorite “lost in the Cretaceous” story beats: surviving by trial and error, making tools and traps, dealing with the climate, learning how to ride a tame beastie, an interlude amongst some giant trees. It’s also sweet and wholesome and quite lovely. If you ever wanted an array of Cretaceous fauna depicted in a post-Steven Universe CalArts-esque style, this is the book for you. It’s right up there with the first Dinosaur Sanctuary as one of my new favorite pieces of dino fiction.

2023 read #77: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.*

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson*

279 pages

Published 1886

Read from July 4 to July 7

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

One of my favorite books as a kid was Treasure Island. This is no doubt a common outcome when your father is controlling and abusive and doesn’t let you read much, if anything, more current than the Edwardian era. So it happened that, when I was still young enough to eat up Readers Digest condensed classics (those stalwarts of impoverished American childhoods in the '80s and early '90s), I was thrilled to get my hands on their bowdlerized version of Kidnapped from the dollar store. Another seafaring adventure from Robert Louis Stevenson! Surely it would be exactly as good as Treasure Island!

Kidnapped is, of course, a very different book than Treasure Island. It was one of the very first times in my young life that I learned I could dislike a book. I don't remember why I didn't like it, though. I wouldn't be surprised if the Lowland Scots dialogue muddled my preteen brain; even at 40, I have no idea what the exclamation “Hoot-toot!” is meant to correspond to in actual Scots speech. Additionally, I wouldn't have been able to follow the intricacies of Jacobite vs Whig politics as a child. Or maybe I tired of interminable wandering over the heather. Whatever the reason, Kidnapped was one of the vanishingly few books I had as a kid that I didn't reread even once.

Maybe as a consequence of that, Kidnapped became a book I've wanted to revisit for much of my adult life. (Or at least since I got my library card and began this blog, all those years ago.) Weirdly, the Suffolk County library system had exactly one copy, and it was a ratty old tome, fraying apart along the spine, so I didn’t try to read it. I finally happened upon a cheap Scholastic edition at the used bookstore a few weeks ago. At long last we can answer: Was it truly so mediocre? Or was it simply above my reading level?

After all these years, I can report: It’s fine? I guess?

Stevenson’s primary storytelling skill here is characterization. Uncle Ebenezer is one of the great bastards of Victorian literature, a standout in a crowded field. Ebenezer is so perfectly realized on the page: a miser in a flannel nightgown, refusing to have lights in the house, happy to measure out half of his own beer into David's cup if he wants a drink at dinner. David himself, by contrast, is insufferably smug and classist, perennially thinking himself superior to everyone and the master of every situation. There's a place for unappealing narrators, and I’m sure his priggishness was thoroughly realistic, but David being a titled prick who I want to push into a bog does the story no favors.

The true star of the book is Alan Breck, whose characterization here — a swaggering braggart in love with his own legend, a Jacobite partisan who forms a fast friendship with a Whig lad simply because the lad witnessed Alan’s feats of swordsmanship — is one I want to recycle for a queer sword and sorcery story.

When it comes to plotting, or even adventure, however, Stevenson does an indifferent job. Our young hero David caroms from seeking his fortune at his uncle’s house, to the titular kidnapping, to fighting beside Alan, to shipwreck, to a half-hearted Robinson Crusoe sequence, to a traipse across a couple Scottish islands, to witnessing a murder, to fleeing across the heather with Alan, to lying sick in a croft for a month, to (finally) talking to a lawyer. It is, if nothing else, thoroughly Victorian — a sprawling mess with a little bit of everything thrown in, for the kids to enjoy in their weekly serial. No wonder it was all too much for a kid in the early 1990s who just wanted some more swashbuckling.

2023 read #76: The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” by William Hope Hodgson.

The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” by William Hope Hodgson

Introduction by Lin Carter

183 pages

Published 1907

Read from July 2 to July 3

Rating: 2 out of 5

The first novel from early weird-horror writer William Hope Hodgson, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” is written as if it were an account from 1757 of events that happened even earlier. We begin in media res some time into this putative document, eliding over the wreck of the Glen Carrig, somewhere in the southern seas. We find the survivors in her two boats drifting toward lands and seas unknown — lands and seas where they are assailed by nocturnal cries, meet horrid monsters, and bumble onward to the next misadventure. It’s two parts Gulliver’s Travels, one part Fiend Folio.

Hodgson mimics the 1700s adventure novel formula — including, regrettably, its antique prose style — perhaps a bit too well. At one point some characters walk around a tree, a simple action which is adumbrated with the phrase “our circumnavigation of the great vegetable.” We are kept at arm’s-length from the characters, most of whom are never named; the action, which could have been a fun proto-D&D monster quest, is staid and prim.

There are nicely creepy images scattered here and there throughout the book: a tree trunk “soft as pulp under my fingers,” monstrous octopuses and prodigious crabs in a forest of giant mushrooms, thousands of tentacled humanoids swarming en masse up a cliff. These are few and far between, however. Most of the book is essentially mundane, covering the usual Robinson Crusoe terrain of obtaining fresh water, improvising weapons and shelter, plaiting rope, battening the boat down for a storm, etc. It isn’t bad by any means, but it isn’t quite the landmark in dreamlike creature-horror one might wish.

2023 read #54: The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle.*

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle*

163 pages

Published 1912

Read May 16

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I used to read and reread this book obsessively as a tween and teen. It was a foundational adventure novel for me at a highly impressionable age. Who could ever forget the canoe passage up the hidden river, the first iguanodonts in the glade, the moonlit megalosaur chase? But unlike Jurassic Park, which I reread as recently as 2011, or Dinosaur Summer, which I revisited just last year, I haven’t returned to Doyle’s Lost World since my youth.

Its virulent racism certainly played a part in my unwillingness to check it out again. It is, straight up, an imperialist adventure; imperialist shittiness is drawn in bold lines throughout its blueprint. (Revisiting it now, I also discovered a deep reservoir of Edwardian misogyny, which I hadn’t picked up on in the past.) There’s also the general mustiness of a hundred-and-eleven year old boys' adventure novel, especially one that short-changes us on the dinosaur action we came here to read. Like so many novelists after him, Doyle quickly gets bored of his ancient saurians. After taking half the book to bring us to Maple White Land, we get just a couple memorable scenes of early dino encounters before they're shunted off to the background; almost immediately Doyle tangents our heroes off into a colonialist intervention between “ape-men” and indigenous humans on the plateau. The book would have been better with more iguanodonts and stegosaurs, and fewer white saviors.

As an adventure novel, though, The Lost World has the gift of sprightly pacing and plenty of dry Edwardian humor, much of which went over my head when I read it as a youth. The way Professor Challenger is built up as this larger-than-life figure for two chapters before we even meet him is a splendid example of character-driven exposition, one of Doyle’s strengths as a pop fiction author. I love the cattiness of the rivalry between Challenger and Summerlee, almost — but not quite — enough to make me want to write my own stories of Edwardian scientist rivals-to-lovers.

This book doesn’t come close to the charms of its semi-sequel Dinosaur Summer, but it’s a fine enough boy’s-life adventure for its time. Just expect a ton of racism along your way.

(And yes, I know the Edwardian era technically ended in 1910. But much the same way that the cultural 1990s lasted until 9/11, I think it’s fair to lump the pre-war 1910s in with that Edwardian vibe.)

2022 read #18: The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson.

The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson

Translated by David McDuff

59 pages

Published 1945 (English translation published 2012)

Read May 4

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We're watching our rights as human beings crumble in real time, not just here in the United States but also in every other country (such as the United Kingdom) that is currently sliding into fascism.

Since the first of May I'd been trying to read a bad fantasy romance from the early 1980s. It was stuffed with gross clichés of the time, racial and sexual, and after the last couple days, I just couldn't stand to read it any longer.

So I dropped that losing bet and picked up the lightest and fluffiest bit of innocent escapism I had available: The Moomins and the Great Flood!

The first Moomin book, Great Flood presents Moomintroll, Moominmamma, and Moomin Valley in primordial form, a mostly blank canvas for an idle sketch of childhood adventure and a shaggy-dog narrative. There isn't much substance here, but then, I wasn't seeking any. Jansson's gorgeous illustrations are more compelling than the prose, which lacks the subtle ache of The Summer Book. In her 1991 preface, Jansson concludes, "Anyhow, here was my first happy ending!" That captures the vibe nicely. It was just what I needed today.

2022 read #15: Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear.*

Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear*

Illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi

325 pages

Published 1998

Read April 27

Rating: 3 out of 5 (maybe 3.5?)

* Denotes a reread.

Like The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, this is another fixture of my teen years. Unlike Magruder, it was one of my favorite books, once upon a time.

Dinosaur Summer is a revisionist sequel to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, updated with then-current dinosaur science, published right at the tail end of the 1990s dinomania. Its first half is perhaps one of the best stretches of writing to come out of the post-Jurassic Park cash-in period, exploring a post-war world where the public has grown bored of dinosaur circuses and Hollywood bigwigs finance the return of the last circus dinosaurs to the Lost World. At the time, I thought this book was the height of speculative literature, mixing personal turmoil and drama with prehistoric action. The circus dinosaurs become characters in their own right, their smells and care needs and personalities delightfully vivid. I was the same age as its teen protagonist when I first read it; while Peter's father Anthony was worlds better than my own, I could relate to Peter's coming-of-age struggles with Anthony's alcoholism and overbearing personality. 

Summer lags in its second half, once our protagonists (small but obvious spoiler here) get stranded on Kahu Hidi, the Grand Tepui. Whereas the circus dinosaurs are lovingly rendered and palpable on the page, Bear seems to lose all interest in "conventional" dinosaurs once we arrive on the Lost World. Bear's prose is more descriptive than fluent, flinging our heroes pell-mell through rock mazes and nighttime forests and into the hive of communal dinosaurs resembling giant mole rats. There's also more than a whiff of well-meaning but misguided 1990s white mysticism: our white hero Peter experiences the spirit-dream that Billie, an Indigenous character, has sought after. Billie aside, basically every main character is a white man.

It's been a while since I've been able to read a book this long in a single day. I think Summer hit a personal sweet spot: it's familiar enough to be a quick read, but enough time has elapsed since I last read it (at least 20 years) that it wasn't familiar enough to be boring.