ARCHIVAL UPDATES: BEYOND BELIEF

Stefan Elg's Fortean collection Beyond Belief is now available to read and download at archive dot org! This marks the title's digital debut.

Courtesy Tower Books, 1970 (original pub. 1967).

ZANTHODON by Lin Carter

Author Lin Carter follows Edgar Rice Burroughs in naming the second book in his underground series after the location itself, and Zanthodon sure is a great name for a lost world created by an anti-matter meteorite that shot straight down a volcano and exploded deep within the earth! It's populated with all kinds of dinosaurs, ancient reptiles, mastodons, and monsters from the id, alongside peoples ranging from neanderthals to really sexy cavegirls to lost Barbary pirates.

When I said sexy cavegirls, I meant it, by the way - Princess Darya is Carter's version of Dian the Beautiful, and our two fisted hero Eric Carstairs can't get enough of her hot 17 year old body, as he tells us at length. Like a classic ERB heroine, she's strong willed and skilled in survival, but also alternates between getting kidnapped and swooning for our hero. She also lets one breast hang free from her furs in an example of primitive, energizing freedom. This may be a little spicier than I remember ERB being, but it's along his lines of robust primitivism being good for the spirit. 

Zanthodon opens with Darya having been spirited away by a thakdol (pterodactyl) at the end of the debut novel, Journey to the Underground World. Poor Eric fears she may be dead! Ah, but we know better ... True to ERB's style, Carter drags us through cliffhanger after cliffhanger, and of course ends this entry with Darya kidnapped yet again. Also like ERB, Carter claims to be presenting the writings of his hero character as real missives from the earth's core, which lead to him spending a lot of time explaining via Eric's POV how and why the narrative is the way it is - choppy and jumping back and forth between characters. It's not really necessary and just draws more attention to itself. Carter doesn't really distinguish himself in terms of prose here, but it all hangs together well enough.

Carter also borrows the threat of some disgusting monster civilization that's preying on humanity inside the earth. For ERB it was the pteradactyloid Mahars, for Carter it's the slimy Sluagghs - did you know that "Sluagh" are the "souls of the unforgiven dead" in Scottish and Irish folklore? Me neither! 

The somewhat awkwardly posed cover art is by Thomas Kidd, who also provides some interior illustrations. These are nice enough, though we're sadly lacking his take on a thakdol.

Carter provides a character guide at the end of the story:

Over at the ERBzine, Steve Servello has written an overview of the Zanthodon series. He points out that Carter's titling follows ERB's through further volumes, and also includes a homemade map of Zanthodon, as Carter never provides one! Elsewhere on the ERBzine, Den Valdron provides a linguistic comparison between the made up words of Zanthodon and Pellucidar.

Did you catch that earlier? After all that running around underground, the story ends with Darya kidnapped yet again! Zanthodon earns a cheery 2/4 for acceptable thrills. When you need a prehistoric pastiche in a pinch, it will do!

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Daw Books, 1979

THE EYE OF THE GODS by Richard Owen

We've got a real throwback here, a lost world thriller set in the Venezuelan jungle and featuring an expedition to the mysterious Autana: a jagged plateau shot through with caves that are supposedly home to Cuyakiare, a surviving Tyrannosaur. Add some very modern terrorism to the mix and author "Richard Owen" seems ready for blast off.

It's too bad, then that the most interesting thing about the story is the background of its author: Richard Owen is a pseudonym for writers Dennis Fawcett and David Nott, of whom there's not a lot of information about online. The original Richard Owen, of course, was a pioneering paleontologist who coined the word dinosaur, and Fawcett and Nott also reference some paleontological history with their background on character Page Foster's great-grandfather Egil Edward Foster, who's a Cope and/or Marsh type trailblazer of American paleontology. Writer Morgan used some of great-granddad's crackpot ideas about surviving dinosaurs to juice a bestseller about the Autana, so now he feels some kind of way about helping out Page on an expedition to find Cuyakiare.

The hardcover edition

It's all a lot of cute set building that feels wasted on the resulting story, which is strangely overpacked yet empty, with the terrorist subplot and endless jungle trekking that drags on and on. It even opens on a dud note with lots of arguing back and forth between Morgan and his editor about whether he's going to cover Cuyakiare or the terrorist plotting over Prince Karim of El Hajjaz, a tiny Emirates country - his entourage is in town in Caracas to work out some deals over oil. The terrorism is masterminded by "Emiliano," an obvious reference to Carlos the Jackal.

After a lot of plot and not a lot of payoff, the mighty Cuyakiare finally gets a big to-do, and, well ... he does alright. After all that build up, the beast munches on some terrorists and stalks about a big cave like a lesser Harryhausen set piece. And speaking of such things ...

As we traipse through the jungle with Morgan and Foster the story starts to feel like one of those low budget '80s Italian sci-fi/action films - something like Top Line or Alien Contamination, which padded out intermittent special effects with cheap location shooting and would-be screwball dialogue between the leads. David Warbeck would have been great as the put-upon Morgan, and why not pair him with his costar from The Beyond, Catriona MacColl? Maybe director Antonio Margheriti could have contributed some scale model FX and a scary T-Rex, too! Maybe, maybe ...

A novel doesn't have the budgetary concerns of a film, though, so it's pretty sad that Fawcett and Nott's scenery feels so impoverished. How come there aren't any other dinosaurs, for one? A Kirkus review from 1977 calls the novel a "shaggy-dinosaur love story" and damns it with faint praise as a "winningly mindless adventure-romance." I would drop the "winningly" from that description ...

On a final note, the paperback artwork does Morgan dirty: one of the more endearing parts of the novel is how he's a middle-aged schlub, not a he-man adventurer type. Page is also noted as having dark hair, not blonde as the cover shows. Fawcett and Nott's The Eye of the Gods limps to a miserable 1/4 rating: all wind up and no pitch.

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Signet Books, 1979 (original pub. 1977)

DEATH OF A THIN-SKINNED ANIMAL by Patrick Alexander

British screenwriter and novelist Patrick Alexander has brought the battered and betrayed assassin Abbott back home after a failed contract on Njala, a fictional African dictator modeled on Idi Amin. Now Abbott's superiors must scramble to ensure that Abbott doesn't make good on his mission and ruin a new trade deal with Njala, who's suddenly worth more to them alive than dead.

Njala has Amin's personality, with a few fictional flourishes: the nation he rules has been moved to West Africa, and gifted with substantial uranium reserves. It's this radioactive bounty that has resulted in the cancellation of Abbott's mission and the newly budding friendship between Njala and the UK.

Compared to the ripped-from-the-headlines fury of Target Amin by James Konrad, Alexander's use of Njala/Amin is somewhat restrained. That opening text about the AR-15 promises a lot of blood and guts, but much of the story is taken up by dithering from Abbott's spymasters, a mass of men with titles like the Controller and names like Smith, and their attendant secretaries/mistresses/wives. There's too much domestic drama around this, and Abbott's relationships too. Alexander never quite goes for the throat action-wise, and as Abbott and his former bosses feint and counter feint it all starts to feel like a very British farce - that's not unintended by Alexander, but the end result is somewhat toothless. When we finally get to the showdown between Abbott and Njala, the story picks up and the energy crackles, but it's too little, too late. Alexander also writes his villain Njala better than his protagonist Abbott, who we spend much more time with.

Despite my quibbling, Alexander's novel was a hit, it seems, with multiple editions:

The cover art is all a little generic (the bird on the hardcover is a nice touch, though), while the main cover art for this review makes the story look like some kind of James Bond caper. The book was also adapted into a popular 1981 French film titled La Professionnel, starring BELMONDO:

With music by Ennio Morricone, too!

The book review blog Olman's Fifty also reviewed this title back in 2013, giving high marks for suspense but criticizing the soppy love story. Meanwhile, a Kirkus review from 1977 is even less forgiving, calling it "just another Whitehall black-sheep story with slightly more flesh on the bones and slightly less blood on the pavement."

My verdict? Alexander sadly misses the mark one too many times, leaving Death of a Thin-Skinned Animal with a disappointing 2/4 rating. Njala and Abbott deserved a better stage.

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Jove Books, 1979 (original pub. 1976)

BLACK WORK by Macdowell Frederics

Ted Griffin is a mercenary pilot in dire need of a job ... the mysterious "Fourth of July" organization are in dire need of a hotshot pilot ... and America is in dire need of a wake up call in BLACK WORK!

Frederics' first person writing as Griffin is engaging, but unfortunately the most interesting part of the story is the roman à clef over who we come to realize are thinly veiled versions of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, throwing their all into a white supremacist terror plot to assassinate the first black vice president! There's some more details which point to a mixing of some other classic Hollywood stars, especially in the Nancy character of "Lynette Hall," who's a patriotic country music star on top of being a nympho. True to Ronnie's life, his "Craig Norse" character is just a cat's paw himself, an intermediary between the Fourth of July org and whoever's pulling the strings at the top. There's also a little John Wayne in Norse, but mostly it's Reagan the simpering chickenhawk has-been who fills in the character.

Hero merc Ted Griffin's unraveling of the plot takes too long, and the whole reason the bad guys supposedly need his unique pilot expertise seems overblown. There's only so many times Griffin can stalk around the underground lair looking for clues or get chewed out as expendable by the baddies before it becomes repetitive. Developments around the CIA are intriguing but similarly padded out. The novel comes in at under 250 pages, but could have been even slimmer. Frederics ends on a realistic, downer note that does feel earned, but there's just too much dross getting there.

This contemporary review by the NYT says that Frederics was a pseudonym for some "serious writer." Maybe they didn't want their name on a book where (spoilers here) Ronald Reagan gets blown away after shouting the n-word ... Black Work earns 2/4 stars for some interesting plays amid pedestrian plotting. Great title, too.

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Signet Books, 1977 (original pub. 1976)