MYSTERIES OF OUR WORLD by Peter Briggs

Not a mystery mongering text, but a solid pop-sci volume covering the cutting edge in earth science c.1969. Author Peter Briggs lays out the debates and scientific developments leading to our new knowledge of the world around us, from the ocean depths to the mountain tops, atmospheric heights, and beyond! There's a healthy dose of natural disasters, with volcanos and earthquakes making for engaging reading. Oceanic investigation is another exciting subject, with plenty of ships dredging and scanning and netting all around the seven seas - the Glomar Challenger is here, a few years before the Explorer would launch its now infamous secret mission. 

Reading on through Briggs' explorations, dense but smoothly flowing, it makes me think. We only just saw the announcement of the phasing out of "pocket" paperbacks, and here's a relic of that soon-to-be-bygone age: a portable, dependable, entertaining science primer, readable by anyone, anytime, anywhere, packed with references and sources - put out by a relatively sleazy/lowbrow publisher, even. Nowadays google is just as likely to give you a completely hallucinated "AI summary" for your search terms as a straightforward URL ... maybe I'm just being cranky, I don't know! Google also doesn't offer as many cigarette ads as vintage paperbacks:

Briggs appears to have been a prolific nonfiction writer - here's a spread of titles including Water, The Vital Essence, which Briggs references in this current text, and a title on the Glomar Challenger.

"And if California falls into the ocean/
Like the mystics and statistics say it will"

 

True to their rough and tumble image, Belmont Tower included a two page spread of mafia books as part of their nonfiction advertising. "You liked reading about volcanos, Billy? Well how about Lucky Luciano?"

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

Belmont Tower Books, 1969

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. Our heroic writer/newsman 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)

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: STRANGE SECRETS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER

Warren Smith's Strange Secrets of the Loch Ness Monster is now available to read and download at archive dot org, including back page ads for his other Zebra specials.

Courtesy Zebra Books, 1976.

WORLD OF THE WEIRD by Brad Steiger

"All new, all true!" Technically that's correct, in that Steiger doesn't copy/paste any prior work here, but this is another of his patented potpourris, ladled with plenty of old fashioned ghost stories and some frequent repeaters such as Ivan T. Sanderson's giant penguin/dinosaur of Clearwater, FL. Steiger leaves out Sanderson's penguin pronouncement in favor of the saurian solution, though he does quote extensively from Sanderson's mumbo jumbo about the impossibility of creating the tracks mechanically. Other big shots like that Tasmanian globster and the Beast of La Gevaudan make their obligatory appearances. Warren Smith would recycle Steiger's chapter on the Beast of La Gevaudan with some minor word changes in his Strange Monsters and Madmen, typical of their writing relationship. The Acambaro figures "discovered" by Waldemar Julsrud also appear, and have had a long life in paranormal and Creationist literature. 

A chapter on "American monsters" is some good fun, with wolf men, apemen, and giant lizards stalking the countryside! Some more spooky stuff: sea serpents, seances with the Fox sisters, and the reincarnation of Shanti Devi! Too bad Steiger fills out his other chapters with some weak sauce such as the Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences and a "quirky" rundown on phobias. Dragons and vampires get some filler chapters too. A chapter on the Navy's dolphin training program reads more sinister than weird nowadays. Oh well, at least the Cardiff Giant is also on hand. That one's a classic and even Steiger can't avoid disclosing its well established hoax status.

1970 Belmont reprint

THE END

Table of contents:

1.  Beware of Greeks 2700 Years Old (5)
2.  The Night a Dinosaur Came to Call (9)
3.  The Devil Rider of Chisholm Hollow (13)
4.  They Came to Acambaro (17)
5.  The Wild, Wild Rocks (20)
6.  Miss Morton's Pet Ghost (24)
7.  Haunted Canterbury (28)
8.  The Phantom Marchers of Crete (32)
9.  The Mystery of Lightning Balls (35)
10. Science and the Sea Serpent (39)
11. Premonitions of Kennedy's Death (46)
12. The Girl Who Lives on Bee Stings (48)
13. Tut Tut, King Tut (50)
14. Abe Lincoln's White House Spooks (55)
15. Superhuman Strength Comes to Farmwife (59)
16. Phatoms of the Ocean (61)
17. The White Lady of Lover's Lane (64)
18. The Strange Dancers Who Perform While Entranced (66)
19. The Ghost Who Was Photographed (69)
20. A Sea Monster Dies in Tasmania (72)
21. Crazy Coincidences (77)
22. She Remembers a Past Life (80)
23. America's Home-Grown Monsters (84)
24. Man's Fine Finned Friend (88)
25. From Out of the Sky (90)
26. Headquarters of the Spook Chasers (94)
27. Witches' Holiday (98)
28. What Are You Afraid of? (103)
29. An Astrologer's Apprenticeship (106)
30. The Fox Sisters and the Mysterious Knocking (109)
31. The Woman Who Saw Without Eyes (114)
32. The Beast of Le Gevaudan (118)
33. The Incredible Eusapia Palladino (123)
34. The Peeping Tom Who Never Left Home (127)
35. The Gurkha Ghost (131)
36. North Carolina's River of Penicillin (133)
37. Land of Zombi and Voodoo (135)
38. There's a Haunted House in Washington, D.C. (141)
39. The Mystery of the Medicine Wheel and the Stone Circles (147)
40. The Legend of the Dragon (150)
41. The Phantom Monk of Basildon (154)
42. Curse of the Vampire (156)

World of the Weird is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Belmont Books, 1966