The Land of Terror (The Fantastic Adventures of Doc Savage, #8)

Book number two. Only 179 to go!

This one, to me, is the stereotypical Doc Savage adventure. A wild criminal device, dependent on something only found in a far off place. A mysterious villain. And lots of dumb criminal lackeys to throw at Doc and the gang to provide the action.

Along the way, this particular adventure also includes dinosaurs! pseudo-science! an obvious identity of the mysterious villain! Ham and Monk bantering! more pseudo-science (the atomic theories are hilarious)! lots of over-written scenes! and more exclamation marks than you can shake a stick at!

Of course (spoiler alert) Doc uses his big brawn and big brain to save everyone's asses in the end.

Fun stuff.

Land of Terror
(Ham, Monk, Renny, Long Tom, Johnny) (New York, Pacific Island near New Zealand)

My sincere hope is to write these reflections closer to the actual reading of the story. Seeing how it has been a couple of months I’m going to go with what stuck out in my memory.

The second outing of Doc Savage gives a more blood thirsty Doc where in later adventures he would avoid killing when he could. The early adventures do not present such a constraint. In a move away from dispatching criminals so permanently, Lester Dent introduces the notorious crime college in this adventure. If Doc doesn’t kill them, he sends them off for a surgical treatment that removes their criminal tendencies. At times it comes across as a lobotomy and for show more this reader it was one of the sticking points for my love of these adventures. I’ve noted something in reading them in publishing order, there is a reference to the previous adventure in some manner. I’ll be calling those out as I read and notice them.

The action starts on the outskirts of New York, moves to the Hudson River and makes good use of a tourist pirate ship as a setting. This is the first time Dent hs criminals using a dissolving substance to dispatch their enemies. A device that will appear many times in subsequent stories. Eventually the action moves to the South Pacific to an island near New Zealand. In the tradition of The Lost World (either Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger story or Willis O’Brien’s silent movie adaptation) Doc and crew end up in an isolated prehistoric dinosaur paradise. Which also in the same tradition is destroyed at the end so no revisits in later stories. I’m sure it is mostly coincidence but one has to wonder if the imminent release of King Kong had any influence on the story. The timing is such that press releases about the movie might have been floating around as Dent was writing.

I have to admit that by the second half of the book, I had figured out who the villain was. This may be more to my having read 20 or more of the Doc Savage books prior to my reading them in order. You tend to pick up the patterns of the more prolific writers and Dent for the most part was churning out one every month with some fill in writers during his 16 years writing Doc Savage. Still this is the first dive into the truly fantastic with prehistoric creatures even though there is given a plausible at the time explanation for their existence.

I don’t mention the cover art too often, the majority of the Bantam books being by James Bama but this isn’t one of my favorites. The dinosaurs are great but Doc is a little stiff. Most times I’m used to Doc being in a more prominent part of the painting and usually not in a defensive posture. Still the story gets its props for being the first for crime college, first for Doc and Dinosaurs, and for Dent to start getting into his groove. show less

As usual, a little slow to get started, but once the adventure really gets started, it holds your interest.

The first Doc Savage adventure I read back in 1967. This started a life-long obsession with the Man of Bronze.

Doc Savage es un extraño y misterioso personaje de piel bronceada y de ojos dorados que, al frente de un grupo de colaboradores batallan incansablemente por el imperio de la justicia desde el piso 86 de uno de los edificios más altos de Nueva Cork, hasta el último rincón de la Tierra.