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The Land Of Terror (1965)

by Kenneth Robeson(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0553086073 (ISBN13: 9780553086072)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Bantam Books

series

Doc Savage (Bantam)

review 1: From April 1933, this second Doc Savage story is rough and unpolished as a chunk of concrete. So early in the 181-issue run of Doc Savage Magazine, the prose is at its most pulpy and bloated and stilted, the characterizations of Doc and his crew not fully formed. Doc, in fact, far from being the merciful do-gooder who would avoid killing at almost any cost, is a dreadnaught of violence. Granted, Doc has just seen his beloved mentor disintegrated by the vile Smoke of Eternity.So it's a crude adventure. And yet ... there's frickin' dinosaurs!Doc and the boys eventually find themselves at a hidden island near New Zealand that, cloaked by cloud-cover, teems with reptilian mostrosities. Fun as hell, though it takes wading through some woody prose to get there."The Land of Terro... morer" has a special place in my heart because it was the first Doc Savage novel I ever read, my 15-year-old eyes bugging out when I saw those dinosaurs on the book rack. Love at first sight and forever.
review 2: Let's face it...most pulp fiction was not great literature. There are clearly exceptions, but they are indeed exceptions. And serial literature is less likely to be great. If you're looking for that in Doc Savage...you're looking in the wrong place. What you are going to get is page-turning adventure. This was the second published Doc super-saga. Lester Dent and company were still finding their footing. There is, perforce, a lot of repetition. As a publisher, every issue of Doc Savage was likely someone's first issue. So you had to introduce the characters, their idiosyncrasies and their dynamics in each issue. And as this was very early on the characters are still settling in to their roles. This is a significantly more bloodthirsty Doc than we'll see in times to come. This one also has the writing ticks that are either endearing or exasperating depending on your perspective. Every time that someone "ejaculates" an excited utterance...there is probably going to have to be a titter. Doc's training regimen, particularly with regard to his auditory and olfactory senses is pretty darn silly. In this saga, Doc and the boys end up in a Burroughsian Lost World complete with dinosaurs and giant mammals coexisting (in a very small ecosystem) and a carnivorous stegosaurus. It's early on. This is admittedly a fairly weak early entry. But in the best of pulp fashion, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. less

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