From Pellucidar to Spain, with points in between: books

BACK TO THE STONE AGE by Edgar Rice Burroughs catches us up on Lt. Von Horst who got separated from Jason Gridley’s expedition in the previous book. In the opening he’s captured by a flying monstrosity that paralyzes him, then leaves him in its nest as food for when its young hatch out. It’s one of the creepiest scenes ERB ever wrote.After that it’s fun but more familiar as “Von” struggles to survive while protecting the cave-woman he winds up traveling with, even though she does think of him as Obnoxious and Irritating. Still, Von is an unusually snarky Burroughs protagonist and I can’t resist a story that remakes Androcles and the Lion but with a wooly mammoth. One odd detail, though, is a tribe that appears to be souls of surface-world murderers condemned to Pellucidar. That’s a very un-Burroughs concept and the only hint of the supernatural in the hollow earth.

MOVING PICTURES by Katherine Immonen and Stuar Immonen is a graphic novel concerning two 1930s sisters who trade places; one of them leaves France, the other winds up under interrogation by the Nazis hunting the paintings she may have hidden. This got a lot of good reviews but it didn’t interest me at all.

Nor could I get into DOWN DAYS by Ilze Hugo, a novel set in South Africa after it’s been devastated by a strange, laughing disease. Hugo writes well but I couldn’t get more than a few chapters in. I’m not sure why.

KILL THREE BIRDS: A Kingdom of Aves Mystery by Nicole Givens Kurtz (whom I’ve met at cons but this is still a sincere review) is a fantasy mystery set in an African culture where castes divide along bird lines: vultures handle death and funerals, doves lead the faith, eagles enforce order, hawks have the true sight that solves crime). The protagonist, Hawk Prentice, arrives in a small community after a murder and despite the assurances Such Things Don’t Happen Here discovers the root cause lies in the victim’s tangled family (to my relief, the issue wasn’t incest). The identity of the killer was fairly obvious but the setting and the characters were interesting enough that I didn’t mind.

In the 1930s, after Spain elected a leftist government, two generals went to war to overthrow the government and put fascists into power. TOMORROW PERHAPS THE FUTURE: Writers, Outsiders and the Spanish Civil War by Sarah Watling looks at various English and American women who got involved in the war as photographers, reporters, nurses or simply polemicists including Jessica Mitford, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and African-American nurse Salaria Kea.

This approach gives a good perspective on the women and the international interest in the war: left-wingers saw a chance to fight fascism, fascists saw a chance to create an ally, the U.S. and most non-fascist governments backed off rather than support a left-wing, communist-inclusive government. Unfortunately it proves an awkward approach for telling the history of the war as none of the women were at key events such as the Guernica bombing. Watling also gets pretentious whenever she muses about the role of the artist in such events. Worth the reading even so.

#SFWApro. Cover by Roy Krenkel, all rights remain with current holder