I’m normally not one to read westerns. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I have found some western stories to be great reads, it’s just not my enjoyable genre of choice.
So why did I pick this one up? First, it mentions the Anasazi. Since my Scouting days, I’ve had a bit of interest in the Native Americans and their beliefs. The Anasazi are a mystery similar to Roanoke. It’s a real mystery and I’m a writer, it’s natural I’d find it intriguing.
Just the fact that the book has a major focus on the Anasazi disappearance was enough to get me to pick it up. As I read it, things got even more interesting because it was obviously touching on the quantum realm. With my other interest of paranormal and supernatural (as shown in the Oddish Questor series), this became more exciting. Was the great western writer going to write a story about other worlds? Maybe touch a bit on Asimov genre territory?
Well, he does, but not quite enough. This is a long book. The hardback probably was close to 600 pages. And this brings up my problem with this story.
If you’ve not enjoyed Stephen King or J.R.R. Tolkien because you think they drag on with too much unnecessary words and description, then you won’t enjoy this book. There were entire chapters that did absolutely nothing to progress the story and could be skipped completely without changing anything. Most of these were repeating things that were thought and said in previous chapters. Made the story drag on.
And then the quantum part where they travel through a portal to another world. Very little of interest for my imagination and it was the shortest part of the story. I give L’Amour some leeway here because he’s a western writer, so he can’t be expected to create a scientific travel to another world in the way the many sci-fi authors have already done it.
If you like L’Amour, you will probably enjoy this one. Maybe not if you don’t like sci-fi also. It’s a good enough story, but not sure I’d recommend it often, even if I’d tell you it was enjoyable. <shrug> What can I say?
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Haunted Mesa – Louis L’Amour
I’m normally not one to read westerns. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I have found some western stories to be great reads, it’s just not my enjoyable genre of choice. So why did I pick this one up? First, it mentions the Anasazi. Since my Scouting days, I’ve had a bit of interest in the…
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Dragonlance – Dragons of Deceit
Dragonlance. That is the title of one of my all time favorite series. My aunt gave me Dragons of Autumn Twilight for my 16th birthday and little did I know it would be the best present I ever received from her. This book clicked with me like very few books ever had. And the follow up books in the series were just as exciting. Not only did I re-read them multiple times, many of my friends borrowed the book to read it. We wore that copy out (it fell apart) and I had to replace it with a newer edition. Sadly, the newer one didn’t have the Larry Elmore cover – which are so cool. Anyway – they didn’t stop there. Many other authors wrote Dragonlance stories – along with the original authors, Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. I read almost all of them, but the Weiss/Hickman books were always the best. And the 2009 they stopped publishing Dragonlance books. Sad times indeed. But wait – every good story needs a twist or surprise ending. So guess what?! Several years ago, they published new Dragonlance books. And not only was there a new series – it was written by Weiss […]
