Just a Little Savage Thursday, April 24, 2008

Longtime readers (Mom?) know that I've been complaining about the state of sci-fi forever--it's too serious, it's too dark, it doesn't have the oomph of the old cheeseball stuff. Last week, I put my money where my blog was and bought some Doc Savage reprints--and returned them after about thirty pages.

There's cheese and then there's cheese. Lovecraft stories are practically wheels of brie, but he knew how to craft language and deliver genuine scares, even seventy years on. He also find a way to stuff huge ideas into his stories without making them unworkable messes.

With the good doctor, there is absolutely nothing going on under the surface: The story is exactly as dimwitted and hamfisted as it sounds. Plus you never have the sense that Lester Dent is in control of his prose. Every last paragraph has an awkward construction or overwritten line that takes you out of the moment--the kind of stuff we used to pass around for laughs at the high-school magazine. Plus the characters all sound the same, plus the stuff about autogyros and lantern-jawed heroes is much funnier in theory, plus plus plus.

I can see why this stuff was revolutionary, and why it's such a great template for everything from the Fantastic Four to Buckaroo Banzai. But it just doesn't hold up. For literary thrills, you'd get more out of Mack Bolan.

@ 5:13:00 PM,

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