March to Other Worlds Day 24 The Valley of Despair by Chris L. Adams
March to Other Worlds Day 24 The Valley of Despair by Chris L. Adams
Chris L. Adams has a talent for writing books that feel like they were crafted by some of the masters writing in the first half of the twentieth century, but read like they were written today. The result are novels that feel like lost works by people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. That’s who I think of when I read The Valley of Despair, which was recently reissued as a fabulous audiobook narrated by William L. Hahn.
Adams starts with a bang. His hero, German WWI pilot Erik von Mendelsohn, has crashed in the jungle and is trying to survive a group of apes that have taken the wrong kind of interest in him. Desperate to escape, he reaches the edge of the jungle near a high cliff face and the apes who are in hot pursuit…refuse to follow him past the tree line. It’s a simple idea very subtly conveyed in the story, but it set all the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. These totally aggressive and fearsome animals won’t follow our hero as he attempts to climb the cliff face to get away from them. It’s difficult not to ask yourself—what are the apes afraid of? What the heck is Erik getting himself into? And the tension just keeps ratcheting higher from this point forward.
Erik is a well thought out character—he’s smart, a bit impulsive, and a little too curious for his own good. The supporting cast is equally interesting. I don’t want to give away the plot, but the people Erik finds and gets into trouble with are equally brave and capable—and the problem they have to confront is better thought out than a lot of “lost world” adventure-style stories I’ve encountered. In short, if you want a fast-paced well-developed adventure story with great characters, you should give Valley of Despair a try.
Now that you’ve decided to give The Valley of Despair a try, you should really consider listening to it in audio format. It’s a short book, so it’s very inexpensive, but a good narrator (and Will Hahn is one of the best) and a few sound effects go the extra mile to really bring this book to life.
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Valley-Despair...
Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Valley...
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