Book Review: The Forgotten Realm (Doc Savage)

The Forgotten Realm by Kenneth Robeson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Before there were superheroes, there was Doc Savage. The Man of Bronze and his five assistants encountered amazing adventures in bizarre forgotten lands. They're explorers and they're adventures. The Savage books represent a high point of men's adventures.

The Forgotten Realm begins when a man known only Xman escapes from a Scottish insane asylum. Quickly, we finds our heroes starting a wild journey in England that will lead them into the heart of Africa where they'll encounter Pygmies and Ancient Roman legions. Are they going back in time? The mystery abounds.

Overall, this was just a superb men's adventure book. While it was completed by Will Murray in the 1990s, it has a real period feel to it and manages to capture the Spirit of the original.

The plot is just a wild ride of plane crashes, gas bombs, sea battles, gladiatorial fights, mystery, impersonations. It's perfectly paced and a ton of fun.

This book features only three of Doc's fabulous five assistant but that seems to work here. In both my previous encounters with the Man of Bronze in Showcase Presents: Doc Savage and in the radio version, it felt like there were too many characters to get in. Here, they strike the balance with Ham and Monk, each other's continual foils added to the verbose Johnny Littlejohn to make the action complete.

If you want to press it, I'm suppose you can find problems with the book like whether the place they went to truly didn't keep track of time, or whether it was really necessary to refer to Ham as "the dapper lawyer" every time he was described. But this is a book that's really meant to be enjoyed not analyzed and man it definitely did its job.



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