The Blind Spot

Blind Spot #1

by Austin Hall

This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it in the way the author intended. Since the original versions are generally quite old, there may occasionally be certain imperfections within these reproductions. We're happy to make these classics available again for future generations to enjoy!

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Pulp, Classics

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1921

About the author

Austin Hall (c.1885 – 1933) was an American short story writer and novelist. He began writing when, while working as a cowboy, he was asked to write a story. He wrote westerns, science fiction and fantasy for pulp magazines.

(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Warren Fournier · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am of two minds with this novel just as there are two authors. This weird classic of Radium Age Science Fiction was developed by the collaboration of two friends working in a shoe store, each who wrote approximately half of the book somewhat independently rather than seamlessly meshing their ideas into a cohesive story. Hence, you have a very bipolar work of fantasy that just doesn't quite know what it wants to be.

The first half of the novel is a slow burn of creepy paranormal phenomena in an old house and meandering mysterious characters that really invokes a feeling of awe and wonder like William Hope Hodgson and Arthur C. Clark. The second half is much more straightforward adventure and fantasy narrative, complete with airships and ray guns, villains dressed in Romanesque armor and wise ones clad in robes, bubble-shaped dwellings in vast alien metropolises under an inverse night sky where the stars are black and the rest a glowing silver.

I much prefer the first 17 chapters. Other reviews have commented that these can be hard for the reader to get through, but I found it to be more engaging for me because of the feelings of mystery and a sense that something beyond nature as we know it was leaking into our reality. It was chilling and set up a really interesting scifi premise. A professor mysteriously disappears on the day he was to give a groundbreaking lecture on the occult while at the same time an elegant stranger named Rhamda Avec arrives looking for a magic ring. This ring is the key to opening a portal into another dimension, the Blind Spot, which seems to center in the parlor of an old Victorian mansion. It seems whoever wears this ring gradually has their lifeforce sucked out slowly and hideously over 6 months. How is all this connected?

Then comes the pulp sensibilities, complete with BOLD-FACED emphases and many sentences polished off with an exclamation mark à la Edmond Hamilton. The mystery disappears and now the reader is thrown into a pretty generic sci-fi fantasy world that we've seen before in Edgar Rice Burroughs adventures.

Now normally there is nothing wrong with this amount of variety in a novel, but the execution here is jarring. I didn't find the second half to adequately satisfy my curiosity built up earlier in the book. Not only that, but the second half starred a protagonist, Chick Watson, who played an important role but was not featured prominently in the first part of the novel. Therefore, the reader had to abruptly stop investing in the previous protagonists, Harry and Hobart, who were an interesting couple, no doubt based on the real relationship between the authors.

Chick Watson is a bore. He prances around arrogantly in an alternate universe after passing through the Blind Spot when the ring drains almost all of his energy. When he arrives on the other side, he remains in a coma for 11 months. When he wakes up, most people take him for a visitor from the spirit world, but one dashing priest is smitten with Chick's muscular and athletic physique and challenges him to hand-to-hand combat. Chick accepts this challenge confidently, as he had never lost any athletic competition before. The guy was an emaciated mess hanging out in burlesque bars and getting smashed on brandy in the first half, and now he is a superhero after an 11-month coma? I can suspend my disbelief as much as any scifi and fantasy fan, but this kind of thing is just insulting.

The structure of the novel is as bizarre as its contents. Going from a first person account by Harry, then to a real-time transcription of a recorded message, to testimony from Harry's girlfriend Charlotte, to another first-person narrative from Hobart's point of view to yet another first person narrative from someone else, to the first-person retelling of a story from Chick Watson, to an abrupt shift to "Editor" commentary, to third-person omniscient narration.

Whew! Couldn't they have just written the whole book in third-person omniscient?

Another pet peeve of mine is overuse of a literary device, and in this case, both authors share blame for the same violations of delayed gratification and promised payoff. Some character always has a secret or key to a mystery, and when others try to get some resolution, they and the reader are told, "Not yet," or "I will tell you all you wish to know, but first..." or "There's no time for explanations now," or "You are unable to handle the truth," or "Let's go into another room first." This drags things on and on needlessly. Even in the last 10 percent of the book, this is done THREE TIMES IN ONE PAGE! I mean, forget it! I don't want to know anymore!

It doesn't spoil anything to say that the end does provide some interesting conjecture regarding the afterlife and the possibilities of endless realities between the spaces of the atom, but it is crammed in the last two pages and really wasn't worth the wait. The rest of the end was just as rushed, with many interesting characters who had been built up in the beginning literally disappearing from the plot. Most unforgivable was that Rhamda Avec, the mysterious man from another world who seemed to be the prime mover of events in the first half, is never seen again in the second, so ultimately this interesting character's arc just ended midstream. Perhaps the authors were setting these characters up for an appearance in a sequel, and Austin Hall did go on to make a second book, but that is one I will likely not bother reading.

So what a disappointment. This thing started off strong for me and promised an intelligent, mind-blowing piece of weird fiction with homoerotic undertones and devolved into a poorly written kid's adventure. Normally, I'd enjoy the wrestling matches and ray guns as much as a Lovecraftian eldritch metaphysical speculation. But both of these elements clashed head-on and splintered the whole novel into an incomprehensible and unsatisfying mess.

[John Peel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd one, a collaboration between two authors - and you can tell. The first one (Flint) wrote the first 17 chapters and then the rest of the book was finished by his friend Austin Hall. It's odd because they have utterly distinct styles, so the book abruptly changes. Flint is verbose and mystical, setting up the mystery, and Hall is direct and detailed, as he sets out the solution. It's possibly the first parallel Earth story (it was written in 1920), where a house stands on the border of this world and one completely different. A group of friends are drawn into the quest to find a missing professor who crossed into what he called The Blind Spot. If you can last the first 17 chapters (and it's tough), the resolution is actually quite nice.

[Leothefox · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first thing I'll say about this book is that there's a lot of it. It consists of “accounts” from several narrators and spans nearly 350 pages, which is longer than my standard fare. For all its faults, it does read pretty well and pretty much delivers the goods in the end.

The story is a sort of science-fiction mystery concerning the disappearance of a professor and several others through a dimensional portal in a San Francisco house. The portal is the “blind spot” of the title and the characters spend the bulk of the story trying to solve its mystery.

I'm a little in the dark for background on this since the story seems to have fallen into obscurity, but I suspect that in 1921 it was a very early writing on dimensional portals and the like. There wasn't anything too horribly dated at work here (although I'd have been fine if it had been), and none of the cliches were too jarring.

My only real complaints are the straight science-fiction approach threw cold water on some of the dramatic or atmospheric potential of the story and that the changing narrators tend to be guilty of the same mannered word choices. All things considered, I don't regret it.

[Love of Hopeless Causes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Probably awesome in its day. Forry Ackerman says, "The most famous fantastic novel of all time." So famous it just made it to ebook two years ago and I'm the first review of the paperback. Between that and his quote about Metropolis I think Forrest doth let his tongue wag flatteringly too much. I gave it the old, non-college try: in fact several tries. It's a slow starter that bogs down--the way any dated Sci-fi story does--unless it has some compelling feature. I confess time travel stories just don't work for me as an adult. The exception is the movie, Primer which was so good I could suspend disbelief: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_.... Don't let the jacket sell you.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic work of science fiction, Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint wrote this book together. The Blind Spot is a place where two dimensions meet. The mystery is compelling, the science contemplative, and the characterizations attractive. Highly recommended.

[César Bustíos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this better than I remember doing in college, but it still fails (the 3 stars is for the good parts).
A prominent philosopher/scientist disappears before giving his big theory on how the occult and supernatural are within the grasp of science. His friends discover it involves a strange house in San Francisco, a mysterious ring and the enigmatic Rhamda Avec. Can they crack the mystery and find him?
This makes for an enjoyable book (YMMV for the style and tone of a century-old SF novel). But then we follow one minor character through the Blind Spot of the title to another world. What should have been A. Merritt-class eerie is instead a generic lost race adventure with little to recommend it. I started skimming. A shame.

[Lynette Caulkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting book. The free LibriVox audiobook edition is well narrated.

[Ali · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a science-fiction story about an interdimensional doorway between 2 worlds. Originally published as a 6 part series in the magazine Argosy in 1921 and later as a book. I initially found it difficult to become absorbed in the story as the plot was slow. Others will find what I thought to be slow was actually wonderous and philosophical. However I did like one of the main characters view that it is humans that make infinity finite, that we only perceive the world as it is with 5 senses and that the possibility that there is so much more is endless. I would not recommend this book unless the reader loves philosophical sci-fi. Great for its time though!!

[Apryl Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember reading this and loving it 20yrs ago. Okay, I like the hinting at the music of the spheres, and the image of the June Bug was retro fun. This could be a really hip movie. I got some good ideas from it for my own writing, otherwise, this wasn't worth my time.

Read it again January 2019: Retro fun, yes, that describes it. Other than that, it was just too frantic. It's as if the spark of several great ideas started heating up and then fizzled away.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorite science fiction novels.

[bluetyson]

The Blind Spot by Austin Hall (2000)

[bluetyson]

The Blind Spot by Homer Eon Flint (2000)

[Hclann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book considering when it was written, sci if, metaphysical concepts.

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting early 20th century metaphysical fantasy/scifi but a bit long for its ultimate impact.