Customer Reviews

Allan and the Ice Gods (Dodo Press)

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Victorian explorer Allan Quatermain experiences memories of a previous, prehistoric incarnation. If this book were written today it'd fit right in with the New Age Noodle crowd who like to do regressions to their previous lives, besides the usual Heroic Fantasy readers who know a bang-up adventure tale when they read one.

This is the last of the 14 Allan Quatermain novels that H. Rider Haggard wrote, and completes the loosely linked quartet that began with "Allan and the Holy Flower," continued into "The Ivory Child" and then "The Ancient Allan." (A reading of these earlier books is recommended before going into this one.) In this final book, Quatermain again partakes of the taduki drug, as he did in the previous two novels, and gets to see a previous incarnation of his--when he was Wi, the leader of a small tribe during one of the Ice Ages. The story is simply written but zips along at a brisk pace. There are several terrific action set pieces: Wi's fight with Henga, the previous chief of the tribe; the trapping of the wolf pack; the fight with the sabertooth; the battle with the Redbeards; the showdown with the aurochs; and the final cataclysm. The members of the tribe are sharply and sometimes humorously drawn. (Rudyard Kipling helped Haggard with the planning of this novel.) All in all, I really enjoyed this book, and thank Pulp Fictions UK for bringing it back into print. The great bulk of Haggard's work is currently OUT of print, and that is a real shame...