Customer Reviews

Beasts of Valhalla

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This was the first Mongo novel I read. I picked a copy of it up at a used bookstore. They also had copies of City of Whispering Stone and An Affair of Sorcerers. I bought them all and decided to read this one first. I literally read all night because I had to finish it. I had never read such a bizarre, yet captivating story. Needless to say, I was totally hooked on Mongo and read the other two books I had bought and went in search of the others. Much to my dismay, most were out of print, so I scoured every used bookstore I could find until I had every novel. I even grabbed a couple of the Chant novels and some of the other books by Mr. Chesbro.

Of all the books, this continues to be my favorite and I've read it several times. Buy them all!

Here's a book that defies classification -- one of the most singular, entertaining novels you'll come across, concerning Mongo the dwarf detective and his hulking brother Garth. It begins a sequence of four novels that stands pretty much alone in mystery or SF, incredibly smart, stylish, weird, with characters you care deeply about undergoing the ultimate transformation, from man to animal to messiah. Read it, then try recommending it to your friends without sounding insane.

The Beasts of Valhalla by George C. Chesbro, is one of the best books ever written in the mystery genre. Basically, all of GCC's books are excellent, but this one is the best! Eerily prophetic, and timely, this book is proto x-files all the way. A must read! Also checkout "Shadow of a Broken Man." Another great novel.

For some reason, I tend to read George Chesbro by accident. My first was An Affair of Sorcerors, which I thought would be a straightforward occult story, and which turned out to be something much more intriguing. In truth, his stories refuse to be easily classified, as one might expect when the hero is a Mongo Frederickson, ex-circus midget, acrobat, and currently a professor of criminology. For all this, Mongo is a tough and shrewd investigator with a knack for getting dragged into mysteries that threaten everyone's peace of mind.

Archangel takes place just after the Valhalla crisis and reveals both Mongo and his brother Garth still having trouble getting their minds around the ramifications of that case. Veil Kendry is a friend of Mongo's who was once a cold-blooded killer - and is now a combination artist and street vigilante. The artist has vanished from his studio leaving Mongo a new painting and $10,000 in cash.

Gradually it becomes clear that Veil has vanished to take action against an old enemy, and has left Mongo with clues spread all over the U.S. and Southeast Asia. Veil was a CIA operative in Viet Nam and Laos during the savage, waning years of that conflict, and what he had seen and done at that time has become a threat to a megalomaniac murderer who will stop at nothing to keep his hands on the lines of power.

In almost no time at all, Mongo has discovered enough to endanger the lives of both him and his brother. Death seems to be treading on their heels, but the more Mongo discovers the more determined he becomes to put a stop to a horror that began 25 years previously.

Chesbro is really at his best in this book. Mongo's determination, Garth's anger as both their hunter and the artist, and the fierce loyalty Veil Kendry seems to command from both his fellow soldiers and the Hmong that he lived with for several years, all this comes to life in a plot which takes one twist after another. From dark beginnings to a shocking ending Chesbro keeps the reader's attention by never letting up. This is a good a starting point as any, although, the events of The Beasts of Valhalla figure in this book enough to making Beasts a better starting point.

Perhaps the pinnacle of this enigmatic author's catalog. Mongo feints superiority, explores crossover venues, and supplants most other heroes in his successful attempt to win the west, get the girl of unresolved purpose, and strike a blow for nebulous
passions. Combining fantasy with sci-fi like an aged bottle of scotch, Chesbro clearly makes his mark in this genre gone mad.
A must read from a man of mystery, passionate elongations, and malevolent phone calls.

This is perhaps my favorite work of fiction ever. Chesbro is very good at writing an entertaining story and cleverly weaving in social commentary. Beyond that the stories are original, even this book which was inspired by The Lord of the Rings trilogy is completely beyond comparison. There is just nothing else like this book out there. If you have never read "A Mongo Mystery" before, start with this one.

All of Chesbro's "Mongo" books have a quality that make them impossible to pigeonhole. This one combines all the characteristics that make the Mongo books so engrossing and irresistible. The matter-of-fact dialog between Mongo and his brother Garth, about the most outrageous situations, made me laugh out loud. There's a bad guy who has a vision of how to save the world through reverse genetic engineering. Many of the story ideas have shown up in other media AFTER this book, including Star Trek: the Next Generation, Jurrassic Park, and X-Files. Treat yourself and read this book.

"You into fantasy?"
"You mean sword and sorcery stuff? Not really. I like detective novels. Somebody should write a huge detective saga, like one of those four-volume fantasy mothers."
- Mongo and Zeke (newfangled comp sci colleague)

Although BEASTS is the fourth Mongo novel, it contains significant spoilers for only one of its predecessors, SHADOW OF A BROKEN MAN. While BEASTS can be read first (I did that myself), you'll have more fun reading the two books in sequence. It's more important that BEASTS be read before the novels that follow it, because the events herein having had a profound effect on the characters' lives.

To the best of my recollection, this was my introduction to Mongo Fredrickson. The title caught my attention at the library - I was very interested in mythology - and the initial situation of a couple of young D&D players having been murdered for stumbling across a scenario fully as bizarre as any of their campaigns kept my attention long enough to draw me into the story. (An extremely annoying minor detail is that Chesbro apparently didn't research THE LORD OF THE RINGS much beyond reading THE HOBBIT, while writing Mongo as having read the series.)

Mongo is under considerable stress initially, not only at the loss of his beloved young nephew Tommy to an apparent murder/suicide but at returning for the funeral to the site of his extremely stressful childhood, growing up as a dwarf in Nebraska with an only partially supportive family. After a bit of fence-mending with his sister, Mongo looks into Tommy's death a little to find that matters are not what they seem.

Tommy and his friend Rodney, as two very isolated computer/D&D enthusiasts in the middle of Nebraska, had made friends with a young computer scientist at the neighbouring Volsung Corporation, an agrigenetics outfit that makes arrangements with the local farmers to test new products. The teenagers and the young scientist invented a new game, scoring points by finding real-life counterparts to events and characters from THE LORD OF THE RINGS, until one day Rodney and Tommy wouldn't believe in something Obie claimed to have seen on the job, and demanded that he prove his claim. Soon afterward, the boys were dead, leaving only their journals and computer records behind.

Fortunately (?), an old adversary of Mongo's, the aging sometime-spy Mr. Lippitt, has been assigned as chief of security to the Volsung Corporation as a kind of combined punishment/putting out to pasture assignment. Volsung, unfortunately, is a cover for a set of biological experiments quite unrelated to creating new and improved strains of wheat and not approved by the FDA. Even more unfortunately, humans with some unusual genetic factors - like, say, the Frederickson brothers with Mongo's genes for dwarfism - turn out to be just what the doctor ordered for test subjects, once they manage to survive a somewhat unscientific exposure to some lab materials.

The Loge family, named for the Norse trickster god Loki are introduced in this story. Apparently the mad scientists who slay together stay together; Obie is #1 grandson, while grandpa is a double Nobel laureate and the brightest of the bunch. While Chesbro skimped on his Tolkien research, he seems to have been more thorough in his research into Wagner's RING operas, the Loge family being fanatics on the subject. (Have to be to name a kid Siegfried, let alone Auberich, never mind naming your company after the family name of a Ring character.)

Drive in statistics/content warnings:
- Lost count of the dead bodies.
- No sexual content, except by slander
- Not much kung fu but a lot of violence.
- Multiple mad scientists with funding, including blown-up lab fu, experimental animal fu, Nobel fu, and Wagnerian opera fu. Old man Loge turns out not to have read the Evil Overlord List's advice on how to design illegal labs up to code.

The premise of Chesbro's Mongo series is far-fetched beyond anyone's powers of ridicule. A dwarf martial-arts-expert former circus performer professor of criminology private detective, with a police-brute brother who comes out OK after getting genetic treatment that essentially turns him into a slime mold--a treatment fashioned by a genius/Christ figure preparing to de-evolve and re-evolve humankind in a more sustainable direction.... The Sunday funnies would reject that.

But Chesbro makes it work--he really does. He draws us into suspending disbelief about the starkly non-credible, making it entertaining and even reasonably relevant to political reality. [Political comment: it helps that his villains are extreme conservatives, of whom no caricatures are as a matter of fact weird, incredible, or nasty enough.]

The Beasts of Valhalla may be the key book in the Mongo series: on the one hand, its awful events and plot developments are frequently mentioned in later books. On the other hand, they're mentioned but not really important for understanding the rest of the series. But this book is one of the best by Chesbro, I'd say, and Chesbro occupies a unique place in mystery/sci-fi work.

The edition I read had great cover art and the premise looked really interesting. However, I found it really hard to get through the book. It was just plain badly written. I read it several years ago and I don't recall examples of what I disliked about it. I finished the book because I had nothing else around to read at the time. Bad enough that I've never had any interest in reading other Mongo books.