Customer Reviews

Scarlet Riders

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Not a bad anthology. Hugh B. Cave's "White Water Run" is really good, exciting and twisty; John Starr's "Phantom Fangs" is good as well; and a few of the other pieces are worth reading.

Frederick Nebel (whose works I usually love) is represented by a pretty bad story, "The Valley of Wanted Men", in which two Mounties investigating a murder discover a hidden settlement of criminals governed by a mysterious "Master". They and two other guys win a wildly improbably gun battle against thirty criminals, rescue the two maidens (with whom the Mounties have fallen instantly in love), unmask the Master (who is masquerading as a Jesuit missionary), marry the girls, and live happily ever after. The writing, unusually for Nebel, is kind of pedestrian; the plot is ridiculous.

But the worst piece in the book is "The Frozen Phantom" by Lester Dent. It's not only bad, it's unspeakably, horribly bad. A Mountie is sent to investigate a place where some people have sighted a "flame maiden" and others have gone insane; which would be OK, but the writing is appalling, almost unreadably so, and the plot is utterly stupid both in its general outline and in its details. Absurdities abound; for instance, it turns out the people are going mad because they've been locked for hours in a box made of pitchblende bricks, and the radium has destroyed their minds.