Thyra: A romance of the polar pit (Lost race and adult fantasy fiction) [Unknown Binding]

Robert Ames Bennet (Author)

Book Description

Series: Lost race and adult fantasy fiction | Publication Date: 1978

Robert Ames Bennet (1870-1954), who also wrote as Lee Robinet, was an American western and science fiction writer. Several of his novels were made into films. He was the author of: Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit (1901), For the White Christ (1905), A Volunteer With Pike (1909), Out of the Primitive (1911), The Forest Maiden (1914), The Bowl of Baal (1917), The Blond Beast (1918), Bloom of Cactus (1919), The Two-Gun Man (1924) and Caught in the Wild (1932).

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Unknown Binding: 258 pages
• Publisher: Arno Press (1978)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0405109571
• ISBN-13: 978-0405109577
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,038,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Classic of the Genre", July 20, 2007

By 

Darius M. Klein "Still you ought not to think... (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thyra: A romance of the polar pit (Lost race and adult fantasy fiction)

"A Classic of the Genre" is how Jessica Salmonsen has described this work. Robert Ames Bennet was primarily a writer of Westerns, but also wrote two Lost Race romances, one of which is "Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit". The plot concerns a group of explorers who fly in a balloon to the North Pole, where they discover, via an opening, that the earth is indeed hollow. Once inside the earth they encounter Viking and Neanderthal communities, along with survivals of Mesozoic megafauna. "Thyra" manages to intertwine the Utopian Lost Race and Lost World subgenres into a single, action-packed plot which never meanders or digresses. The first Viking community upon which the heroes stumble after they enter the bowels of the Earth (and where they find the eponymous heroine) is an unlikely Christian-Socialist Utopia. As they penetrate further into the Earth's interior, they encounter those Vikings who have given themselves over to idolatry and human sacrifice, along with a community of stereotypically aggressive and bestial Neanderthals. At the novel's climax, they have a perilous close encounter with some demonic prehistoric reptiles in the Hela Pool (a particularly well-written scene). The copy of this work which I obtained is a photocopy of the microfilm of the original 1901 edition, which has delightfully quaint illustrations; I don't know if they have been reproduced in the "Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Fiction" series' edition. Mr. Bennet's other Lost Race Romance, "The Bowl of Baal", also combines Lost Race and Lost World motifs, and is recommended here. Of the two, however, "Thyra" is the better.