Sunday, September 11, 2011

The Big Book Of Adventure Stories!

Rafael DeSoto

I might've bought the last book I'll need for a while yesterday. The Big Book of Adventure Stories from Random House's Black Lizard label is a big ass book (874 very large pages) filled with some very intriguing stories from a rather broad spectrum of sources and writers.

The classics are well represented with stories by H.G.Wells, Rudyard Kipling, O.Henry, and Jack London. There's high adventure stories by Talbot Mundy, H. Rider Haggard, and Harold Lamb. There's sweet science fiction by Ray Cummings, Damon Knight, and Phillip Nowlan. There are westerns by Louis L'Amour and Johnston McCauley. And there's sword and/or sorcery by Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and Fritz Leiber. There's pulpy shorts by Sax Rohmer, Lester Dent, and Cornell Woolrich. There's even a bit of a spoof by Phillip Jose Farmer. These are names to conjur with and there's a bunch more in this giant paperback tome.

The entire Edgar Rice Burrough's novel Tarzan the Terrible is included. We get Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Conan the Barbarian, Zorro, Buck Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and even King Kong.

This is big entertainment. I'm most eager to read Ray Cummings' "The Girl from the Golden Atom", a seminal science fiction adventure. But Phillip Farmer's King Kong postscript tale is also high on the list. Richard Connell's classic "The Most Dangerous Game" is a story I'm currently teaching at school, and it's here too. There's a lot to choose from.

I like the heft of this book, and I love the look of the pages. I recommend it.

Here's a gallery of covers for some of the stories in this massive collection.











And finally the cover art for this volume by Rafael DeSoto comes from this 1961 issue of Adventure.


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2 comments:

  1. "After Kong Fell" is superb. You will love it.
    Is "Yank Who Became an Island God" included?
    'Cause I want to know how how i can end up in a situation like THAT!

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  2. Nope. They only lifted the neat cover by DeSoto.

    As for the situation? Yeah boy!

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