The Shaver Mystery Book Four!

The Shaver Mystery Book Four offers up three rather different tales set in and around Richard Shaver's gobsmacking underworld. These are pulp stories first and foremost, so a reader must grade them on that standard. The emphasis is on plot, though to be fair to Shaver he does carve out some decent heroes to carry the weight of the stories. 

"Cave City of Hel" offers up more Norse mythology reimagined for a modern audience. Shaver sets up the story by suggesting it originated from a manuscript from an eye witness, an attempt to push the notion that all the Shaver Mystery tales are true or based on truth. The story is set in Hel, a city beneath the surface of Norway. Norway at the time was still under the occupation of the Nazis and our hero heads underground to escape their attentions. He finds Hel and the source of many of our Norse legends to boot. As most of the Shaver heroes do, he finds a romance in the from of a woman named Tanee. It's not giving anything away to say they lived happily ever after. Getting to that point is the story. 

"The Mind Rovers" is one of the strangest of Shaver's stories I've read so far. This one begins in a remote prison and our heroes are the prisoners themselves. They discover that they can escape the prison in their dreams and proceed to do so. They find a weird landscape filled with strange threats and women that grow on trees literally. The prisoners organize and then form an army to turn the tables on the corrupt officials who run the prison and other institutions which use people for profits. Shaver is said to have spent time in an asylum and this story suggests to me that he imagines the whole system of institutionalization is a vast conspiracy against the common man. 

"Earth Slaves to Space" is a direct sequel to "The Masked World" (see volume three). Our assembled heroes from that story, having put down the dictator that ruled their underground city with a corrupt iron fist, are caught unawares when some of his allies bring in Amazons from the depths of space to take them all into slavery. Apparently slavery is a big thing, and people are lured down from our modern surface world and they too are enslaved. The whole gang head into space to distant planets where they see many different races, but all are to sold. Our heroes manage to remain together for the most part and some even escape ultimately turning the tables on the cruel Amazons. 

The stories are brisk reads, wild rides into the imagination of a guy who for all his many literary failings knows how to cook up a yarn. 

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