The Secret Origin Of Skull Island!

Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland have spent two decades now revising and expanding the long back history of Skull Island, that isolated forgotten little island where Carl Denham and company chanced upon the mighty King Kong. In the movie and resulting novelization we only know Skull Island in the modern world, when the natives on the island have become a small-minded society of relatively few individuals seeking to survive in a nightmarish environment for humans unlike any on the planet. 

But the question always lingers for the viewer or reader about how this culture came to be on this impossible island. In the books King Kong Skull Island Exodus and King Kong Skull Island The Wall we find out.

The two paperbacks are reprints of King Kong of Skull Island, a larger hardback book DeVito and company created with crowdfunding sources. This book is now a rarity, but the two paperbacks are readily available even as I scribble these words. But what is the story? Well without spoiling the rather exciting details let me expound a few moments. 

The first volume begins with a trim novel version of the story first told in 2004 in Kong King of Skull Island. That story took the novel presented and wrapped it in some additional material detailing aspects of Skull Island in the times after King Kong had been removed. The core novel like its predecessor introduces us to Carl Denham's son Vincent who in 1957 begins a trek back to Skull Island with Jack Driscoll's assistance to find out just what happened. King Kong has melted into myth and urban and legend and Carl Denham has been missing for over two decades. Vincent needs answers and he finds them thanks to a very old woman called the "Storyteller" who fills him in. 

In the new material here (half the first volume and all of the second) we learn even more about the history of the people of Skull Island who call themselves the Tagatu. We learn that long ago the Tagatu was a mighty culture akin to that in Egypt in potential power, but which was all but wiped out when a mighty volcano demolished their valley. These folks had wise forward-looking leaders who prepared, and a great voyage was undertaken by the survivors to a little place called Skull Island. The Tagatu think they can master this terrifying territory because of their mastery of organic information which gives them protections against most animals and the fact that their culture works in harmony with giant intelligent ape-like creatures called Kongs. With the power of the Kongs they feel confident they can hold their own against any saurian threat. They learn the threat is much more ghastly than they imagined.

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