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May 03, 2007
Pulp Review: Doc Savage Resurrection Day
Ahhh Doc Savage. Now here's some serious All-American heroic action. Strangely enough I'd never read any Doc Savage before this one, although my friend Joe had a copy of Philip Jose Farmer's book about Doc Savage, Doc Savage, His Apocalyptic Life, which is a kind of fake biography/sourcebook thing which we all thought was very cool at the time.
So Resurrection Day is my first Doc Savage tale and, unlike last week's review of The Living Shadow, this is not the first book in the series by any means. Indeed, it's pretty much a random reprint that happened to be the first one I bought and read because I liked the premise. So what I say here may not be representative of Lester Dent's writing at all - I'll let you know when I've read some more. This particular story is one of two collected in the super-cool pulp-sized reprint from Nostalgia Ventures, who's also doing some awesome reprints of Shadow and Doc pulps with the original artwork. Very cool, cool things and I suggest you buy them all.
So what's up with Resurrection Day? Well, basically, Doc being the super-scientist that he is, has spent some of his down time over the past decade perfecting a concoction that can raise one person from the dead. It was incredibly hard to make and so he wants to make sure he'll give this wondrous gift of life to the right person. So, he announces his discovery to the world and leaves it to a panel of politicians and scholars to make the final decision, which I thought was pretty cool of him. Meanwhile, the evil yet down on his luck General Ino has his own nefarious plans for the resurrection drug and wants to steal it of course.
General Ino is an interesting villain - very much in the mold of a criminal mastermind, he has a strange habit of talking in many different accents for no particular reason. His right hand man is a sort of nervous lawyer who, when things get rough, has a psychopathic need to cut people's heads off. Ino himself is quite ruthless, sacrificing minions without a second thought.
Doc Savage is pretty much pure hero - better at everything than everyone else. Smarter, stronger, a better fighter, a better scientist. His five companions are all experts in their own fields, from Law to Chemistry to Archeology, but Doc seems their equal in each. I'll be curious to read more about these five companions, since from this one reading they're very hit or miss. Sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying. Sometimes advancing the plot, sometimes bogging it down. The wee jury in my brain is still out on them.
There is some crazy/cool technology in the story. Doc and his men have machine pistols that can fire different kinds of bullets, including ones that somehow stun rather than kill or, at the opposite extreme, ones that explode with the power of a grenade. Lester Dent (writing as Kenneth Robeson) plays pretty fast and loose with the science. At one point when he's going of into the desert, Doc takes a pill that while being water, contains all the chemicals the body needs from water. Right. No that doesn't make any sense at all. Nor do the similar pills that work the same way, but with air. But hey, that's nitpicking. It's a fun, exciting read and some great twists (a great pulp has to have great twists). Early on when General Ino's getting the better of Doc, he comes up with some pretty nasty surprises. The book ends a little prematurely, and I suspect Dent was running up against his word limit, but overall it's a satisfying pulp hero tale (although I prefer The Shadow still).
I'm done with Fantomas, so that'll be the next pulp review. Right now I'm reading Some Operator 5, which is an exciting change of pace. More pulpeteering next week.
Posted by rdakan at May 3, 2007 02:53 PM