151h 04/42 The Magic Forest

Posted by on Apr 9, 2002 in 1942, Bantam 145-156, bogart, clark, nanovic, novel, pulp, richardson | 3 comments

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The mysterious disappearance of Renny and a series of tiny grotesquely carved totem poles send Doc and his hard-fisted crew on a deadly race deep into the Alaskan wilds in search of a strange hidden land.


  • gordy Skorseth

    This story grades out at a D + or C – primarily because of the ending. It feels like it was slammed together due to a deadline or word count restrictions. The ending consists of the unrealistic conceit in which Doc performs a special surgical operation on several of the bad guys to make them see the error of their ways and make restitution to the wronged party. Aarrgh. Bad guys are supposed to be slaughtered or put in jail for their crimes. The notion of Doc

  • http://www.thomasfortenberry.net Thomas Fortenberry

    An oddity this one. I liked reading it but didn’t like it. It is fairly well-written, but you can still tell it was by a ghost simply by the slight “off-ness” of the telling.

    The story takes place in the Alaskan wilderness, all fiercely beautiful shores, forests, and glaciers. Gorgeous, dangerous, and reminds me of the locale of a certain werewolf-meets-Patricia tale.

    Unfortunately, the story sits and spins in this wilderness for, literally, weeks on end and doesn’t ever really progress. Not enough hooks to reel you into the story; too much is left wanting.

    Worse, they spend the entire book stumbling in the dark through the woods trying to discover the magical, hidden forest — which they can’t see for the trees, ar-ar — so that when the inevitable conceit of the mystery is finally revealed it is too little, too late. This is probably the fault of the ghost, because we have seen a deft Dent pull-off nifty hat tricks like this before. This one just falls a bit flat.

    But then again, maybe I’m being too hard. I always expect more from Doc!

  • Rodney Jones

    One of my least favorite. I kept waiting for Doc to have a clear enemy to fight or mystery to solve, and the dropped totem poles didn’t seem that exciting. Once in Alaska, I thought that perhaps the Magic Forest would actually have some unexplained magical behavior. We saw a lot of Monk and Ham, especially in the forest when it started flooding, and that was fairly good. In typical fashion, things wrapped up quickly, and was somewhat exciting.