Into a subterranean world of red-hot lava, Doc Savage and his fantastic five descend -- to face the most fiendish foe of his career. Awaiting Doc is an irresistible power that can level mountains... that can enslave the world... and that threatens to make Doc's most dangerous adventure his very last...

Ah! Perhaps my LEAST favorite Doc of ALL time! I've read it a dozen times for continuity's sake and STILL don't understand what was going on at the end. Bad editing by Bantam or denseness on the reader's part? Anybody concur out there?

I enjoyed this one. I like my Docs lean and mean with lots of action and a pace that just won't quit. The ending is a bit confusing but getting there is all the fun.

Another Doc I didn't particularly care for. Not a lot of great stuff going on, just a a sort of mundane adventure. Maybe it's because I was a huge Captain America fan I was somewhat disappointed the first time I read it but even years later when I reread the book, I discovered I liked it even less.

I found this to be a very smooth reading book with a good rythmn to the action. It never really got my adrenaling pumping, and there was no explosively exciting finish, but it kept my interest the whole way through. I had not heard it mentioned before that Monk played tennis each morning with his beautiful secretary, Lea Aster, on his roof-top tennis court. An amusing image to say the least. Worth reading for that bit alone.

This is one of the more humdrum adventures in Doc's early years. It's not that the novel is bad at all, it's just not terribly exciting and is rather prosiac after all. One thing notable about this story is that Doc deliberately and uncharacteristically allows the villian to fall prey to his own trap and die at the conclusion.

A little predictable at the end I thought, as well as a little hard to follow and rushed. A rather vanilla adventure that just plods along until it's conclusion.

This definitely wasn't the best. It was boring. All I could say for the fantastic underground empire was, it was underground. The villains didn't have that strong a plan. Overall, not too good.