Francis Stevens (1)

This is a rather dated but still enjoyable read of one of the first multiverse stories. The three main characters all think they are time-traveling but then come to realize they had simply entered another (very dystopian) version of their own world, where time moves at a different pace, (or something... the 'science' in this story is very hand-wavy). Regardless of the scientific accuracy, the story is entertaining, mostly on the strength of the characters and the strange adventures they find themselves having. And really, at its heart, this is more of an adventure tale than anything else. On that level it holds up pretty well more than 100 years after first being published.… (meer)

Citadel of Fear is a novel from the World War I era, which may have been good for the time that it was written, but doesn’t particularly hold up today. It fails in more area than it succeeds. The novel starts off with an Irishman in America finding a lost Aztec city. There are shady goings on involving Aztec gods and an escape from the place where he is being held in captivity. The novel then has a jarring and abrupt shift into the future and eventually ties back into the lost city from the beginning of the novel.

Despite the title, there is nothing especially horrific happening in this story. I found the horror elements to be rather ho-hum, and the characterization to be fairly weak. The shift from past to present was so abrupt that it almost seemed as if I were reading an entirely different story. The climax of the novel is told in summary form rather than shown to the reader and it really falls flat. It’s often difficult to judge stories written in a different era. What may have worked then may no longer work today. I don’t know if this would have been scary or captivating to a reader from nearly a century ago, but it doesn’t stand the test of time.

Carl Alves – author of Battle of the Soul… (meer)