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 ( )

A surprisingly engrossing weird adventure story. I went back and forth on this a couple of times. The early stages have two explorers encountering a classic lost city in the desert, where Aztec gods are still worshipped. When a fifteen-year time-skip intervened, my interest waned as it usually does in those circumstances. However, Stevens soon gets things going again, now in weird thriller mode. This is good stuff, keeping things weird enough to signal the reader that it's all Aztec all the time, but equally just plain weird for the characters trying to understand it.

I have no idea how accurate any of the Aztec mythology is, but once I'd got into it, I found this an enjoyable and novel story. Stevens maintains a good foreboding atmosphere, and I half-expected it to turn into a horror story. Nevertheless, the writing remains very readable. The characters are simple and see minimal development, but play their parts perfectly well. I'd have liked to see the mysterious girl better fleshed-out, as she's potentially a very interesting character with a unique background, but perhaps this wasn't the story for that - by the time she's on the scene things are bubbling towards a climax, and pausing to give her extensive backstory would have affected the pacing. ( )