The Burning Mountain – Alfred Coppel, 1982 ★★

The Longest Day that Never Was

For those who balk at the morality of using A-bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, The Burning Mountain presents a hellish alternative: mass waves of suicide boats and planes, gas warfare, hordes of crying children wearing explosives, and much more.

Between 150,000 to 250,000 people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Alfred Coppel imagined a death toll at least as high in the hypothetical event of a failed detonation. The invasion of the Japanese Home Islands becomes a series of endless battles fought with bamboo sticks and flamethrowers; one side full of people eager to die, the other side worn out both by their own casualties and those they must inflict.

As a worst-case scenario, The Burning Mountain convinces. As a story, it mostly misses the mark with a handful of distinctive yet dull characters and an uninvolving, shapeless narrative.

Captain Blood – Rafael Sabatini, 1922 ★★★

Don't Let the Name Fool You

Pirate fiction should be an easy sell. Adventure is baked into the formula; so is violent death, unbounded freedom, and the raging seas. Whatever your age or gender, cannon shot bouncing across a crowded deck is nourishment for that twisted 12-year-old inside you.

Captain Blood, one of the most successful pirate fiction titles of all time, demonstrates both the promise and the limits of this genre. Over a hundred years since its publication, it retains the power to thrill and enthrall. But how can you really root for pirates?

Country doctor Peter Blood wonders, too. He takes to piracy early in the book when fate gives him no other options. Though he leads a fairly nasty crew who preys on cargo vessels, he longs only for respectability and the love of a decent woman who scorns the life he leads.

El Borak And Other Desert Adventures – Robert E. Howard, 2010 ★★★★½

Wilder, but not as Weird

What happens when you take classic Conan, strip out all that juicy weirdness and sorcery, and double down on the daring-do by making it even more bloody and kinetic? The answers are in these stories featuring another Robert E. Howard character, El Borak.

Lesser known, yes, but in terms of pure escapism and satisfaction, this Texas gunfighter turned Middle Eastern troubleshooter plays second fiddle to no one. Del Ray’s 500-page collection of El Borak tales blazed past my eager eyes in a blur of viscera, censer fumes, and sandstorms.

The collection features seven stories Howard penned near the end of his short life featuring Francis Xavier Gordon, known to people in the hills in and around Afghanistan whom he either fights or befriends as “El Borak,” meaning “the Swift.” Four other desert-set stories of earlier vintage feature two other Howard protagonists, Kirby O’Donnell and Steve Clarney.

The Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane – Robert E. Howard, 1998 ★★★½

Wrath of a Godless Puritan

Many action heroes offer at least some depth of character; few put their gut-wrenching angst on display like Solomon Kane.

A Puritan unable to rest while there is evil to confront and defeat, whatever the odds, Kane makes for uneasy company, torn between steadfast religious convictions and violent engagement with a world which mocks his belief in a compassionate Creator.

Robert E. Howard is best known today as the creator of Conan, but Kane may be his most enigmatic character, certainly his most existential one. Del Ray presents every original Kane story Howard produced between 1928 and 1932, along with some fragments and poems that only deepen his mystery.

Helena – Evelyn Waugh, 1950 ★★★½

Something Better than History

History stops for no one, but occasionally makes detours. Helena tells of one such detour brought on by an old woman which changed the world.

Helena was the ex-wife of one emperor and the mother of another. More to the point, as Evelyn Waugh presents her, she crystalized the dawn of the Christian era in Europe with an act of faith that magnified the role of religion in the future of the West.

Imbued by the spirit of the Magi, Helena offers up a simple prayer: “For his sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

Bran Mak Morn: The Last King – Robert E. Howard, 2005 ★★★

Requiem for a Forgotten Race

There is much to love in this collection of short fiction and poetry centered around a doomed race of pre-Celtic warriors, but mainly if you are a fan of the author going in.

Underneath Robert E. Howard the professional pulp writer of the 1920s and 1930s was a fighting primitive who rebelled against civilized constraints even though he knew he could only lose. In that light, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, from the classy continuing series of Howard story collections published by Del Ray, presents Howard in his element.

People who love Howard will want this book, for the different ways it highlights one of the writer’s signature characters, Bran Mak Morn, and more at the core, the Pictish race from which he sprang. But as Spinal Tap’s manager once said, their appeal is selective.

Waverley – Walter Scott, 1814 ★★★

Putting on the Plaid

History is full of accidents. For example, this novel. If not for a missing tackle box, no one would ever have gotten to read it.

In the preface to his 1829 edition of Waverley, Walter Scott explains how he wrote the first few chapters of this, gave it up, and put the manuscript in a garret room where he kept lumber. Poking around said room trying to find a tackle box to lend to a friend, he came across the manuscript, read it, was surprised to enjoy it, and decided to finish it.

And thus history, or rather historical fiction, came to be.

North And South – John Jakes, 1982 ★★

Too Thick for its Own Good

Why do big, thick fiction novels invest in me a sense of awe that smaller tomes do not? Do I not recall Hemingway’s thoughts on the value of concision? Or how a tight narrative framework often works best, even when the subject is the American Civil War?

You can fit The Red Badge Of Courage in your pocket or purse. Good luck trying that with North And South.

John Jakes followed up the amazing success of his eight-volume “Kent Family Chronicles” by kicking off what proved an even bigger commercial triumph, the story of two American families united in duty but driven apart by war and the “peculiar institution” known as slavery. The result is a hodgepodge of crafty plotting and loose writing, of flat characters and engaging storycraft.

Libra – Don DeLillo, 1988 ★½

Conspiracy? Lone Gunman? Why Not Both?

If only every awful moment in history was as suited for fictionalization as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with its strange characters, bizarre circumstances, and world-changing events.

Of course, many – perhaps even a majority – of Americans say that already happened with an outlandishly false and ridiculous piece of writing called the Warren Commission Report. In Libra, Don DeLillo dubs the Report “the Joycean Book of America…the novel in which nothing is left out.”

The Alienist – Caleb Carr, 1994 ★½

Murder and Psychiatry at the Turn of the Century

Welcome to 1896. The art of police investigation means knowing how much to club a suspect until he talks. Moving through Manhattan boulevards requires a keen eye for pools of urine and horse manure. Psychiatrists are so sinister in the public consciousness they are known as “alienists” and regarded with fear and loathing.

It is a bleak and dangerous time, even more so when New York City discovers its own version of London’s Jack the Ripper on the loose.

Walter Winchell – Michael Herr, 1990 ★½

Unfinished Novel about an Incomplete Man

There is a scene in Walter Winchell where the title character is about to get the old heave-ho from show biz. “Pep you got, but pep ain’t talent,” his agent tells the song-and-dance man. But pep will change everything for Winchell; mass media will never be the same.

The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas, 1844 ★★★½

A Potboiler for the Ages

The test of a great storyteller lies not in the story, but the telling. Few storytellers stand the test of time like Alexandre Dumas in his breakout novel The Three Musketeers.

Is it a great story? I don’t think so. The narrative ambles about, plays up many tropes of the historical-adventure genre, takes several protracted detours, and doesn’t quite climax after 600 pages as much as run out of steam. But what a ride!

The Bastard – John Jakes, 1974 ★★★½

Come for the Sex, Stay for the Revolution

Sex sells. That’s an idea as old as history itself. Sex sells even when the subject is history, as John Jakes amply demonstrated with the release of this, the first of eight lusty novels tracing the history of an American family spreading their seed from just before the American Revolution to the dawn of the 20^th century.

The March – E. L. Doctorow, 2005 ★★½

Trudging through Georgia

The American Civil War remains a touchstone for understanding what it means to be American. Whether it’s race and regionalism, human rights and civil liberties or westward expansion and technological progress, everything that makes America American runs through the Civil War like a teeming railroad junction or the mighty Mississipp.

No wonder so many American fiction writers take a shot at writing about it.

Comstock Lode – Louis L'Amour, 1981 ★★★★

L'Amour Goes Long, Successfully

Walking steady to face down a dangerous hombre, sharing coffee under the stars with people happy to take a bullet for you; catching up with a girl from your past who turns out both beautiful and fascinated by you: Reading this made me feel like a 12-year-old. Comstock Lode is pure escapism, and I lapped up every page.

The novel presents familiar territory for legendary Western author Louis L’Amour: Val Trevallion comes to the American West from Cornwall, England with his parents, who seek their fortune in an untamed land.

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-15 ★½

Trudging Through a Classic

The book wore me out long before it reached its merciful conclusion, its rambling narrative and repetitive prose making each of its more than a thousand pages like another millstone against my soul. 

And the worst part? All my long nights of reading, I carried with me the guilt I should be enjoying this.

Who am I not to admire Don Quixote?

The Lincoln Conspiracy – Timothy L. O'Brien, 2012 [No Stars]

Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln...

Historical fiction is one of my favorite literary genres, when it’s done well. The spinning nature of time is never better appreciated than when one sees a page from our past come into focus as if for the first time.

A thoughtful fictional treatment can lend a fresh and divergent perspective on what has become well-trod ground.

But when historical fiction is done badly, it makes for a rough trudge. Take this story set in the United States after the Civil War, centering on the mystery surrounding the country’s first presidential assassination. As fiction, as history, as action-adventure, the novel fails so badly as to defy reason.

Pirate Latitudes – Michael Crichton, 2009 ★

Dead Captain, Leaky Vessel

Did Michael Crichton even read Pirate Latitudes, at least in the form we have it today? I wonder. He died more than a year before the book saw publication, and it reads like an outline for a novel rather than a fleshed-out example of one.

The storycraft is patchy, the typical Crichton invention uneven. Perhaps he worked on this as an exercise between more serious efforts, thinking he'd have time to give it the fresher perspective it needed. 

Alas, death has a habit of catching one unawares.

Sackett's Land – Louis L'Amour, 1974 ★½

Weak Start to Sackett Series

Louis L'Amour is commonly called the most popular novelist of the 20th century, with some 260 million books sold by century's end. But he wasn't critically well-regarded, and there are times reading him you understand why.

Sackett's Land presents him in surprisingly weak form given the pride of place this novel enjoys in his oeuvre.