“The Land of Terror” picks up after the events of the series debut, “Man of Bronze”. Savage is now receiving his pipeline of funds and can afford to travel the world righting wrongs. In one early effective scene Savage hands a fistful of cash to a woman experiencing blindness. He encourages her to use the money and a personalized handwritten note to seek out a surgeon friend of Doc’s. He does this while chasing a bad guy, which is ultimately the book’s setup and early premise. It turns out Doc’s friend and chemist Jerome Coffern is melted by a mysterious substance released by the villain Kar. In furious opening chapters, the reader is tagging along as Savage is on a highspeed foot chase to capture Coffern’s murderer. The killer is attempting to dodge Savage’s advance by running through New York streets, downtown apartment buildings and onto a tourist ship in the Hudson River. It’s a long but entertaining sequence of events that culminates in the killer escaping.
Later, Savage does a little detective work and learns that the melting substance being used is called the Smoke of Eternity and Kar’s gang plans to use it for robbing banks and other dastardly deeds. As a gumshoe, Savage learns that Coffern, a taxidermist named Bittman and a guy named Yuder traveled to a remote New Zealand location known as Thunder Island. After asking Bittman, an old friend of Doc’s father, about the trip, Bittman suspects that Yuder could really be the mysterious Kar and that the Smoke of Eternity could have originated from Thunder Island. After another furious chase scene that involves Monk being captured, the team pursue the bad guys from New York to Thunder Island. From here it falls into what I perceive as the typical Doc Savage adventure tale - exotic location, strange creatures, gunfire and a quest or chase to thwart some evil mastermind.
It’s only Dent’s second issue of writing this character but it’s clearly evident he has a firm grasp on what he wants to express to the reader. The first half of the book works really well as a simultaneous chase scene while still asking probing questions as an investigative pursuit of plot. The second half is by far the best as Doc’s team faces dinosaurs and Kar’s henchmen inside of a volcano. Fans of the series often point out the fact that this entry includes five killings, something Doc’s team doesn’t do much (if any) of in future volumes. High body count on a pursuit of vengeance. I’m okay with it.
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I actually read this just a couple of years ago. Liked it fairly well. I'm not a huge Doc Savage fan, and I think that's because I discovered him late.
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