The Dungeon
Phillip Jose Farmer
Part I by Richard A Lupoff
Part II by Bruce Coville 
The Dungeon II
Phillip Jose Farmer
Part III by Charles de Lint
Part IV by Robin Wayne Bailey

     What do you get when you cross Edgar Rice Burroughs with TV series The Lost World and Tad Williams’ Otherland books? You get a humdinger of a fantasy, action-packed and mind-boggling, dazzling and inventive. In short, a good read. Veteran writer of this type of fantasy (this reviewer’s favourite type, I must add) Philip Jose Farmer has written introductions to all four of the “books” comprising this epic and sets the scene. Ibooks is adept at managing to recreate the “sense of wonder” associated with classic era pulp fiction and does so once again here with interest. Clive Folliot leaves the London of 1868 behind to search for his missing older brother Neville, lost in the heart of the Dark Continent. Trouble is, Clive gets lost himself and finds himself in a vast dungeon, constructed on nine descending levels like all the best hells by two alien races. Within are trapped beings from many times and many worlds and Clive soon finds himself as leader of a small band who are determined to escape. But always ahead of them is Neville, out of reach and leading them a merry dance. Is he friend or foe?

     This is a very entertaining and absorbing book, thrilling and endlessly ingenious. It draws on many sources, both pulp and classic (although the two are hardly mutually exclusive) and motifs from Dante, Lewis Carroll, L Frank Baum and ERB’s Pellucidar books are many. There is nothing new under the sun and this book more than illustrates how writers are “standing on the shoulders of giants” and every work of fiction is (hopefully) unique in some way, but the vast body of literature in existence are the ancestors of each book as it appears in print. To its detriment, this is a work of composite authorship and it shows. The first author Richard A Lupoff effortlessly mimics the language and ambience of late 19th/early 20th century adventure fiction with an enviable skill and grace. The other three are less keen on the idea and thus the work is hardly seamless. For example, an alien being has its own strange idiomatic way of speaking in one book, and speaks perfect English in another and then changes back again. This roughness does have its own charm though and makes the whole even more redolent of pulp magazine stories where more than one author would write adventures of a particular character. As for the actual characters, watching them develop is fascinating, and none of them seem to be mere ciphers, which is a boon for this type of fiction. I don’t say this very often but I will say it now…hugely enjoyable!