King of the Dinosaurs by Ray Palmer

At one of the antiques malls on Route 40 in Hagerstown, MD, there are booths full of vintage SF books, magazines and collectibles; on a recent visit I saw a copy of the October 1945 issue of Fantastic Adventures; the cover of which, by J. Allen St. John, illustrates King of the Dinosaurs by J. W. Pelkie.  Like everybody, I love dinosaurs, and so I was moved to read this tale of prehistoric beasts by an author I had never heard of.  Back home, a gander at isfdb indicated that the author of King of the Dinosaurs, the first of four stories about Toka the caveman, was in fact Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Fantastic Adventures.  This made Palmer's promotion of the story on the editor's page of the issue all the more amusing:

All of us, we're sure, like Walt Disney's cartoons.  Well, here's a novel that you might call "in the Disney manner"!  "King of the Dinosaurs" is 75,000 words of delightful fantasy, of smashing adventure, and subtle satire that will satisfy you as no fantasy has in recent years.  Here, at last, is a writer who has the "gift" of a Burroughs in a new guise.  

They wanted fifteen bucks for the magazine at the antique mall, and you know how cheap I am, and so will not be surprised to hear I am reading King of the Dinosaurs in a scan of the issue in which it appears that is available free to one and all at the internet archive.

I'm afraid I have to report that King of the Dinosaurs is not very good...at all.  Individual sentences and paragraphs are poorly written, with confusingly constructed sentences and many distractingly  unconventional word choices.  The novel is also poorly edited, with lots of missing words and typos.  The pacing is quite bad, with many scenes that are way too long and feel quite slow, including action scenes which should be quick and energetic; Palmer habitually overexplains and overdescribes, and his writing is very repetitive--the same phrases and words appear again and again, and we are subjected to descriptions of the same mundane actions and ideas again and again.  In a scene in which a man chases a woman around an apartment, seeking to rape her, she doesn't just throw a chair at him once, she throws three different chairs at him, and this is after she has already thrown four different rocks at him, and before her boyfriend arrives to fight the rapist, during which fight the boyfriend also throws a chair at the rapist, and then a "lounge."  Yes, these cave people have "lounges," and we hear about these pieces of furniture again and again.  

Here are some sample sentences that had me groaning as I began the novel, plucked from a fight scene in which Toka and his righthand man Rok struggle against a dinosaur (they call dinosaurs "Big Snakes"); this battle takes up five pages of Chapters IV and V (the novel has 56 chapters):  

But the Big Snake was suddenly so looming its breath was a searing blast on an already foul air.

Along his arm and into his cool fighter being came a blood-awakening tingle as the broad battle-head connected, though only glaringly.

Its great red eyes were now firing viciously.

Palmer's plot is a mix of risqué adult melodrama and the kind of goofy stuff a kid might have come up with.  Toka is the brilliant leader of a secret rebel faction of his tribe of cave people; Toka's father was a leader of the tribe but was murdered in the coup that ushered in the tyrannical reign of the current chief, the bald and musclebound Kola.  The tribe lives in the caves that honeycomb a cliff; this cliff is like an apartment building or hotel, with twenty-five levels which everyone calls terraces; the terraces have "balustrades" and the caves are called "apartments," "barracks" and "offices."  Chiseled into the cliff is the settlement's name, "SANDCLIFF," in letters thirty-foot high.  These cave people have a written language, candles, locks, and other technologies and cultural artifacts we don't generally associate with cavemen, and Palmer describes the architecture and décor of this antediluvian skyscraper, which is serviced by elevators and full of secret passages and other elaborate functional and decorative features, at great length and in mind-numbing detail.  

As the story begins, Toka is leading a gathering party of tribesmen to a muddy pool, the level of which inexplicably falls and then rises again over the course of a few hours in the middle of each day.  Special berries grow on the bottom of the pool, underwater, and can be gathered in the brief period when the pool is at low ebb.  These berries have amazing powers, making those who eat them super strong.  The pool lies within view of Sandcliff, and to avoid the crushing tax on all food gathered, the members of Toka's party of pretend they can't find any berries; in fact they find thousands, and hide them in their long hair.  

A dinosaur attacks, and Toka and his lieutenant Rok lead it a merry chase in circles in the muddy pool so the rest of the party can escape to secrete their berries in a cave in the jungle behind a secret door.  After this dinosaur is defeated a second saurian comes along and summarily snatches Rok in its jaws and carries him away to what we expect is a horrible fate.  

The scene switches to the luxurious 25th terrace of Sandcliff, which has a parquet floor and "beautiful inlay scenes in the back wall." There we meet Kola, his sexy sister Rissa, and Kola's righthand man Kagi.  Kola and Rissa grew up poor down on Terrace One, but after the coup now occupy the geographic as well as political heights of society.  Kola is a real brute, regularly striking his slaves and his subordinates, including Kagi.  Kagi is a relatively small man, especially compared to the muscular Kola, but bold enough to beat his own slaves and to make aggressive sexual advances on Rissa, earning him a slap across the face from her.  King of the Dinosaurs is replete with scenes of beatings and with relationships based on unrequited lust: Kagi also sexually assaults Roya, Rok's sister and Toka's love interest; Rissa desires Toka, and schemes to make him her personal slave; and Kola, like Kagi, has designs on Roya and tries to blackmail her into becoming his queen. 

I guess all these anachronisms and all this soap opera jazz are the "subtle satire" Palmer promised us--whether this is a satire of 20th-century social class or a satire of mainstream fiction, I don't know.  Anyway, it is not the melodramatic relationships among the caveman upper class that constitute the craziest aspect of King of the Dinosaurs.  That distinction belongs to the fascinating spectacle the residents of Terrace Twenty-Five can watch from their lofty perch--baseball games the local dinosaurs put on, using their tails as bats and a human as the ball!  (This is the horrible fate to which Rok is subjected.)  The dinosaurs are intelligent, and talk to each other, for example arguing with the referee when the hit that sends Rok flying deep into the jungle, at first believed to be a grand slam, is declared a foul.  

Halfway through the story we learn that it was Kola who inspired the dinosaurs to use humans as balls in their game, and that one of his strategies as ruler is to foment conflict between dinosaurs and his tribe.  Another little conspiracy he engages in is murdering one of his underlings so he can frame somebody else for the crime.  I generally find the clues and the sifting of the red herrings we find in murder mysteries, as well as palace intrigue, to be pretty boring, and did not welcome these elements of a story I thought would involve more journeys through monster-teeming jungles.   

The dinosaurs mass and march on Sandcliff, seeking revenge, but all they do at first is mill about its base, the lowest terrace being too high from them to reach.  Kola announces a lottery to determine who will be thrown to the dinosaurs to appease them, and plans to fix the drawing so that Toka will be selected.  (We hear a lot about this lottery and about Kola and Rissa's competing plans to fix it, but the lottery never takes place.)  There is a lot of tedious back and forth as Toka, Rissa, Kagi and Roya move in and out of rooms, in and out of captivity, and in and out of hiding places via elevators, stairways and secret passages, each pursuing his or her agenda and trying to escape Kola's wrath.  Palmer seems to think SF fans want to read scenes of strong people abusing weak people, and I suppose there are some who do; more questionably, he seems to think readers desire detailed descriptions of people manipulating secret doors.  When he could just say, "Kola returned to the secret treasure room," Palmer prefers to spend two paragraphs describing the bald dictator's every step, every press of the concealed panels that open and close the secret doors.

In the final fifth of the novel comes its multifaceted climax.  With a new determination fired by Kola's efforts to antagonize them, the dinosaurs start building a siege ramp out of trees and earth in hopes of ascending to the first terrace, from which, it seems, they can just climb up the rest of the terraces.  The cavemen, who have invented doors with hinges and locks, have not yet invented the bow or the sling or the javelin (they fight with axes and knives) and do nothing to interfere with this construction.  Kagi launches a coup attempt and is defeated and thrown to the dinosaurs to be devoured--all that talk of the dinos using people as baseballs is dropped.  Kola forces Roya to marry him; she tries to stab him, but is overpowered, and when he tries to consummate their marriage she throws chairs at him, but again is overpowered--seconds before the bald tyrant can rape Roya, Toka appears.  

A ferocious thunderstorm has rolled in, driving the dinosaurs from the base of Sandcliff into the jungle and Kola's army from the balustrades in their apartments.  This cleared the way for Toka to emerge from his secret hiding place on the roof of the skyscraper and assemble his revolutionary faction.  The rebels retrieved the berries they have been hoarding in their secret cave, devoured them, and then launched their revolution.  Toka has a long fight with Kola in which Roya and Rissa play supporting roles: Kola throws a knife into Roya's chest, Rissa stabs Kola and then Kola throws her down to the dinosaurs (the storm ends during this fracas), only to fall down in his turn while fighting Toka.

With the destruction of Rissa and Kola, the revolution is won.  As if this novel wasn't already incredible enough, the people Toka thought dead--his father, Rok, and Roya--reappear, perfectly healthy.  Rok explains how he survived being struck by a tyrannosaur's tail and thrown a mile through the air: "when I saw the King was finally going to slam me away yesterday I naturally relaxed with the blow."  Naturally!  The dinosaurs start climbing their siege ramp, but then Rok and Roya's grandfather plays a tune on a goat horn and the giant reptiles, hypnotized, dance off to play baseball with a ball made from "huge sods."

(One of the childish aspects of King of the Dinosaurs is how the heroes, Toka and Roya, don't actually kill anybody, not even a dinosaur--the villains do all the killing.  This, plus the fact that Rok, Roya and Toka's dad survive what initially appear to be fatal injuries, means the heroes maintain their innocence and pay no price for the risks they take and successes they achieve.) 

Horrible!

King of the Dinosaurs is the worst thing I have read in ages, bad in every conceivable way, from the plot to the style, from the pacing to the tone, which is all over the place, the absurdity of a caveman skyscraper full of secret rooms and intelligent baseball-playing dinosaurs sitting uncomfortably beside all the physical abuse and sexual assault depicted.  Reading it was a chore.  Did Palmer really think this was good?  Or was he just that hard up for copy?  It is astonishing that three more Toka stories would be published!