After many, many years of searching, I finally got copies of Philip Jose Farmer's Lord of the Trees/The Mad Goblin books - the two sequels to A Feast Unknown - and got stuck into them. And it was so goddamn delightful how much Farmer gets right to the fucking point.
I read A Feast Unknown at the perfect time in my life, wand adored the cock-crossing pulp epic, featuring thinly-veiled version of Tarzan and Doc Savage battling it out against the machinations of The Nine, the secret rulers of the world.
And while Farmer's books are reasonably easy to find, it has taken me forever to find the Doc Savage Caliban one. This has always been the way - I actually have four copies of Lord of the Trees, because I keep seeing different versions of it and buying it just in case. (I also have three different copies of the Tarzan biography, but still would do anything for the Doc Savage one.)
So now that I had both sequels, I finally got to crack into them, and I absolutely adore the way that Farmer does not fuck around in any way.
Because Lord of the Trees starts with (not really) Tarzan getting blown out of the sky, surviving a high altitude fall into the ocean, fighting some sharks, swimming several miles to shore, finding the remains of his family's home, getting attacked by highly skilled mercenaries, killing a bunch of them, fighting some hunting dogs, getting napalmed, bringing down helicopters with a small catapult and then getting captured, and that's just the first 20 pages.
After years - decades! - of decompressed comics, telling a short story in long pages, and current trends of TV series getting multiple episodes to get to any kind of fucking point, it's still an absolute thrill to get something that is totally designed to pack as much as possible into a few thousand words.
The rest of the book has almost as much incident, but never underestimate the power of starting with a bang.
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