Armchair Fiction‘s “Lost World/Lost Race Classics” #18 is Richard Tooker‘s Inland Deep. This reprints the hardback book from 1936, which was an expansion of the novella “The Tomb of Time” from Amazing Stories in 1933. This edition gives us the dustjacket artwork on the front cover, and we get some interior artwork from the book (I assume) and the cover of Amazing Stories.
Tooker (1902-88) was an author and editor who wasn’t hugely prolific in science fiction, having less then 20 science-fiction stories in the 1920s and ’30s, with an equal number across other pulp genres. He also did the short-lived Zenith Rand series in the Spicy pulps (reprinted by Black Dog Books), and another well-known story is “The Day of the Brown Horde,” which was later reprinted (and cover featured) in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
In this story, we get a lost world set in a fictional cave system in western Colorado. A trio of explorers — a rich adventurer, his daughter, and a museum curator (who is in love with the daughter) — take a trip to Comanche Caverns after a report of a prehistoric footprint and strange sounds from the cave are reported by others. Kitted up, they start exploring. I was surprised they used dynamite to break through one of the walls. I’m not sure if that was standard procedure with caving at the time. After breaking through to further rooms, they hear mystery noises. But another blast of dynamite causes a cave-in that blocks their exit. Unable to clear it, they see glimses of some creatures in the cave. They decide to look further, going downwards. They soon feel heat and smell vegetation.
Exploring further, they soon discover a huge cavern with prehistoric beasts and a vast inland sea. The ceiling is lit by some unknown means, allowing for vegetation, such as algae, ferns, and more, shades of Jules Verne‘s Journey to the Center of the Earth. The explorers encounter large pterodactyls, brontosaurus, and others large and small. Further, they find a race of “frogmen,” humanoids obviously descendant from lizards. In exploring, they run afoul of the frogmen, and also discover this inland deep is threatened by a volcano. Sadly the frogmen, in their attacks on the group makes things worse. The group is able to escape, but did any of this world remain? Who knows.
Overall, I found this an interesting story, almost a variant of Verne’s story.
In additional to this, to round out this volume, we get another of Tooker’s stories, “The Ray of Eternity,” which was covered featured in Amazing Stories. The cover artwork and story artwork are included.
This is a nice addition to Armchair Fiction’s lost-world/lost-race series.
