Bantam Books
1987
The Navajo called them the Anasazi, the “ancient enemy,” and their abandoned cities haunt the canyons and plateaus of the Southwest. For centuries the sudden disappearance of these people baffled historians. Summoned to a dark desert plateau by a desperate letter from an old friend, renowned investigator Mike Raglan is drawn into a world of mystery, violence, and explosive revelations. Crossing a border beyond the laws of man and nature, he will learn of the astonishing world of the Anasazi and discover the most extraordinary frontier ever encountered.
Growing up in a family that was always reading, one of the authors that I couldn’t seem to get away from was Louis L’Amour. He was a favorite of both my father and my maternal grandfather; I remember my grandparents’ house always having a L’Amour paperback laying around, their covers and spine showing years of re-reads by my grandpa, who reportedly always read a novel a night. Indeed, whenever we as a family took the rare trip into the “big city” (that being Omaha, Nebraska to us rural types) to spend a couple of hours at one of the malls there, he would always make a bee-line to whatever bookstore was in there and plant himself in the Western Fiction section for the entirety of the visit. Whenever Grandma would tell me, “Go get Grandpa,” I knew exactly where to find him, every time. I once asked him what his secret to reading an entire novel a night before bedtime was, and he finally told me that he only read the dialog parts. Which…okay, I can see that as working, letting your brain fill in the blanks as you’re taking in what the characters are saying. It’s not the reading method I have. But, that’s besides the point.
If you know me, you would understand that the type of fiction produced by Louis L’Amour wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse. Reading at a very young age, I always gravitated towards the weird fiction, the spine-tingling and supernatural horror growing up. When I began reading “adult fiction”, I cut my teeth on Stephen King and Clive Barker, with the occasional Dean Koontz whenever I had a few hours to kill. I didn’t do “westerns”, and if there was a genre that Louis L’Amour was pigeonholed in, it was that, right alongside Zane Grey. The only reason why I would pay attention to anything written by him, was because the title would tickle my affinity for horror fiction. So, obviously a title like The Haunted Mesa would nab my then 14-year-old interest.
This being, if the bibliography on Wikipedia is to be trusted, the final published novel of L’Amour’s before his death in 1988, I remember seeing the mass market paperback of The Haunted Mesa at the grocery store back in 1988, and wondered about the title. Of course, now I understand that any author worth their craft tends to dabble in other genres than the ones that made them famous; back then, when I was young and stupid, I had this notion that authors should stay in their own lane and not deviate from it. But, the title garnered my attention, and thus I managed to talk my parents into buying me a copy to read. It was, after all, Louis L’Amour, a beloved fixture in my household. When I got home, I made it through a couple of chapters…then promptly lost interest. Blame it on my youth.
Now, here we are, a small handful of decades after the fact, and I find myself revisiting The Haunted Mesa, as a book I purchased through my Kindle, just to not only finish what I started all that time ago, but to also explore storytelling of a different nature.
The first thing that I noticed when looking up this title on the Kindle, was that The Haunted Mesa was listed under the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures line, which kinda threw me. Does it count as a “lost treasure” if you remember when it was originally published? Am I really that kind of old now? It’s like hearing one of the songs you loved in High School being played on the Classic Rock station. You just can’t describe that feeling you get when you realize, “Oh…I’m old now.” What the Lost Treasures line is, though, pertains to added bonus material either pertaining to the book itself, notes and/or manuscripts that would supplement. Kind of like the bonus materials found on DVDs and Blu Rays. In this instance, this has a rather in-depth behind the scenes postscript written by Louis’ daughter Beau L’Amour, including journal excerpts from the research and general skeleton of the structure while writing The Haunted Mesa.
As far as the story goes, despite the title, The Haunted Mesa is really more of a pulp-style “weird western” science fiction yarn than a supernatural horror story. It draws heavily from Navajo legends of the Anasazi, Mayan mythology, and speculative doorways into parallel worlds, with just a smattering of cryptozoology thrown in. The main protagonist, Mike Raglan, has traveled to the mountainous mesa area in the Southwest after receiving several urgent phone calls and mail from his old friend, Erik Hokart, to come out and help. Hokart was in the process of building a secluded home on top of one of the mesas, and the messages stated that he found himself in a bunch of trouble, and needed Raglan’s expertise as someone who investigates and debunks paranormal phenomena. When he arrives, Hokart is nowhere to be seen, and Raglan soon finds himself in possession of Hokart’s journal (which depicts his quasi-archaeological exploits while building the home there, leading up to his disappearance), and his dog Chief. He also finds himself followed by several mysterious large men that seem bent on either killing him or taking him hostage, as well as a mysterious yet beautiful woman who warns him about evil from the other side that wants to silence him, a kind of evil that possibly took his friend hostage. Possible doorways between our world and her world exist, and despite the protests, Raglan is bound and determined to go to the other side and save his friend. Only, it soon becomes evident that he can’t really trust anyone. Will he make it there and back in time, before these doorways slam shut once more?
Your average Lewis L’Amour book runs about 250 pages, give or take. I say this, because as far as I know, The Haunted Mesa is probably the longest book he’s written, coming in at 433 pages on the Kindle, and about 357 or so in print, which puts this about as long as two of his standard novels put together. Now, with this being the first L’Amour book I’ve read so far, I have no way of comparison, but…there’s a lot of exposition in this book. There are points where the characters tend to go for pages pontificating about certain things like the nature of man, the rise and fall of mysterious cultures in the Southwest, a lot of it tied up with the backstory of whatever character Mike runs into that may or may not have something to do with the overall narrative. According to the postscript, this book had been brewing in L’Amour’s noggin since at least the 70s, having notes and expeditions around places like the Mesa Verde and the surrounding areas. He obviously had a long-standing interest in the lore and mythology surrounding the mesas; and given that this was his final written book before he died, it may have just been an instance where his characters worked as a mouthpiece for his own brain droppings on life, the universe, and everything. Forty-Two. I make no apologies.
There is some riveting action interspersed among the exposition, in a rather engaging pulp style. Most of this takes place in our world; Mike doesn’t really make it to the other side until about 70% of the way into the book (one of the perks of having a Kindle, you know at what point something happens). There’s a bunch of characters that are introduced that seem they would be much more important to the plot than they are–there’s a local law enforcement character that, in my head, kept imagining to be patterned after Graham Greene, that maybe should have been more of an everyman perspective on the other side than just staying here on our side. And some of the ones that do, aren’t really all that fleshed out enough. Other than that, the story itself did drag a bit at times, especially when the characters got to pontificatin’ and such.
On the Goodreads site, there’s a lot of 1- and 2-star reviews of The Haunted Mesa, from those who were obviously expecting an old fashioned Western yarn, because of the name. As someone who comes from a different style of literary consumption, I found The Haunted Mesa to be an interesting bit of pulp sci-fi Weird Western speculative fiction that could have been tightened up at a few points, and expounded upon a bit more at others. You would do well to check this book out.
Darrell Schweitzer (Editor)
Confessions Of A Christian Freak 