Richard Fallon

Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters is another fine anthology of the weird from Valancourt Books. Edited and with an introduction by Richard Fallon, it collects twenty imaginative stories and poems from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were inspired by the growing popular interest in paleontology, sparked largely by the discovery of fossils of prehistoric species: pterodactyl, iguanodon, woolly mammoth, and the like. For me, this anthology is not quite as solid as many of the other Valancourt efforts, as the handful of poetical entries are not nearly as interesting as the short stories, of which the following are among the cream of this crop:

The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis - A truly bizarre tale in which the discoverer of the titular beast proceeds to perform a shocking biological experiment.
The Dragon of St. Paul’s by Reginald Bacchus and Cyril Ranger Gull - A murderous prehistoric reptile wreaks havoc in London.
A Relic of the Pliocene by Jack London - A tale of a strange hunter who reports doing battle with a prehistoric mammoth.
The Terror of Blue John Gap by Arthur Conan Doyle - A clear precursor to Doyle’s The Lost World, here we have a story of a subterranean beast in the British Midlands.
The Great Beast of Kafue by Clotilde Graves as Richard Dehan - A tale of a giant sauropod discovered in Rhodesia, with a bit of a surprising twist at the end.… (más)