Book Review: The Haunted Mesa

Title: The Haunted Mesa

Author: Louis L’Amour

Publisher: Bantam

Date: 1987

ISBN: 0-55-27022-2

Length: 360 pages

Quote: “A campfire was unlikely at that height, and in that location A crashed plane? He had heard no sound of motors, no explosion, seen nothing except that odd flare.”

Best known for “westerns” (which he did better than most writers of them, treating them as research-based historical novels), Louis L’Amour tried writing fiction about other historical periods, and in this contemporary novel he attempted speculative fiction. Mike Raglan, the professional skeptic and debunker of charlatans, was invited to the Utah-Arizona borderlands by his old friend and teacher Erik Hobart. Mike knows Hobart was skeptical, hard to fool, and unlikely to feel intimidated by “weird stuff” unless something truly, deeply weird were going on. So he comes out to investigate Hobart’s disappearance, and finds himself dealing with time travel, different three-dimensional worlds that connect through multi-dimensional space, the archaeological mystery of what became of the Anasazi people, and other ideas that stimulated the speculative thought of 1987.

For people who liked the kind of thing he usually wrote, L’Amour consistently delivered the kind of stories they liked. I’m not so sure that his venture into science fiction appealed to science fiction fans. I know I’ve sometimes thought that some excellent science fiction writers—Le Guin, Delany, Butler come to mind—demand too much attention from the reader, and don’t explain enough; while reading The Haunted Mesa I thought several times that L’Amour was plodding, repeating, even belaboring the speculative premises of his plot for the inattentive reader.

L’Amour’s fictional mesa and its environs are “haunted” by dimensional travellers, some benevolent Anasazi people and some from Shibalba, the dimension of anti-humans. You can’t tell which are which by looking at them; though a nice young person seems out of place in Mike’s world at first, a not so nice one seems like a very respectable newcomer to town. Mike spends a good part of the book working out who’s on which side. In the end, once Mike’s figured out which side everyone’s on, physical force will save the day, just as it does in L’Amour’s “westerns.”