The Lost Valley

  Probably my earliest memory of knowing anything about Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was reading about it in The Spinechilling Book of Monsters by Rupert Matthews. I borrowed this book out of the library over and over and over again. It cover monsters from folklore, mythology, and cryptozoology, as well as monsters from books and movies. It gives a brief description of storyline of The Lost World along with a few striking illustrations (image libraries are credited but not artists, so I don't know who drew these - does anyone out there recognise the style?) The caption here reads, ' The explorers in the novel The Lost World come across aggressive pterodactyls and a huge, warty toad.' And so, for years, I believed that in The Lost World , there was a giant, horrible, bloody-mouthed terror toad as one of the primary antagonists: entirely because of this caption, and this illustration. I finally came across a copy of the novel when I was about 13 at a friend'...

 Recently, I borrowed Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan Omnibus from the library, hoping for some decent Lost World imagery. It's a collection of comic strips from the 90s. This image of Tarzan taking down a dinosaur, byArthur Suydam, did set the scene nicely, I must say! There is certainly a bit of a  Jurassic Park vibe off the dinosaurs here for sure (as with almost all mid-90s dinosaurs). The first proper story in the collection, Tarzan's Jungle Fury , is absolutely bonkers, even for Burroughs. Tarzan discovers that his patch of African jungle is infested with mutated dinosaur-like creatures, all carrying some sort of infection which causes them to devolve into malformed, tentacle-laden monstrosities. It turns out that Tarzan himself has accidentally caused this infection by bringing an intelligent plant-like creature back from Mars (or Barsoom). Something odd about this story is that in the Burroughs-verse, Tarzan's Africa is already crawling with Lost Worlds, dinosaur...

  The future is going to be great! Here at the Explorer's Club, we're becoming very interested in something called 'Utopian Scholastic.' It's a name retrospectively given to a look and a sound associated with mid 90s educational software, books and games. Encarta, Dorling Kindersley books, the game Myst , and, em, - museum gift shops - are its touchstones. It's busy, it's bright, it's cluttered, it's surrealist, and it's optimistic. It has a reverence for facts, science, and classical architecture. It believes that the world is big and full of cool things, like rainforests and whales and the coliseum. And it believes that through technology (such as CD-ROM, so cool) the future is going to be great! Not only that, but humans and their tech are going to march into the future completely in tune with nature. Utopian Scholastic includes a sort of second-wave environmentalism as part of its vibe, and its look and sound sometimes puts me in mind of prop...

'Frank… You’re not going to the Belgian Congo. You’re just driving to upstate Pennsylvania!  You don’t have to take all this equipment with you and camping stuff. You can get a motel up there and just talk to people and come back!' So said cryptozoology pioneer and TV naturalist Ivan T Sanderson to his two  proteges, Jay Blick and Frank Graves, as they prepared for a road trip into deepest, darkest PA to hunt for the American Thunderbird. 

The Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs by David Lambert (1995) from Bloomsbury Books was one of many dinosaur books I had as a kid - however, this one was memorable not only for its many, many dramatic illustrations of species both familiar and obscure, but because it contained a scant few pages about dinosaurs in media. Thought brief, this section was one of the few sources of information I had back then as to the history of dinosaurs in film and literature, and I can't express just how much these few morsels whetted my desire to track down all the works within!  This page is from a 'Dinosaurs in Art' section. These four pictures are (1) The great Charles R. Knight's 1926 drawing of a Protoceratops from the Field Museum of Natural History (2) a sauropod by the also-legendary Zdenek Burian from Life Before Man (1972), (3) Allosaurus by Maurice Wilson from The Story of Prehistoric Animals (1961) and (4) Torosaurus by Neave Parker from the Illustrated London News (no date gi...

  Kong lore is deep and ever-changing. That’s why I approach the topic with trepidation. Much that has been told about the making of the film comes from almost one-hundred-year-old hearsay, or self-promotional tales spun by the films’ creators decades later. Multiple versions of the same story vie for your belief. Anything written about the movie is liable to be challenged or overturned as new evidence emerges. Kong scholars regularly produce new books (and revised editions of old books) which overturn long-cherished mythology. And yet, Kong is one of the most important – I would say perhaps among the top three ever created – pieces of Lost World media ever created (the others being … ohhh, let’s say King Solomon’s Mines, and Conan Doyle’s Lost World). And so I must wade in. Welcome back to the Explorer’s Club. It’s been a while. Find yourself a spot by the bar, grab a gin perhaps. I’ll be having a drop of Tullamore Dew to get through this one.

'Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.' Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, 1959.  The Most Haunted Blog In England Borley . An evocative name. I once visited Borley Rectory, or what’s left of it. Back in my Essex days, I took a daytrip up to the Suffolk border, en route, ultimately for Rendlesham Forest. I had UFOs on my mind at the time, as you can probably guess. But on the way, I passed through more witchy, ghost-haunted and folky horror-y terrain. Coffee in Matthew Hopkins’ Mistly village, a drive through the Stour Valley, stopping off at the haunted Bull Inn at Long Melford, the spooky Elizabethan splendour of Melford Hall, and a pitstop at Nethergate Br...