Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 stars"The Haunted Mesa": A Real Treat For Louis L'Amour Fans!
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2017
Louis L'Amour has been one of my favorite authors for decades or long before his passing. Most of his fans know him as one of the most gifted authors of the western genre. After reading his autobiography, "Education of a Wandering Man", I realized there was far more to the man & the author than his most popular western paperbacks. So, it was I began to seek out his more obscure works like his detective short stories, his brilliant historical novels "The Walking Drum" & "The Lonesome Gods". Only recently did I become aware that he had written a science fiction novel late in his life, "The Haunted Mesa". In fact, I believe that Louis was working at editing this book right up to the time of his death. Some of the other readers that have critiqued "The Haunted Mesa" did not like the build up of the central character asking many of the same questions over & over. Some of the questions have depth & I believe Louis was trying to get his readers to think deeply about those questions & ideas being presented. Sometimes to form an idea or opinion, it takes a lot of soul searching. I think that line of reasoning is what Louis was trying to portray with his character of Mike Raglan. I found the book like many written by Louis L'Amour to be quite enjoyable while teaching valuable history lessons from the author's lifetime of experiences. The other idea that I came away with from reading "The Haunted Mesa" is that Louis L'Amour could have been a great science fiction author if he had chosen to go down that path rather the commercially successful western for its time period. Like Louis once said about Edgar Allen Poe, the great author of suspense & the macabre story might have made an equally successful storyteller in another genre. At the time of Poe, scary stories of suspense was where the money was at. Louis became popular with the game changing advent of the paperback novel & westerns being the most popular film genre. It may be hard for a younger generation to fathom but the paperback was just as much a game changer as the Kindle reader has been in transforming print media into a digital world. If you read "The Haunted Mesa" with an open mind, I believe that you will agree that Louis L'Amour should be considered a great author regardless of the genre being used!