The Haunted Mesa: A Novel (1988) - Plot & Excerpts
To be honest, I felt like this book was just a hot mess. The short version of why I hated it: The narration was so awkward and circular and repetitive that I often had no idea where we were going with this, and nothing really happened in the first 300 pages. I couldn't figure out if the author was trying to squeeze in worldbuilding as a replacement for plot or what, but there wasn't even much of that. Basically the whole first three fourths of the book was protagonist Mike trying to decide whether and how to go rescue his friend Erik, who is presumably trapped in some alternate world populated by alien Indians, and the windows to said world do not operate by predictable physics, nor do its tenants operate by typical human logic.That's the really striking thing about it. The whole time it's built up how DANGEROUS this place is, with everyone and their mother bleating OH MY GOODNESS NO YOU CANNOT FIGHT THEM YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE GETTING INTO MIKE at every turn, only to have him actually go there and shoot things in the head and fight dudes who apparently are so unused to being fought that they don't know how to fight. Like, that's actually the plot. No one ever resists them, so they have gotten confident and just assume people won't resist if they say "no, stay in that prison." Mike punches them once and they just die or explode or fall over. And they're just all so shocked about this, because my goodness, why isn't he intimidated by our reputation? NO DON'T FIGHT THEM MIKE. Why not? And the villain seems to have absolutely no motivation. There are several groups and/or individuals cited as baddies for this book, but none of them seem to have any desires or motivations--certainly not any that have to do with kidnapping Mike's friend Erik (which is ostensibly the reason Mike has to go to this godforsaken place and kick some ass in the first place). Why? Why did the plot even happen?Now, let me talk about Mike and his narration style. He's always gazing into his navel contemplating things in this obnoxious circular way, and everything had a question mark on it. Here's an example of the narration:"We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, and other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?"Let me reiterate that this is NARRATION. It is not dialogue.More:"Where was Erik? Why had he not kept their appointment? Why had Erik chosen such a remote place? Had he been kept from that appointment? Was he dead? Injured? A prisoner? That was preposterous. Yet, was it?"I'm not kidding. Stuff like that was literally on every page. And boy did I get sick of him wondering "Where was Erik?" Here, suffer through some more:"That man now? The one he had found in his condo, stealing his book. Who was he? Why did he want the daybook? Did he want it for himself or was he sent by someone to find it?"You see what I mean. And these are generally questions that the usual reader would be wondering; we don't need to be prompted to wonder. A dude breaks in to steal Mike's mystery package and yeah, we're gonna wonder who he was and what his motivation was. We don't need three or four mental soliloquies involving Mike pelting us with the question marks of his life.But the dialogue was often worse. People would ramble on for multiple-paragraph whinges, in terribly stilted phrasing that read an awful lot like the narration, and they would literally just appear to Mike and start talking. A couple times someone just walked up to him in a restaurant and sat down and started pages and pages of conversation wherein they relayed plot-relevant details. They seriously felt like video game checkpoints; press A to talk to character, collect clue. Like, toward the end, when Mike was questioning the loyalties of his allies, he's having a coffee and in comes a guy he doesn't know. Who sits down in his booth, introduces himself, and just randomly starts talking about a guy they both know which makes Mike suspicious about whether his ally has been bought off. (Oh, and when Mike finds a book with notes from his friend Erik, the journal details composed by Erik are identical to L'amour's writing style--complete with question marks. There are like three chapters at the beginning involving Mike picking up the daybook, reading Erik's scribblings, and then stopping and whining about not knowing what's going on and flip-flopping on whether he wants to believe/help and then going back to the book.) The conversations are not only poorly rendered but shockingly circular; the characters will discuss things they've already discussed, reiterate things they've established, and spell out absolutely obvious things. There's one where Mike meets a policeman who's investigating arson and he just slides into the booth and talks to him and they discuss that Mike had a guy break into his room to steal a package. Mike says the criminal "seemed like a professional." The police guy, eager to move the plot along, prompts Mike to explain what he means by "professional." So he rambles a while about what clues he thinks lead to the criminal being sent by someone else for the purpose and why he was probably really experienced, and then later in the same conversation the policeman again seems confused about why Mike thinks the breaker-inner was a professional. It's like an editor never read the book and said "Hey Louis, did you know you already made this more than clear? Like, on top of that, why would a police guy not know what that meant?"And then we have the other-world Indian characters who come from the other side of this veil, or Third World or whatever he called it. They don't speak English there but an old guy from our world is apparently going around teaching noble savages how to speak English so that they can come here and talk to our hero in terrifyingly stilted pidgin English. Wow, it was incredibly bad. You know, one second the girl is saying "I no understand" and the next she is saying "He said our three dimensional world was fantasy, something we had become accustomed to and accepted as the all." What? He just doesn't seem to understand what it would sound like if someone only had a passing familiarity with English. And the Indian characters who didn't speak English very well had this really annoying tendency to preface "unfamiliar" words with "what you call." Things are "five of what you call miles away" and involve what you call science. Ughhhh.And sometimes, Mike talks out loud to his dog for expository purposes. I just started saying "shoot me" out loud when that happened.Now let me talk about the absurd plot and its repetitive, frustrating rendering. We get sudden detours into Mike's backstory sometimes, and most of it is irrelevant though I think it was trying to explain why he had certain skills. So Mike's an ex-carny, has been around the world to tons of exotic places, learned fighting styles and shooting skills, speaks several languages, and has written several books about weird stuff. Most of it is presented like "by the way, he did this, and that's why he has familiarity with that." We are told over and over again that his investigation of supernatural and magical happenings usually turn out to involve fraud and sleight-of-hand, but occasionally he runs into stuff that might be magic and he knows there's some mysterious stuff out there. Oooooh, creeeepy. I guess it was supposed to be for ambiance, and to play to the reader's presumed skepticism so we'll relate to Mike, but it's said over and over and over again how he's a skeptic but SOMETIMES NOPE and he's not sure if he believes it but SOMETIMES THINGS ARE WEIRD and yeah probably nothing's happening here but MAYBE ALIENS. Some waffling is expected. But tell us once and/or show us more. This was just like round and round and round the pointless pondering train.But then. The pacing is just incredibly slow and involves Mike just going back and forth between the mesa where his friend disappeared and his own room, I guess. He'll go drive out to the mesa and think about things (WHERE *WAS* ERIK??), and then sometimes he'll "realize" things that make no sense. So do other characters. Like, there's this bit where Mike is reading his disappeared friend Erik's handwritten journal--the only clue to where he might've disappeared to--and Erik's describing a series of creepy experiences that involved him digging out a kiva and having various interactions with the supernatural. Erik sees a GLOWING RED marking appearing on his map. Erik also loses his pencil and it is REPLACED WITH A JAR. He randomly decides that the glowing red line "means" that a sinister spirit is looking for a way back into this world. But the snatching of his pencil and replacement with a weird jar is obviously just a spirit being mischievous--it's clearly a different entity doing THAT. And leaving him sunflowers. And stealing his sweater and bringing it back with another one with a sunflower on the tag. And kidnapping his dog and sending it back with sunflowers tucked into its collar. These are all friendly things. But the other mysterious happenings are bad entities. It's sinister. I just don't know why the characters are interpreting these things this way. Mike does it all the time--just figures out that someone's bad or good based on seemingly arbitrary things.The daybook. It contains written records of stuff that happened to Erik presumably less than a day before he disappeared, at which point he was pleading for Mike to "HELP US!!!! FOR GOD'S SAKE!!!!" but . . . he somehow managed to make arrangements for a messenger to get the book to Mike when he was already in mortal danger. Guess he just sat down while being kidnapped and wrote about it, then sent his companion off with the errand. I don't understand the timeline of this.The cop. When a business is burned to the ground and a police guy is investigating, he comes to talk to Mike and the Indian girl from the other world, Kawasi. Just finds them in a cafe or whatever and starts questioning them. Later, Mike's in the desert and THE COP COMES OUT THERE AND FINDS HIM and just starts asking him more questions and even suggesting that maybe he suspects Mike of being involved with the arson while admitting that he's "reaching" and "fishing." Oh my goodness. A policeman isn't going to come follow you into the desert for VERY URGENT follow-up questioning and then ramble for a while about how you could possibly be guilty but not do anything to arrest you or take you back for questioning. And if they have more questions for you they're not going to keep letting you wander around knowing you might become a suspect only to find you like three more times to talk about the investigation. Who is this jackass and how did he even get a job?The suspicious woman, Eden. Mike has her pegged from the beginning because he's ~so smart and observant~ so he noticed that she has his books on the shelf but hasn't read them and must have just bought them, and he just happens to have marked the book that got stolen from his hotel so he knows she's behind it. But she's literally not involved in anything that makes any sense. She sent someone to steal the book? Yeah, and, uh, so? It leads nowhere. Her big revelatory moment is that she admits to being a poison woman, which was supposed to be this thing where the male characters are cautioned to never sleep with these woman because their nether parts will poison them. Eden proceeds to never try to trap anyone with her vagina. Who cares if she's poison? And when confronted with info that links her to Erik's disappearance, all she does is tell Mike not to go rescue him and ramble a lot about how she's watched and controlled by her people and has no real power. Why did she try to mess with Mike in the first place? The whole thing was just absurd. The banker. I mentioned before that a guy just walks up to Mike in a restaurant and tells him stuff he needs to know about someone who will double-cross him, but he also deposits two and a half pages of his own history in the banking industry. It is completely irrelevant to the plot. There are other things like this too, like when Mike is realistically considering the possibility that he might die or get trapped in the other world on his rescue mission so he's wrapping up affairs, and then he opens a bunch of his letters and TELLS US WHAT THEY'RE ABOUT. They're all irrelevant. (Or, I guess they're trying to show how talented and well-rounded Mike is because he's conversing with people around the globe about topics on which he is considered an authority, but seriously, WE DON'T CARE.)Also, apparently these people do not live in our universe, and I'm not talking about the people from the other dimension. There's a bit where Mike says that if Erik hadn't left his notes behind, everyone would have just assumed he fell off a cliff. Are you for real? Wealthy and well-connected science guy disappears and leaves behind no body and no clue, but sure, people would just assume he got lost in the desert and fell off something and no one would have investigated. That isn't how things work at all.Mike also makes a lot of assumptions about the other-worlders and what they understand, and they always turn out to be right. For instance, at one point he believes he is being watched, correctly targets which of the other restaurant patrons is watching him, and manages to sneak out without being seen because he has correctly surmised that the other-world guy doesn't understand how doors work. He knows nothing about their culture or their sophistication, but he just figures hey, a guy from another world probably thinks this whole back wall made of glass is solid, but I know there's a door! Hee hee! He's not watching that door, only the front door! WIN!! What? And this is exploited even more when it turns out everybody in the bad old other world doesn't expect Mike to be able to fight. They just come after him and expect to stop him, but he gives them a couple good punches and they go down. Every single person he fights, with the exception of the final bad guy, goes down with a couple punches or a bullet. And it's repeatedly expressed that it's because no one resists them in their world and they aren't expecting a tough guy like our hero. I just . . . what? Why do you have a bunch of guards and armies but they don't actually fight? What do they DO? Mike's idea to FIGHT THEM is REVOLUTIONARY and NO ONE'S EVER THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE OMG. Kawasi and her people say they have only just "defended" when the bad guys come for them, but what does that mean? They stand in front of their houses and don't do anything or what? Mike's idea to FIGHT THEM is repeatedly portrayed as incredibly, shockingly original and radical, but there's no real explanation for how they got complacent except that they just kinda did. And then, I just want to say there are so many disconnects with actual storytelling and with reality. Like, okay, if you find your friend in a mysterious stone dungeon right out of cartoons (with blocks that can be pressed to trigger sliding stone doors and everything), and he complains that the villains starved him, what do you do? Give him some of your trail mix? Or ignore the poor bastard until the third time he says he can't go on because he's too weak, THEN give him some food? Because the latter is what Mike did. I thought he must not have any food with him because Erik kept complaining that he was weak and starved, and then he pulls out the trail mix and I'm like WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THIS BEFORE? And it's more than 300 pages in before Mike suggests he might suddenly love Kawasi. The narration even acknowledges that they've spent no time together and that he didn't even know if he trusted her for most of that time, but suddenly their love is so important and he has to rescue her too and propose to take her back to his world and just suddenly start calling her "honey." Whaaaa. There's no warmth to it and no suggestion that Kawasi viewed him that way, but I guess he needed a girl to save. Sigh.And finally, one more complaint about narration. There's this weird redundant storytelling style that makes me think an editor never saw the manuscript. Example:"At a glance he realized the ruins were ancient, older than anything he had ever seen, anywhere. Mike Raglan had looked upon many ruins, but his first impression of this one was one of extreme age."That happened constantly. Observation, followed by observation reiterated. Plus the narration had this maddening tendency to point out condescendingly obvious things. Here's one example:"It was never easy for one people to understand another when their cultural backgrounds differ too drastically."You don't say.I had an incredibly difficult time finishing this book. The dialogue was staged and unrealistic; the Indian characters are portrayed as noble savages and mystics; the pacing is plodding and makes all the parts that are supposed to be exciting seem drawn out and tortured; and the book is both conceptually simplistic and executionally convoluted. It seemed like L'amour had a bunch of "cool" ideas about the Anasazi myths and some various Navajo folk traditions that he wanted to develop into a story, but when you write a story about your friend vanishing into an unknown other world, there should probably be some reason the bad guys are holding the prisoner and some compelling reason for the hero to help, and for this there's just nothing here. Pages and pages of the protagonist flolloping around in his head wondering what's going on and talking to people about how spooky it is, with absolutely no authentic character development and no driving force behind the plot or any of the relationships portrayed. I definitely would not have read past page 50 if this wasn't a book assigned by my book club, and I don't like to review books I haven't finished anyway. I'm honestly confused as to how anyone finds this book readable, to say nothing of finding it fun. Maybe there's a warmth people associate with the genre or some tropes I'm missing, because I experienced absolutely no connection with this and frequently felt like I was reading the unfinished first draft manuscript of an ambitious high school kid who'd just read a book about the Navajo and got enraptured, so it's just sort of shocking to me that this is the work of an extremely successful, established, experienced author. I don't know what happened here.
Mike's seen some strange things in his time, and when his old friend Erik disappears under mysterious circumstances leaving behind only a daybook full of murky clues, he knows he has to come check it out. While investigating the mesa where Erik was in the process of building his home, he finds supernatural happenings involving ancient evil and a possibly extradimensional Indian race with nefarious plans for those who sniff around their territory. Mike's investigations establish loyalties--not all of which can be trusted--but time is running out to find Erik, and Mike may have to go to another world about which he knows nothing to save his friend.I was so very confused reading this book because--I just can't find another way to say it--I felt like I was reading the first draft of a book by an author who'd never tried to write one before. And yet, I know this author has sold hundreds of millions of books and is a legend in his genre. The pacing was incredibly uneven, with most of the "action" involving Mike mulling over whether he was going to do things and telling other people what he was thinking of doing and then reiterating what he'd already said out loud. It's literally 300 pages of him trying to decide if he's going to do anything and what he's going to do if so. He develops a love interest in a girl he barely knows, out of nowhere (and suddenly starts calling her "honey"); the dialogue is all stilted and confusingly presented; the pidgin English uttered by the otherworld Indians was cringeworthy; and there was no motivation revealed for any of the characters to do anything they did. It was like a weird mixture of treasure-hunt story, rescue mission, murder mystery, and poorly fleshed-out supernatural tale, but none of those aspects came to fruition. And Mike himself was an inaccessible, tiring character; he's a hard-boiled stoic (of course) who literally sits around in diners and gets approached by clue-dropping townspeople--I mean they actually just walk up to him and sit down and tell him long-winded plot-relevant stories--and he wins a dozen fights against people who have apparently never been in fights in their lives because the plot says nobody ever thought of fighting them. I had a very hard time finishing it. I'm just baffled.
What do You think about The Haunted Mesa: A Novel (1988)?
This was a painful book to read. I had a tough time giving it a one-star rating, because I was such an avid reader of Louis L'Amour in my younger days; but the truth is, I hated this book. He spent 362 pages telling a story that could have been told in 150 or less. He kept rehashing the same themes over and over again, going nowhere. I've never read a book of his with so little action. Was he just trying to reach a quota for the number of words written? Whatever gave L'Amour the notion he could write science fiction anyway?
—Glenn Berg
Mike Ragland is the hero and sole point-of-view of Louis L'Amour's "science fiction" novel, The Haunted Mesa. When Mike receives a letter from a friend, Erik Hokart, asking him to meet him in the New Mexico desert where he's building a house on a mesa, Mike answers the call, spurred by the letter's sense of urgency. He makes the rendezvous but Erik does not. Erik is missing, but he has left Mike a record of events that led up to his disappearance in the form of a "daybook" journal delivered to him by a mysterious woman who seems not of this world. Mike is an investigator of things paranormal, best known for exposing charlatans. He's an author, world traveler, ex-cowboy, and general roustabout--just the sort of knowledgeable tough guy to tackle the mystery of Erik's disappearance with its other-worldly undertones, and fight off any evil-doers involved.In the course of Mike's investigation, he is aided by the local sheriff and followed by thugs who seem unfamiliar with the way our world works. Using Erik's journal as a guide, Mike follows a trail that leads to portals between dimensions, a ruined citadel containing a maze, "enforcers" that are unused to being resisted, a chief bad guy with steely fingers, a lost Indian tribe, giant lizards, and even the sasquatch make an appearance. All of the action, even in the other dimension, is set in the US desert southwest where Mike figures out the riddles, the maze, and shoots-and-punches bad guys and lizards to find his friend and win his Indian princess.The Haunted Mesa is generally listed as science fiction in the bibliography of Mr. L'Amour's works, though I would consider it more fantasy or speculative. It was apparently his last novel (published a scant two months before his death in 1988) and I suspect it was a break from most of what he had written before. He was, along with Zane Grey, a preeminent writer of the American Western genre. Many of his works were made into movies and TV (e.g., John Wayne's Hondo) and he still has a passionate following.Though set in contemporary times, I found The Haunted Mesa to be a thorough western in ambiance, theme, and structure despite it's speculative elements. And I mean "western" in the classic sense, like in John Ford movies and early 1960's television. The conflicts are very black-and-white, good-and-bad, with NO shades of gray. The point-of-view is with the protagonist, Mike Ragland, all the way through. Other characters come and go, but the tale told is Raglands, with no input from anybody else. He makes his way through the adventure two-fisted and armed--"He had no desire to kill anything," but then again, "nor did he have any desire to be a chance victim." So the bad guys (other dimensional Indians in this story) fall like regular Indians in a John Wayne film. We don't know why they're bad, they just are, and they're led by a guy who is the worst, also for no apparent reason. If I'm sounding down on the book, it's mostly because I'm really not a fan of this genre. I read the book just because I wanted to see what a Louis L'Amour book was like and it was pretty much what I expected. So while this kind of western is not my favorite brand of storytelling, I realize that it is for a lot of people. The aspects of the story I described in the last paragraph are why many people like L'Amour's works. I understand that and, if you're one of those people, you'll probably like The Haunted Mesa. And I would recommend it to you because I suspect Mr. L'Amour stepped out of his comfort zone with this work and offered his fans some food for thought.The main morsel of that thought food is the idea that the "paranormal" is really just the "normal" beyond the limits of what we've figured out. "There are more things in heaven and earth," in other words. On this point, Mr. L'Amour and I are in complete agreement, and he says it well:The terms we use for what is considered supernatural are woefully inadequate. Beyond such terms as ghost, specter, poltergeist, angel, devil, or spirit, might there not be something more our purposeful blindness has prevented us from understanding?Still, there are, in my opinion, technical problems with the story that kept me from giving it more than three stars.First, as I said, the POV never leaves the protagonist. That's not bad in itself, it's just that it underscores the one-dimensionality of this storytelling. The story really needs the viewpoints of some other characters to give it some depth and to better pull in the reader. Second, the conflicts were too black-and-white. This builds on my first point in that the secondary characters, especially the "bad" characters, have no depth and in some cases, barely react. The "other world" and its inhabitants are just bad for no reason (other than some intimation that their civilization had simply degenerated).Third, there is not enough feel for "place." The story is set in the desert southwest, which with its red-rock canyons and stately mesas is a dramatic place for someone not accustomed to it. It's barely described in the story. We're told that the view from the top of the mesa is beautiful, but the words don't show it to us or let us feel the characters interaction with their environment. For this setting that a big omission, especially with a story that's not meant to be geared exclusively for fans of westerns.Fourth, the romance was totally not believable. I guess that's part of the genre. The women are there as rewards for the cowboy hero defeating the bad guys, but Ragland seems to fall in love out of nowhere--when the object of his "affection" is not even around. When she is around, she doesn't react much to him in that way, and when he starts calling her "honey" it just sounds condescending. Oh well, I guess that's why cowboys kissed their horses at the end of the old movies.Fifth, Indians are depicted as savage and/or backwards. I won't belabor this point, I could write scads about it. Western fans would say that the cowboy hero has a lot of respect for the Indians. I would argue, however, that the classic cowboy hero's respect for the Indian is really just a "white man's burden" kind of condescension.Sixth, there were too many passages where Ragland's interior questionings were explicitly stated. There was far too much of this:What was he doing here , anyway? Why was he not back at Tamarron, going down to the San Juan Room for breakfast in a normal, sensible, attractive world? What was he doing out here at the end of everything?Some is OK, but too much is telling the reader what to think and how he should be reacting to the story. It amounts to "telling" and not "showing."Those are my criticisms but let me add that Mr. L'Amour was a good writer. He made a living at it for most of his life, writing a genre at a time when there was a big market for it and establishing a large and loyal following. This is apparent in his prose, which he handles capably and is able to turn a compelling phrase here and there:There were ancient mysteries, old gods who retired into the canyons to await new believers who would bring them to life once more.Phrases like that are what kept me reading to the end.The Haunted Mesa didn't do it for me, but if you're a fan of the classic western and are open to a little expansion on the basic storylines into speculative realms, you'll like this book.
—Ray Foy
oh my god! how can a book about a lost race of indians from another dimension be this mindnumbingly boring? I think I actually got dumber as I read this book. So a guy is building a house on a mesa in Utah/Arizona, and he manages to get himself kidnapped by indians from another dimension, who turn out to be related to the anasazi, an advanced civilization of native americans who lived in that area a thousand or so years ago. Now the Anasazi actually existed in real life, but they didn't disappea
—John
