DEATH'S DARK DOMAIN: The WILDest Doc Savage Adventure Yet!

Our hero has had some truly wild rides in the All-New WILD Adventures of Doc Savage, but none wilder than Death’s Dark Domain.

When I learned that Death's Dark Domain is a sequel to the Doc classic, Fortress of Solitude, I had to dig out my old Bantam paperback for another go-round. I didn't read it, though, because I discovered I had a more complete version of the story in the first volume of the Nostalgia Ventures two-fer series. The Nostalgia Ventures edition features all the original art from the October 1938 issue of the pulp, so I read that instead.

According to Will Murray's introduction, Street & Smith gave the pulp story extra promotion. Readers had been teased with hints about Doc's arctic hideaway for five years, and their first peek inside was treated as a special event. Lester Dent apparently agreed, and gave the story a special villain, an evil genius and master hypnotist who calls himself John Sunlight.

As a story, Fortress of Solitude is pretty standard stuff (weird menace, gang of thugs, Doc and/or his aides getting captured), and we get only two paragraphs describing the interior of Doc's dome. But John Sunlight is undeniably special - if only for the fact that he escapes Doc's clutches, taking with him a score of deadly devices, and returns two months later to battle Doc again in The Devil Genghis.  Death's Dark Domain takes place in between those two adventures, as Doc and the gang face the consequences of Sunlight's theft.

In Fortress of Solitude, you may recall, evil John Sunlight broke into Doc’s Arctic hideaway and stole a bunch of WWDs (Weapons of Weird Destruction) that Doc had appropriated from assorted mad scientists. In true bad-guy fashion, Sunlight sold one to each side in a small European war. Now, in this previously untold tale by Will Murray, while Sunlight is off somewhere enjoying the proceeds, Doc and his crew are stuck trying to clean up the mess.

And it’s one hell of a mess. Some of the many menaces they’re up against are monsters they can't see, a sudden blackness that makes everything dark as the inside of a lump of coal, and a squadron of bats the size of airplanes. Add to that the usual quota of quirky villains and dangerous dames (some even quirkier and more dangerous than usual) and you’ve got one of the toughest cases the Savage gang has ever tried to crack.

As always, Will Murray’s homage to Lester Dent’s style is dead-bang perfect. And there are many more Wild adventures to come.