Review by Marian Powell   —   April 15, 2003

How can a book by the world's most famous writer of westerns be considered lost? The answer is that Louis L'Amour is known as an author of westerns. Therefore, his one science fiction novel, is not well-known to readers of science fiction.

The Haunted Mesa is science fiction but placed in the west. The opening line is typical L'Amour "It was night and he was alone upon the desert." However, the next sentence, "It had been over an hour since he had seen another car..." tells us this is the modern world. Soon we learn that Mike Raglan, the man who is alone in the desert, is searching for a friend who had sent him a frantic request for help.

The first part of his book is his futile search and the uncovering of hints that there is something strange and terrible about a mesa where his friend had planned to build a home. Soon strangeness and danger is everywhere and a very strange and beautiful woman appears and then disappears. The story gathers speed until Mike Raglan plunges pellmell into the source of the mystery, an alternate universe and after that it's non-stop action as he learns the answers to all the questions raised in the first half of the story and then has to figure out how to get out alive..

By then he is on the track of an even greater mystery than the disappearance of one man. What happened to the Anasazi? The Anasazi were historically an ancient people who built a flourishing civilization several centuries before Columbus and abruptly vanished leaving intriguing ruins behind that today's archaeologists still puzzle over.

I couldn't summarize the plot in a few sentences even if I wanted to. Louis L'Amour was a great storyteller and he actually threw in enough stories for several novels here. Sadly, The Haunted Mesa was his last book. I have wondered if he planned a sequel for the novel is definitely flawed. It seems written in haste and would have been improved by some editing and a rewrite. It really contains too much plot, too many stories some of which seem inspired by the pulp science fiction of the 1930s.

It's still a great yarn, a kind of ghost story (except it has a science fiction rationale) to be told around a campfire. Underneath it all though, one senses a very serious purpose. Louis L'Amour is developing a theme that he had touched on in many of his regular westerns; that the history of the west as we know it is all wrong. We should listen to what the Native Americans have to say and not assume their stories are only myths. There is far more to the ancient history of the west than we know.

I don't imagine that Louise L'Amour expected his version of history as told in this novel to be taken seriously as anything more than an action-packed story. But I do suspect he was trying to make the reader think, to contemplate how little we really do know and how much there is to learn.