Cover blurb
Kagur is a warrior of the Blacklions, fierce and fearless hunters in the savage Realm of the Mammoth Lords. When her clan is slaughtered by a frost giant she considered her adopted brother, honor demands that she, the last surviving Blacklion, track down her old ally and take the tribe’s revenge. This is no normal betrayal, however, for the murderous giant has followed the whispers of a dark god down into the depths of the earth, into a primeval cavern forgotten by time. There, he will unleash forces capable of wiping all humans from the region—unless Kagur can stop him first.
My thoughts
Called to Darkness is a fantasy adventure novel set in the tabletop roleplaying game universe of Pathfinder. For the non-nerds out there, Pathfinder is a fantasy setting spun from an earlier edition of the more popular Dungeons & Dragons, so it incorporates many of the same creatures, themes, and worldbuilding elements of D&D, but remains its own thing. The novel is part of a series of standalone adventures called “Pathfinder Tales” that help flesh out the setting beyond what is found in the rulebooks for the game. Dragons are more common in Pathfinder than dinosaurs, but Called to Darkness obviously has more of the latter, or it wouldn’t be reviewed here.
Pathfinder is set on the planet Golarion, which is Middle Earth but with a larger variety of fantasy races. Kagur is a female warrior in a northern tundra that is home to barbarian tribes and Pleistocene megafauna. During a tribal feast, Kagur is about to make barbarian babies with another warrior when her adopted brother—a frost giant named Eovath—goes on a rampage and kills everyone in the village but her. She vows vengeance against Eovath, but before that can happen, he disappears into a vast cavern system below the planet’s surface in search of a dark god he believes is calling to him. Kagur teams up with the shaman of a neighboring tribe and together the pair pursue her brother deep into the depths until they enter a giant cavern lit by a miniature sun, which supports a jungle teeming with dinosaurs, cavemen, cave-orcs, and an evil race of lizard people.
Fantasy is a genre that I enjoy, and while I’ve rarely played roleplaying games outside their video game adaptations, I have read many rulebooks for the lore about their settings as well as countless D&D and Pathfinder novels. Sadly, the problem with many fantasy stories featuring dinosaurs is the reptiles usually aren’t integral to the plot. A long time ago, I reviewed the D&D novel The Ring of Winter, noting its surprising lack of dinosaurs for a book set in a lost world of dinosaurs. Called to Darkness doesn’t have the same issue as there are plenty of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts in its pages, but the author doesn’t do anything interesting with them. The book is less of a novel than a collection of occurrences, often involving Kagur fighting some creature from Pathfinder’s bestiary before moving on to another fight in the next chapter. The characterization is almost non-existent and the writing is dry and unimaginative. The rivalry between Kagur and Eovath is supposed to provide the dramatic conflict, but we are only given the tiniest glimpses of their sibling relationship, making it impossible for readers to relate when the author attempts to communicate Kagur’s emotions about having to kill her brother.
The prehistoric beasts here are just obstacles to be overcome, although there are a couple of fights—one involving an ankylosaurus in a temple, the other a one-on-one rumble with a T. rex—that were appropriately bloody and kind of fun. Still, there was nothing here that gripped me, and as a fan of both fantasy and paleofiction, I should’ve been an easy sell.
Trivia
- Richard Lee Byers is the author of more than 40 fantasy and horror novels, according to his Wikipedia page.
- In an afterward, Byers states that Called to Darkness is a homage to the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote a series of novels set in a hollow earth inhabited by prehistoric survivors.
- The novel’s setting is “Deep Tolguth,” one of a series of nation-sized caverns in the interior of the planet, each supporting a different ecosystem. It is connected to a valley on the planet’s surface called Tolguth, which is a “lost valley” that also contains dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals.
Prehistoric Pulp 
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