Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Beneath the Planet of the Apes by Michael Avallone

Beneath the Planet of the Apes
by Michael Avallone
1970 Bantam Books

22918070

A second spaceship goes through the same wormhole and drops off astronauts at the same time and place, where they meet the same human woman from the first film.  Our hero Brent is captured, escapes, and goes into the Forbidden Zone of post-apocalypse New York City where he meets a bunch of Brain Guys who worship an atom bomb before an army of gorillas attack.

Fairly standard retelling of the movie, the only difference is that here Taylor accidentally sets off the bomb that destroys Earth instead of doing it on purpose as in the movie, reportedly from the original script.

Avallone does his usual bit of having dramatic paragraph breaks to pad out the page count.  I don't recall having issues with his prose in other books I've read, but it's pretty clumsy at times.  There's a running motif around the phrase "milk of human kindness" which comes up four times.  It ends with an appropriately haunting eulogy to planet Earth.

Included in Planet of the Apes Omnibus 1 in ebook from Amazon

Paperback from AbeBooks

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