by William Schoell
1989 Leisure
"grotesque reverse fellatio"
A widower photographer joins his jerk professor friend's expedition to El Lobo, an archeological site buried under a mile high mesa in the Southwest. Takes a 100 pages to get moving, but once it does it's non-stop monster carnage. Carnivorous slugs burst our of orifices, grow house sized, and destroy whole towns. Psychic assaults drive the characters to madness. I was afraid the titular dragon would a giant iguana cop-out as implied by the cover, but nope, we get a full blown, fire breathing, people eating dragon.
Had the feel that Schoell was just winging it, and later felt he had to explain things via a psychically delivered exposition dump. Also, it kept bothering me how there was a sense of massive scale, but had to shrink things back down to get the story moving. The mesa is 5000 feet above the desert floor, and the interior catacombs dig deep under ground level, but we have characters (some elderly) popping back and forth four times the height of the Empire State Building.
Could have done with a trim of half the pages, but happy to see full blown monster attacks.
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