After reading the first half of the Sherlock Holmes canon, I decided to read Arthur Conan Doyle's ‘The Lost World’ and found it equally enjoyable. Incredibly, the novel reads like a contemporary thriller. For instance, today’s average reader of H.G. Wells’ classic, ‘The Time Machine’ (written decades later) could find it semantically unwieldy by comparison.Doyle bookends the plot with a romance and uses a taught exposition to thrust the reader into the primeval jungles of the ’lost world’. A plot reminiscent of the Holmes short stories served to keep me in suspense. The author succeeds in tackling the fantasy genre with more than skill; Rather, meeting the challenge like the true innovator.
