War Eagles

Angel Gate's series of new novels under the banner ""Ray Harryhausen Presents"" gets off to a less than stellar start with Macek's novelization of an unfilmed screenplay from Merian C. Cooper, the director-producer who created the legendary King Kong. In 1939, test pilot J.P. Brandt has been bounced from the Army Air Corps after his misguided effort to revive a canceled weapons program leads to his crashing a prototype long-range bomber. Given a second chance by the designer of the plane, Brandt agrees to pilot another one for a publicity-stunt trip around the globe. En route, Brandt's Polish copilot secretly gets the flight off course, and near the South Pole a giant eagle attacks the plane, causing it to land on an unknown island populated by dinosaurs, as well as a community of Norsemen. When Brandt finds that a detachment of Nazis is also on the island, he enlists his new-found Norse allies and their avian mounts to battle them. Some readers may find the plot bears too many similarities to King Kong (a lost world populated by giant creatures and living dinosaurs) as well as to countless other tales of lost civilizations.