Allen A Debus

Prehistoric Monster Mash Allen A Debus

Thirty-five years in the making!! Not your usual 'dinosaur book'! A monstrously MASSIVE tome -- 47 chapters, half a dozen of which have not been previously printed!! A nostalgic romp--a tour-de-force wending through the murky annals of dinosaurian & dino-monster pop-culture, from Jules Verne through the Dinosaur Renaissance heyday! Allen A. Debus has written nine books addressing pop-cultural interest in prehistoric creatures, both real and fictional. This new selection has ten main sections addressing "Revenge of the 'Lost World' movie monsters," "Hopeful Monsters," "Apes & Godzilla," "Paleo-books," "Paleo-pioneers," "Odd Evolution," "Dinosauriana," "G-Fest Panels," "Chicagoland's Paleo-world," and" "Exo-paleontology." Topics explored include: dino-monster movies, paleo-fiction, dinosaur books, 'mad' scientists hellbent on Frankensteinian science & awful evolution, King Kong 'versus' Godzilla in film and novelizations, pioneers both of the dinosaur movie industry and in paleontology, paleoimagery & paleoart, science fictional dinosaurs, dinosaurabilia, 1990s dino-displays around Chicago, a sense of the 'apocalyptical' conveyed via paleo-sci-fi, and much more. While not 'all-encompassing, ' this new work paints broad brush strokes of the 'dinosaurs-in-popular-culture' genre (augmenting Allen's prior subject-matter writings). Most chapters were previously printed in increasingly hard-to-collect fanzines, some dating back to 1984. For those of you familiar with Allen's popular fanzine & dino-mag writings but lacking access to numerous individual publications in which many were printed originally, this new collection is a nifty way of acquiring over four dozen of his articles, gathered here and reorganized with sufficient inter-connectivity into sub-themed chapter format--'conversational' in tone.