I just finished reading Otis Adelbert Kline's Planet of Peril. Some few of you readers (if any) may possibly remember me talking about Otis and his work some two years ago, when I read his two Mars books. Essentially, he was a contemporary and less-skilled imitator of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his Venus series (to which this book belongs) was his first foray into planetary romance.
It was OK. Like I said, OAK was not as skilled a writer as ERB. Plots seem to unroll with remarkable swiftness in OAK books, and his characters seem occasionally to be bizarre.
Nonetheless, it was fun to read this. I've got access through Project Gutenberg to the other two Venus books by OAK, so I'll probably go ahead and finish them while I'm at it.
And I might even dig around in my basement and find my Lin Carter Callisto books. Honestly, as much as I thought Lin Carter was a talentless hack, I have to admit that his planetary romance in the form of the Callisto books seem to be the best expression of the subgenre other than ERB himself.
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