Entry 24: The Interior World

Indy Timeline: 1929

The final novel in the Rob MacGregor Indiana Jones series harkens back to the third book in the series - "Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils".  As was the case with "Veils", the Interior World takes away from MacGregor's strength at creating believable historical environments and instead puts Indy squarely in a fantasy world.  As I've written in the past, MacGregor is great at creating sequences in diverse settings from the early 20th century - cities like Paris, Chicago and London come alive for the reader.  In the Interior World, we instead experience Indiana Jones' journey into a land of fantasy with ghosts, dinosaurs, and mythical creatures. 

The book opens up on a promising note- with Indy on an archeological dig on Easter Island.  I was looking forward to more of both of these things - it is surprisingly rare that we get to experience the famous archeologist actually doing archeology and Easter Island is inherently fascinating.  However, this sequence is a short one, and we are soon whisked away from the island to pursue a mission from Marcus Brody to investigate a friend of his that has gone missing. 

Once again, the formula here is very similar to Seven Veils, but rather than searching for Percy Fawcett, Indy is tracking down someone named Hans Beitelheimer.  The story took a different turn here, with a twist of horror as Indy finds himself in an unsettling shanty town known to attract a certain ghost ship.  Following fights with an octopus and leeches, Indy finds himself whisked away into the center of the earth where he must eat fish eggs called "nalca" to stay alive.  His reason for being sucked into this mysterious world revolve around a madman from the interior world obtaining the ALICORN from the previous novel and his plans to join forces with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. 

Needless to say, like Seven Veils, the plot here is weird and "outside the box".  I felt like it had an "Alice in Wonderland" feel to it, in which every page brought me deeper down the rabbit hole.  People turn into animals, Indy finds himself in a field filled with majestic unicorns - gah.  For all the weirdness, I did find myself wanting to read on to find out how the hell this bizarre story would resolve itself and square with the rest of the canon. 

Unfortunately, I found the ending to be a big cop-out.  The ultimate deus ex machina - even more so than in "Veils" - in which Indy and Marcus sit in Brody's office and speculate that "maybe it was all just a dream or a hallucination", but "we'll never know for sure".  Overall, the specific sequences in the novel are well written and spooky at times (the handprint on Indy's chest from the ghost in the bar, for example).  However, I was left feeling like this story wandered too far off track from the originals and never quite found its way back.  I really enjoyed MacGregor's Indy books, but this one ends the series on its weakest note.

Indy Rating: 6.5/10