A Plague of Demons
Keith Laumer
159 pages
published in 1965
The advantage of reading a Keith Laumer novel is that they’re so short you can read two of them in the time it takes to get through even half a modern novel. So after Worlds of the Imperium I decided I would indulge myself with another Laumer novel I hadn’t read in over a decade. Reading them back to back it was interesting to see the simularities between the two novels. Both are partially set in Northern Africa, both star tough, grizzled loners whose name start with a B, and in both the hero gets involved in an operation way over his head and discovers the true reality of his world. Though really, that last bit is true of almost every straight science fiction novel Laumer ever wrote.
Not that Laumer wrote to a formula, but he knew what his strenghts were, what he liked to write about and what his readers liked to read. Certainly he always manages to hit my buttons. A Plague of Demons is no exception. It’s as fast-paced as the best of his work, with a nice dash of understated humour, in a writing style that owes a lot to the great American hardboiled tradition, as well as some of Ian Fleming’s work.