Flappers & Fiction

In May 1889, Frank Brown leads a railroad survey expedition down the treacherous Colorado River through uncharted canyons. Starting from Green River, Utah, with six boats and fourteen men, they navigate the Labyrinth and Stillwater canyons before entering the deadly Cataract Canyon. The expedition faces constant disasters: capsized boats, lost supplies, and violent rapids nicknamed “fountains” that shoot deadly waves without warning. What began as an ambitious engineering survey becomes a desperate fight for survival in the most dangerous waterway in America.

Young Harry Fenton arrives in the heat of a Burmese port with a head full of romantic notions about the gentle wisdom of nature. Under the guidance of the cynical Captain Weatherly, he marvels at the dockyard elephants piling timber with the precision of hired laborers. Harry is charmed by their apparent cleverness; he believes a few sugar-cakes have secured him a loyal friend. But when he returns empty-handed one afternoon, he discovers that a beast’s memory is sharp, but its gratitude is dangerously short-lived.

At Stephenson, two hundred and sixty miles from Memphis, a passenger collapses with yellow fever. Armed men at the station threaten to shoot anyone who lands the dying man. The passengers abandon him in an empty car and the train flies on. This is not the whole story. It is merely how the narrator arrives, eventually, at a mountain church where a lean preacher scolds him for taking notes during a sermon about a dead woman’s cooking.

William “Billy” Winner was once the undisputed king of the show, a lion tamer with forty terrible wounds to prove his mettle. But in the yellow gaslight of the menagerie tent, he sits as a forgotten laborer, tracing the “war maps” on his own skin while the crowds cheer for newer novelties. From a terrifying nap inches from a stalking tiger to the night he carried a leopard through a burning museum, this narrative strips away the circus sequins to reveal the brutal, fascinating reality of a life lived inside the cage.

Professor Pundit has traveled the length of the Lower Niger for one specimen, the Yauri crocodile, a beast said to carry a jaw unlike anything else in Western Africa. Every attempt has failed him. So he sends for Gezo, the most feared hunter in the district, who arrives looking rather too slight to cast a proper shadow in the noonday sun. What Gezo does next, armed with nothing but a roll of ox-hide and a knife, is not for the faint of heart.