Review: The Bride of Osiris - Otis Adelbert Kline

Otis Adelbert Kline didn’t always look to Edgar Rice Burroughs for his inspiration, although his short novel THE BRIDE OF OSIRIS (serialized in the August, September, and October 1927 issues of WEIRD TALES) does have a subterranean civilization in it. SPOILERS AHEAD. That civilization, modeled after ancient Egypt, is located under Chicago, as young man-about-town Alan Buell discovers when his beautiful fiancée Doris Lee is kidnapped from a nightclub by some shady characters. The local head of detectives in the police department appoints Buell as a special agent and partners him with another detective, two-fisted Dan Rafferty. Buell and Rafferty track the kidnappers but wind up captured themselves and taken underground, where they encounter the usual evil high priests, sacrificial rites, and daring rescues, escapes, and recaptures. Once again, Kline mixes some A. Merritt with his Burroughs and throws in a little Sax Rohmer as well.

If you can buy the premise—and it’s a real stretch—this is a mildly entertaining yarn. There’s nothing you haven’t read before, but there’s plenty of action, a colorful setting, and some despicable villains. However, I was never able to work up a lot of enthusiasm about it. For one thing, Dan Rafferty’s grotesque Irish brogue is so thick and overdone that he’s really annoying, even though he does some admirable things and seems to be a good guy. For another, the plot seems to be building up to a climax that it never delivers. I know, you’re supposed to review the book as it is, not the way you wish it was, but I really felt like we were going to have a squad of hardboiled Chicago cops with tommy guns bust in at the end to do epic battle with a horde of crazed Egyptian cultists. Instead, although there’s some action at the end and the prospect of apocalypse, the story sort of just peters out.

There was a chapbook reprint of THE BRIDE OF OSIRIS published in the Seventies by Robert Weinberg, with a cover by Frank Hamilton, and there are e-book and trade paperback editions available on Amazon now, but it never received any sort of mass market reprint. The length probably had something to do with that, but the fact that it’s just not very good probably did, too. There are some nice scenes and concepts in THE BRIDE OF OSIRIS, but to me, overall, it’s a misfire.