I was unprepared for the nature of this book, despite Red Watson’s quote on the back (“Too far out for Cave Books.”). It is better to be prepared or should one enter the unknown as a first explorer, meeting the thrills and challenges as they come? For the reader who prefers the former, be aware that Dirt, Danger, and Darkness is a collection of speleo short stories in the macabre sci-fi vein—caving fantasy in the extreme, humor at its most bizarre. Paul Steward has previously put much of this material out in grotto newsletters and on the Internet, and through this collection now makes it available to the wider caving community. He has done us a favor.

Because Paul Steward is a caver, he is able to lend a degree of credibility to the stories that holds the reader’s interest—what happens to the characters may be improbable, but we can still relate to them because they attend boring grotto meeting, use rigging, crawl into insidiously small leads in hopes of major finds, tediously debate the pros and cons of electric versus carbide lamps and otherwise act as “normal” as we know each other to be. And what does happen to them is the stuff of which cavers’ nightmares and spelean fantasies are made of—grotesque creatures, calamitous accidents, unexplained geological transformations, even out-of-world events. But above all that, Steward has a keen sense of humor. I especially like the “Hell Tour” to Gory Caverns—Mary the tour guide has methods for protecting the resource that have probably crossed the minds of more than one conscientious ranger.

This is not a book of outstanding artistic merit—the noncaver will find the underground theme repetitive, the surreal events are often not convincing enough, the violence is too gratuitous, and the gore is gawkish, not gripping—yet I think Dirt, Danger, and Darkness will none-the-less find a welcome spot on most cavers’ bookledge. We are drawn to the cave motif as an outpouring of our souls; haven’t we all occasionally calmed ourselves on hearing an unexplained sound by giving voice to some wild imagining? Do we not laugh and make bizarre jokes to rid ourselves of some primeval terror of the underground? Paul Steward has given us some fun armchair reading and if it sends only an occasional shiver down our compressed vertebrae, then he has amply succeeded. The three Ds in the title seem to be a reminder that the power of suggestion is especially acute in the third dimension. For myself, I can honestly state that my first cave trip after reading this book was different for the new strange thoughts that occasionally came to mind.