Wayne Thomas O’Conner is a man of many of talents who lives a profoundly Christian life where though his various endeavors form home ministry, to international book distribution, and publishing and keeping in print of at least a dozen of his own religious and non- religious titles among them Adventurer’s Horn. Though many of Wayne’s titles are available in Amazon Kindle format his omnibus Adventurer’s Horn is a kind of delightful anachronism, which evokes the kind of home my grandparents might have grown up in the last decades of the 19th century when books were precious, and a family might only have three books, the family Bible, The Sears Catalog, the latest issues and the old ones for the back house, and a book like the Adventurer’s Horn which would have something for everybody.

“Monkey Spectacles Adventures” had a surrealistic tone to it that took the reader through a fever dream that made one think of the early 20st century American prairie poet Vachel Lindsey (1879-1931). Particularly the way the story moved from the surreal to the mundane and then in the end left the reader with an open ended question just as all the really good stories do as they construct a world crafted out of narrative grounded in subtext which then exploded into a world of its own.

Two other stories really caught my attention not so much because they were and exercise world building but “Worm Farm Part One” & “Worm Farm Part Two” really wrote or if you will chanted back into existence a mid-Twentieth American world which is rapidly receding where magazine had advertisements for things you could send away for like correspondence courses, trusses, or a hundred baby chicks which would show via the US mail at some point in the future in a world with the cloud tracking numbers or cell phones. Here you should really pay attention to something I realized is being done in “Worm Farm Part One” & “Worm Farm Part Two.” That is to say Wayne Thomas O’Conner has not so much written a couple of stories but he has re-created the kind of culture where we see his readers actually recreated and light thrown on what is an alien world for most of us well into the second decade of the 21st Century.

Time and space allow me to only attend to one more of stories in the collection “The Parable of The Magnificent Statue” which is a Parable of creation and inspiration. Here is where Wayne Thomas O’Conner shows himself capable of rising to the level of the one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time Jack Vance in his 1967 Hugo award winning story “For Breath I Tarry ”

I have read all the other material work and I feel confident in giving my highest broadest recommendation to Adventurer’s Horn both as a text and an artifact as at home in a university library special collections as in a public library special collection. I have noticed that I have already started to read my copy to pieces and there is a certain persistence of imagery in my mind from the stories I liked the most. But don’t pay too much attention what I like, buy the book for what I know you will like and then watch it sort of hang around as it gets read to pieces, which is always the sign of a great omnibus.