A story of expectations, the hazy memories of youth, and… oh yes, a plot and setting inspired by a famous TV show
Noah Barnes is a strange duck. He’s an astrophysicist. A bit of a loner. More importantly, he has joined an astronomy group going into the backcountry to get to some dark skies for observations. But he isn’t interested in astronomical observations and astrophotography. And gets annoyed when his own side project gets interrupted. He’s trying to find a phenomenon…
…a phenomenon that transported Billy Gather, a young boy, his sister and his father elsewhere several decades ago. The three disappeared, with just Billy returning two years later, halfway across the globe. No one believes in Billy’s story of dinosaurs and Neanderthals and strange artifacts in a valley lost to time. No one is serious, anyway. They figure it was some sort of gang thing gone wrong, an international kidnapping plot that whisked Billy across the globe. His father wasn’t eaten by a T-Rex, his sister wasn’t lost. All that is just books and stories. Right?
But there’s something I haven’t told you. For, you see, Noah is actually Billy Gather, the valley is real, and Noah’s attempts to return to the valley will accidentally draw in others and propel the plot of Peter Clines’s God’s Junk Drawer.
The way I’m going to continue this discussion is by quoting the theme song to a TV show from the 1970s:
“Marshall, Will and Holly,
on a routine expedition
Met the greatest earthquake ever known
High on the rapids
It swept their tiny raft
And plunged them down
A thousand feet below…
To the Land of the Lost.”
The high concept of God’s Junk Drawer is to take a solid SF approach to the existence of the Land of the Lost, having one of the expeditioners come back from the titular location, and decades later, seek a way to return to the valley. That high concept sold me right away and pushed me to getting a review copy of the book. I am of an age, like the author, to have seen the show in re-runs, and I wanted to see what a modern, more rigorous take on the concept might be like.¹
And that’s what we get. Noah and his unwilling companions are back in the valley, Noah on a quest to find his sister (his transport back to Earth was alone, and their father died a year before his escape). But Noah finds that the valley is larger, different than he remembered. He expected it to only be some years since his escape, especially with the time dilation he thinks is active—but he finds that centuries have passed. What’s more, many more people are in the valley now (from a variety of time periods), and Noah’s status is more than a bit of legend among them. The Gathers teamed up with another stranded figure in the valley: an android, Ross, and Ross has been around since Billy left, working with those who have arrived in the four centuries since. Ross does not, as it turns out, know what happened to Billy’s sister, which helps propel the plot further. The terrain is wider, larger, and landmarks are further apart. Billy’s valley and time there were a very different time, even through the lens of childhood.
Soon enough, Noah and his companions learn that the humans are not even in control of their own destiny, that a new and mysterious power has moved into the valley and controls its fate. So the novel plays a lot with Noah trying to reconcile his earlier knowledge of the valley with the current state of affairs and still trying to figure out what happened to his sister. And of course, survival in a much more uncertain world. To this end, Noah does get some flashback PoV sequences, as we see him arrive in the valley with his sister and father, and a few of their more memorable encounters. Clines is crafty, and these sequences help ground the theme (more on that in a bit) as well as show us the “then” state of affairs.
The technologic and scientific underpinnings of the valley come into play here. Noah thinks he knows what and where the valley is, but its true nature is part of the book’s journey. There are clues for a reader to make guesses, and all roads run to a mysterious character, the Castaway. The Castaway does not appear to exist in the present, so we only see them in flashback, and in Noah’s explanations of his past in the valley. The Castaway is a multidimensional being living in the center of the valley, and their multidimensional nature (including the dimension of time) makes communication with rather difficult. There’s a sadness, a pathos to the Castaway that reminds me, doubtless deliberate on Clines part, of the “intelligent Sleestak,” Enik, who finds himself marooned in this land just like the protagonists, and yet having a wider perspective on their journey. The teasing out of that is also part of the joy of reading and immersing oneself in the book.
The novel has a strong minor key on allusion, genre savviness and a love of genre. We get characters arguing about The Winter Soldier, for example, or making a Star Trek V reference, among many other genre references and touchstones. This is a novel that lives in a modern SF world, where everyone can and will likely understand or at least appreciate a casual reference to genre. Familiarity with pop culture is not needed to understand this book (just like, really, you need never have seen The Land of the Lost to appreciate this book), but it does add an extra layer to the proceedings.
That said, the novel also plays a lot with Land of the Lost itself. In the universe of this novel, that show never existed, although there were plenty of novels and books written about the Gathers and their adventures. And this all started with a routine rafting expedition (although instead of California, the Gathers disappeared while in Maine). Instead of the Pakuni from the show, we have Neanderthals as neighbors to the Gather family. There are obelisks, not pylons, and they act differently. There are plenty of dinosaurs—more species than in the TV series, in fact.
Clines takes this to the next level and makes allusions and references to Land of the Lost itself as things that are NOT in the valley. Several times there is an easter egg reference to the show, but through the weird lens of a world where that show did not exist. The author’s love of Land of the Lost and its formative aspects for him is on its fullest display here. Also, see the Castaway above.
There are plenty of inventions, speculation and surprises in Clines’s valley as well. This is not an expy of Land of the Lost; he has a considered and really interesting idea of when and where the valley is, why it scoops up people, and what it all means. We get to see his imagination unleashed on a Land of the Lost-like setting, and his speculative inspirations are wide and interesting. And some of what he finds are absolute surprises and delights for the reader, as well as perils. The valley is not a safe place in the least.
The underlying story of God’s Junk Drawer s, as I have started to tease out, two themes that emerge in the telling of the narrative. The first is “the past is a different country,” and that is triply true of one’s youth and upbringing. Billy Gather’s time in the valley is a hazy, almost golden age for Noah, and his memories of the valley being much more pastoral and peaceful (even with carnivorous dinosaurs) clash over and over against the actual reality of the valley now as Noah and his companions, and the inhabitants of the valley, find it. There’s a scene in the flashback PoV for Noah where Billy doesn’t really understand what is happening in an encounter with the Neanderthals, but the reader can and does put together the pieces quite quickly as to the true state of affairs.
The theme that is allied with this is the concept of science being willing to change or abandon hypotheses. Repeatedly, Noah shows that he is reluctant, at best, to change his mind to fit the actual facts on the ground, stubbornly insisting on an outdated and clearly incorrect information set. This is especially ironic and pointed given that Noah IS an astrophysicist, and his limited and incorrect understanding of the phenomenon of the valley allowed him (and accidentally others) to get back there in the first place.
Finally, late in the book, Noah does recognize that his assumptions are faulty, and that clinging to them is getting people hurt. It’s a real moment of growth for Billy, and this, combined with the theme of youth and memories, gives real ballast to the novel. This is a fun, entertaining, exciting and engaging read, and at the same time it has a strong emotional depth and heft.
Where I think the novel could have been slightly stronger is in its other protagonists. Billy/Noah’s journey is the main arc, and the remainder of those caught up in his trip to the valley, as well as the people who are already in the valley when they arrive, get much shorter shrift. Sure, some of them die, quickly or later, but it feels like there could have been much more done with the secondary characters. There are some interesting bits here and there (such as a guide who is not what he appears at all), but in general, the college students are more interchangeable in my mind than I really like.
The novel that comes to mind in thinking about God’s Junk Drawer is Chris Roberson’s Paragaea. That novel features a Russian cosmonaut, Leena Chirikov. Shortly after launching in the mid-1960s, she winds up in the alternate world of Paragea. The novel holds the tension of Leena trying to understand a world on her terms, while giving the reader enough clues to see it is a strange post-singularity world where civilization has regressed, manipulation of nanotech and the like is “magic,” and Leena clearly went through a wormhole. That novel features a major character, Hieronymous Bonaventure, from the British Royal Navy of the 18th century, who also fell into a wormhole some time ago and has been wandering around Paragaea ever since. To show his bonafides, Roberson has a scene where Leena stumbles upon a stone plaza that will be familiar to those who ever watched the show. Paragaea, like this novel, delights in its cultural references and allusions, but is more focused on the action-adventure side, sometimes following pulpy conventions.
I think that God’s Junk Drawer does a better job overall and balances the action and adventure and references, genre knowledge and allusions with an emotional core that gives the novel that extra note of emotional depth. It’s an entertaining and engaging read, and unlike some other novels that might tread in this space, succeeds at doing more than a relatively straightforward adventure story. LIke in Land of the Lost itself, while there’s plenty of action and adventure, God’s Junk Drawer contains veins of nuance, thoughtfulness and insight.
Highlights:
- Hard science meets a classic television show plot
- Strong emotional beats and character growth for Noah
- If you’ve ever been earwormed by the TV show theme song, this book is for you
Reference: Clines, Peter. God’s Junk Drawer [Blackstone Publishing, 2025].
¹ We are not going to discuss the Will Farrell Land of the Lost movie here, only to know that it does, in fact, exist.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
