The Jungle Book (Sentinel zine)

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This article is about the Jim/Blair AU zine by Katrina Bowen. You may be looking for the Professionals story.
Zine
Title: The Jungle Book
Publisher: AMC Press, a Paranoid Production
Editor:
Author(s): Katrina Bowen
Cover Artist(s): TACS
Illustrator(s): TACS
Date(s): April 1998
Series?: No
Medium: print zine
Size:
Genre: slash, m/m, what if
Fandom: The Sentinel
Language: English
External Links: The Jungle Book at Divine Adoratrice's
The Jungle Book at Squidge.org
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The Jungle Book is a Jim/Blair slash novel by Katrina Bowen, published as a zine in April 1998 by AMC Press, and then later online. Available as print zine and PDF from Requiem Publications as of 2018. The novel is an AU with the premise of "what if Jim hadn't been rescued from Peru after 18 months?"

zine cover by TACS

The zine has 195 pages, a color cover and interior b/w illustrations by TACS.[note 1]

The first part of the story had been net published on 852 Prospect prior to the zine publication as Beyond the End in October 1997[1], as well as the story titled In the Jungle..., dated July 17, 1997.

After the exclusive zine period a text version of the complete novel without the illustrations was also web published in November 2000, though the author's page has since vanished.[2]

Unusual for the time, the story was written in first-person present-tense, and shifted POV between Blair and Jim with each chapter. Each chapter title was taken from poems and songs.

Comments by the Author, Printed in the Zine

This is an A/U; based on the premise that Jim didn't make it out of the jungles of Peru after eighteen months, as he did in the show. It all started in July 1997, as a silly little fantasy piece that barely lasted three pages. I allowed myself (oh, my arm needed twisting, it really did) to be convinced to extend it to a full story, called "Beyond the End." After several dozen people asked me about what was going to happen next, I decided a sequel was plainly in order. This is the end result.

I started writing this long before the "Warriors" episode that gave canonical information about the tribe Jim stayed with. The Direma are entirely my own invention, and they bear no relationship to any actual rain forest tribe. So many people deserve credit for this. There are the net fans that gave me steady input and kicks in the rear. There are the beta readers, primarily Margie, Lianne, and Lynn, who performed valiantly in the face of long dry spells alternating with feverish writing. I can't forget the publishers, without whom you wouldn't be reading this. TACS deserves special mention for her exquisite artwork. And finally, but always first to me, thank you to Gloria Lancaster for her encouragement, support, humor, and frankincense.

About the Chapter Titles

In the zine, the author explains the chapter titles:

Obviously, the title of this zine is from "The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling. (Fun Fanfic Fact: titles cannot be copyrighted.) All of the chapter titles are taken from poems and songs as follows:

1. BEYOND THE END (Denise Levertov - title of poem)

2. THE SOUND OF THE BREEZES THAT BLOW (Van Morrison - first verse of "Moondance")

3. ONE OF MANY CIRCLES (Wallace Stevens - poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird")

4. FALL WITH ME FOR A MILLION DAYS (Jimi Hendrix - "May This Be Love," 4th verse)

5. OUT HERE IN THE STARS (last verse of "Lost in the Stars " by Kurt Weill)

6. WHEN ALL IS TOLD (Louis MacNeice - poem, "The Sunlight on the Garden")

7. BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAY (Son House, song title)

8. NOT EVEN THE RAIN (e.e. cummings - poem, "somewhere i have never traveled")

9. IF I KNEW (Laura Love, song title)

10. HEARTBEAT (Buddy Holly, song title)

Excerpt: The Opening Paragraphs

Shit. Something bites me on the back of my neck, and it starts to itch right away. I want to scratch it but that's a httle hard to do with my hands tied behind my back. I can't do anything about the insect bites, just hke I can't do anything about the sweat pouring into my eyes, or about my hair falling all over the place, or about being scared to death.

Trying to be discreet about it, I lean forward a httle to catch Dr. Vaughan's attention. Doesn't work. He's staring around at the people surrounding us, speaking every language he knows, but none of them react to anything he says. He tries to rise off his knees - I guess he's planning on launching into his "God's Gift to Academia" act - but one of the warriors levels a spear directly at his throat. Looks like he's not impressed.

Vaughan has the sense to settle back slowly, and the spear is withdrawn. I start breathing again. Welcome to the wonderful world of field anthropology, Sandburg.

Contents

Sample Interior Art

The zine contains numerous black and white interior illustrations by TACS. Below is a sampling.

Reactions and Reviews

Unknown Date

[awena]
A fabulous Sentinel slash novel describing how Jim and Blair first met in rain forests of Peru. A very sweet, loving tale of two very different men who realize how much they complete one another[3]
Observations of a Slash Slut: I loved this story. Though AU, Jim and Blair remain very in-character. Katrina is a wonderful author and has given us a beautiful first-time story. I think the awards she won were greatly deserved. This starts out with Jim not having made it out of the jungle after his crash in Peru. Blair and another man are captured by the tribe Jim lives with. They are going to be killed until Jim intervenes on their behalf. As Protector of the Tribe he may choose to place Blair under his "protection" thus allowing Blair and his companion to live. The tribe is watching to make sure of the truth of this claiming so Jim and Blair have no choice but to follow through. I suppose this first-time would be considered non-con sex, since Jim and Blair would not have engaged in sex at this point were it not for the do-or-die scenario. Blair's companion feels that Blair has betrayed them by willingly accepting this means of surviving, and begins his own campaign to get even. Meanwhile Jim and Blair learn to trust each other and find love along the way. Once they make it back to civilization, another little adventure awaits them. This was a truly intriguing story, which I actually called in a sick day from work so I could finish it! I just couldn't put it down once I started. As Katrina stated in the Author's Notes, she began this work before Warriors aired so the tribal information is not canon.[4]
[Angie's Rec]
But Don't Take My Word For It!: I had to think long and hard about whether I wanted to buy this one, because I refuse to buy anything in zine form that was previously on the net. As expensive as these things are, I want all new reading material. (Unless it's something like "best of the net" which is pretty well self-explanatory.) Anyway, I knew the first story was a previously net published one, but I liked it so much, I finally went ahead and bought it. It was worth it. There was a lot more to the story than just what had appeared on the net. Yes, Jim and Blair get back to America, but that's all I'm going to say about it. This is a good quality zine, (I can't tell you how much I love spiral bindings as opposed to combs) and it's a good continuation of the story. Also has some beautiful cover art. ;-)[4]
[Kathy]
First time. Angst. Totally droolable illustrations from TACS. If you are any kind of Sentinel fan, you definitely need to add this to your collection. There are what I would consider "essential" 'zines for the TS fan and this would be one of about five.[4]
[ratcreature]
A classic of the genre "what if Jim hadn't been rescued after 18 months?", and still one of best. The Peruvian jungle, Jim, Blair... and best of all, this one has a plot to sustain it.[5]

1998

[Sandy Herrold]
"Jungle Book is the expansion of a wonderful Sentinel a/u net novella by Katrina Bowen.

Why is this "not quite" a review? Because I didn't read it, I devoured it! (and three hours after I got it, I had to give it its next reader--so I don't even have ordering info.) But I can say a few things:

One, if you were afraid that there wouldn't be enough new stuff to make it worth it, fear not. The original novella (cleaned up and changed a little) is 63 pages of the 193 page zine. Lots of new stuff, and much of it is lovely.

Two, if you were afraid Katrina'd ruin a good thing by continuing this, again, fear not. The new stuff is both a logical extention of the original, and yet very fresh and involving (and occasionally...hot!).

Nuts and Bolts: The zine is *clean*. I didn't notice any typos and only a very few layout glitches. The color cover is vibrant, and there are many interior pieces of b/w art.

For the typographically nitpicky: The layout is, um, servicable. Each paragraph has both an indent (a BIG one), and a full extra line, which I find both unattractive and a waste of paper and expense. And I wish that the editors would use em dashes rather than hyphens, and curly quotes instead of straight ones, but I fully realize that most fans do not give a damn about such things.

(On the other hand, since one of the arguments for Zine publishing rather than web publishing is the nicer formatting still possible on paper, I think this is worthy of commenting -- if this entire story had been web published, I would have formatted it into just over 1/2 as many pages, as finickily as I like to. On the other hand, very few fans indeed have the ability to print off color covers like this yet. Enough rambling.) The zine is 23$ by mail, and a darn good read.[6]

[anonymous]
My main quibble with the layout is that I *know* Katrina had this thing formatted with italics, etc. (err, I was one of the beta readers) -- but apparently whatever program the publishers put it in stripped out her formatting, and it never got put back in. So some of the rhythm/emphasis is missing. In fairness, though, that's probably not something that will be all that obvious to most people; it's just a little added something that would've been nice.

That said -- it's a very good story, and worth the money. I bought the zine even though I've already got the rough draft on my hard drive. I wanted to see the final polished version, and to see what happened with the art -- and I'm glad I did.[6]

1999

[livia]
Who doesn't love fuck-or-die fantasies? And this, a fuck-or-die jungle fantasy-- with emotion and mood and character-- wow. Read it, then read the expanded AU version.[7]
[Ishi72]
A fabulous Sentinel slash novel describing how Jim and Blair first met in rain forests of Peru. A very sweet, loving tale of two very different men who realize how much they complete one another.[8]
[raonaid]
Simply the most awesome Jim/Blair story ever! This is an AU story where Jim was never rescued from Peru, and Blair's plane crash lands in the jungle and he meets Jim there. Yes, boys and girls, Claiming is involved! Right up there with 'A Fish Called Krycek', this is one of my favorite zines! I adore it! If you own no other Sentinel slash zines, you *must* own this one! Trust me! ;-)[9]

2000

[Sandy Herrold]
I was [previously] complaining specifically about net novelists who just hand their stories over to publishers who turn out adequate zines. Maybe naming names will help, maybe it won't. I love the original story Jungle Book, and I was glad that Katrina decided to add to it and make it a novel. TACs added a beautiful cover, and made it available widely and efficiently as a zine. That's great. Tacs is a great publisher. I thought the interior layout sucked, and the editing was not as tight as I wished. But the layout and editing was consistent with TACs' other zines, so I assumed that Katrina knew what she was getting into, and I wanted to point out to other net novelists out there, that there might be other choices -- or other ways of working with the editors we do have.[10]
[anonymous]
"The Jungle Book": As most of you know, this began life as a short story in answer to a story challenge, then graduated to a longer story, then to a novella. Alternate Universe -- Blair goes on an expedition and falls into the hands of a native tribe and their adopted Sentinel. One of my favorite zines, it pulls off well the difficulty of any AU story: changing the circumstances of the characters' lives and still extrapolating their characters logically (and recognizably) from those changed circumstances. The created tribal characters are quite appealing, the bad guys satisfyingly nasty. The development of the relationship under these circumstances is interesting to observe. My only problem with this story is the loose ends the author left. I asked Katrina about this once -- she said it was a deliberate choice on her part (she did something similar in another novella she wrote, "Picture Perfect," which is an amnesia story), "because life has loose ends." Which may be true, and which worked well for "Picture Perfect," but here it simply made the story feel quite . . . unfinished.[11]

2004

[at crack_van]
The best “Jim and Blair meet in Peru” AU I’ve read, The Jungle Book is well written and, that most elusive of qualities in an AU, believable. Featuring a richly imagined setting and wonderful characterization, it's a long and fascinating read.[12]
[at crack_van]
Normally I'm not much on the "fuck or die" method of first meeting,lol, but this worked really well.[12]
[at crack_van]
FYI, you're going to lose a big chunk of time to "The Jungle Book" it's long, meaty, OMG hot and well I ended up saving it to my HD for ease of rereading.[12]

2016

[squidgiepdx]
The Jungle Book by Katrina Bowen - a Sentinel AU novel where Jim never made it out of the jungle[13]

Notes

  1. ^ ratcreature said: Though at least judging by my print copy the interior illustrations might have initially been in color as well and just reproduced b/w, as they don't really come across that well as b/w illustrations, but look like the color cover would copied in grayscale.

References

  1. ^ Katrina Bowen. "Beyond The End". 852 Prospect. Archived from the original on 2006-05-20. Retrieved 2009-02-07.
  2. ^ adoratrice (2001-03-03). "The Jungle Book". Archived from the original on 2013-10-16. Retrieved 2009-02-07.
  3. ^ awena. "Zine Recommendations and Reviews". Awena's Homepage. Archived from the original on 2001-11-21.
  4. ^ a b c "The Jungle Book". Destinies Entwined. Archived from the original on 2008-03-09. Retrieved 2011-03-23.
  5. ^ ratcreature. "Through the Looking Glass -- Alternate Universe Recs -- The Sentinel". ratcreature.net. Archived from the original on 2008-06-18.
  6. ^ a b In 1998, Sandy Herrold posted this in-depth review to the Virgule mailing list. It is reposted here with permission. The second comments are quoted anonymously.
  7. ^ livia (1999-06-21). "*livia's sentinel picks*". Fiction by debchan. Archived from the original on 2002-02-20.
  8. ^ Ishi72 (1999-10-08). "'Zine Recs and Reviews". Archived from the original on 2013-01-12.
  9. ^ raonaid (1999-09-29). "Raonaid's Zine Recommendations". Archived from the original on 1999-10-08. Retrieved 2022-04-18.
  10. ^ Sandy Herrold's comment at Prospect-L post in September 7, 2000, quoted with permission
  11. ^ anonymous comment at Prospect-L post in July 6, 2000, quoted with permission.
  12. ^ squidgiepdx (2016-03-26). "Free - multiple Sentinel & 1 X-Files slash zines!". Dreamwidth. Archived from the original on 2024-04-08.
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