This original anthology, from the authors and editors who brought you the Gaslight Sherlock Holmes series, sees Challenger and his stalwart companions including the reporter Malone, big game hunter Lord John Roxton and the skeptical colleague Professor Summerlee, travel across space and witness the ravages of time, narrowly eluding a dinosaur’s bite only to battle against the invasive red bloom of alien foliage, and then plunge deep into the mysteries hidden within the Earth and reach out to the moon and into the heart of the unknown. Strap yourself in for chills, thrills, and challenges to the unknown in exciting new worlds and lost places with literature’s foremost scientific adventurer. Featuring stories by: Simon Kurt Unsworth, Stephen Volk, Guy Adams & James Goss, Lawrence C. Connolly, Mark Morris, Josh Reynolds, John Takis, Wendy N. Wagner, Andrew J. Wilson and J. R. Campbell. With an Introduction by Christopher Roden.

Three years after the events that took place in The Lost World, Professor Challenger urgently summons his fellow to a meeting. Oddly, he requires each to bring an oxygen cylinder with him. What he soon informs them is that from astronomical data and just received telegraphs of strange accidents on the other side of the world, he has deduced that the Earth is starting to move through a region of space containing something poisonous to humankind.

Professor Challenger returns to test one of his theories by digging underground and poking the planet in this classic adventure story. In The Lost World, Professor Challenger and reporter Edward Malone found dinosaurs living in the Amazon. In The Poison Belt, they witnessed chaos as Earth passed through a cloud of poison gas. Now, with the help of Peerless Jones, an expert in Artesian boring, they seek to test the professor’s Echinus theory . . . Professor Challenger believes that Earth is a sentient being. Like the sea urchin, it is protected by an outer layer, unaware of what happens on its surface. Challenger wants to dig beneath Earth’s protective layer, its crust, and touch the creature inside to let it know humanity is here. But what the men find underground is quite surprising . . .

The protagonist of these stories is the maddening, irascible and fascinating Professor George Edward Challenger. In these collected tales he faces adventures such as that high above the Amazon rain forest in "The Lost World" and the challenges of"The Land of Mist."

The Poison Belt' was the second novel that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Professor Challenger. It was first published in the year 1913.