Books

Mon - June 26, 2006

The Black Dahlia Files:The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles by Donald H. Wolfe

I’m a sucker for true crime books, particularly unsolved mysteries, yet I’ve never really read anything about the murder of Elizabeth Short (a.k.a. the Black Dahlia) in 1946. This new book is a lot of good background on the case, with the obligatory new “solution” to this enduring mystery that justifies a new book being written.

The first part of the book, where author Wolfe gives us a narrative of what we know happened to Short in the years before her death and takes us through the L.A. police department’s investigation, is good. It’s well written and gave me a great flavor for the time. I guess I didn’t realize just how spectacularly corrupt the L.A. police were at that time. The movie L.A. Confidential (1997) wasn’t exaggerating that much. Also, it seems that people in that time and place really were obsessed with Hollywood. People gave statements to the police and newspapers that sound like they were straight out of the movies. I suspect that the newspaper writers were responsible for a lot of that. In particular, look at the alleged statements attributed to Ann Toth, a 16-year-old high school dropout and prostitute who roomed with Short briefly. If the newspaper is to be believed a transcription of her talking reads like a Jack London story.

The second part of the book, the part with the new theory of the killing, is less satisfying. Wolfe had access to some accidentally declassified files from the L.A.P.D., so he has some new details from Short’s autopsy and who the detectives on the case were looking at for suspects, but that doesn’t amount to much. Wolfe's theory also suffers from being internally illogical and he has to downplay one aspect of the Short murder that completely invalidates the whole thing. Basically, Wolfe offers evidence that Short had ties to some of L.A.’s illegal abortionists (not unlikely, considering her apparent lifestyle), then posits an elaborate scenario that has Short pregnant by one of L.A.’s most powerful citizen, then murdered by Bugsy Siegal. For some reason Wolfe is insistent that a particular abortion doctor was present at the murder scene, but why? If your intention is to kill a woman, you don’t need to give her an abortion too. Most damning to Wolfe's theory, the fact that the contents of Short’s purse, including an expurgated address book, were sent to a newspaper along with a mocking note doesn’t make sense in the context of any criminal conspiracy.

Posted at 11:04 PM

Sun - April 16, 2006

Hunt for the Skinwalker by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp

The goings on at the “Skinwalker Ranch” have been on my radar for a while. Basically the story was that a family had moved to remote ranch in Utah and for years was bedeviled by paranormal phenomenon of nearly every kind imaginable: UFOs, poltergeists, invisible creatures, hippies, cattle mutilations, portals to other dimensions, and zombie wolves. You name it, they saw it. Their plight caught the attention of a group calling itself the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS), a privately funded organization devoted to scientific verification of the paranormal. NIDS bought the ranch and spent eight years observing it “scientifically.” This book is not the official report (I’m not sure if or when that’s going to come out) but rather the recollections of Colm Kelleher, the NIDS team’s micro-biologist. What did he see and is his account likely to convince any intelligent person of the existence of the paranormal?

Any illusions that I may have had of this book being a serious scientific study, or even a Mythbuster-ish clever one, died early. After some preliminary accounts of what the Gorman family (Tom, his wife Ella, teenaged son Tad, and a barely mentioned daughter) experienced, Kelleher goes on to give some background on the Native American belief in skinwalkers, a kind of cross between an evil witch and a werewolf. Why should we believe that skinwalkers are any more real than vampires or fairies? Kelleher cites a bunch of modern sightings, all but one of them anonymous, and the non-anonymous one contradicts all the others. So in terms of proof, we’re a little light already. Sadly, this material is probably at the front of the book because it’s some of the more believable stuff about Native American mythology he’s got. Later in the book Kelleher tries to prove that the Hopi believe in other dimensions, and the only source he cites is a fiction novel by Louis L’mour.

Even on simple matters of science and the paranormal Kelleher (and/or his co-writer, journalist and UFO enthusiast George Knapp) appears to be sloppy with his research. In a brief discussion of a nearby man-made reservoir that is supposedly inhabited by giant snakes that occasionally kill people (no names or dates are offered, of course), Kelleher explains that the reservoir is too recent for the snakes to be left over from the “Paleolithic” era. Paleolithic? Really? The Old Stone Age was known for giant aquatic ghost snakes? In a chapter on the Sasquatch Kelleher cites the supposed capture of the creature dubbed “Jacko” in 1884. That whole episode has been conclusively proven a hoax, and has no part in even the most casual discussion of the reality of Bigfoot and his ilk.

I also immediately noted the complete lack of pictures in the book. This is odd, because according the descriptions of what Tom Gorman saw before he contacted NIDS the various phenomena should have been easily photographed. Gorman even said that one phenomenon, a portal to another dimension that would appear in the westerns skies just after sunset, was so common he even had a favorite tree stump to sit on and watch it.

After the NIDS sent investigators, some of whom stayed at the ranch for weeks, these photogenic phenomena refused to show. In the paranormal biz this is called “shyness.” If somebody says they see UFOs every night at 7:00 you can be darned sure that the first time someone shows up with a camera will be the first time the UFOs take a miss. I tend to think shyness is pretty good indication that we’re dealing with delusions or a hoax. People inclined to believe in the reality of this stuff will argue that shyness is indicative that a phenomenon is “intelligent.” Why UFOs or beings from another dimension would care whether they are photographed is something that can never be adequately explained, but is treated as an article of faith.

Another fun motif in books on the paranormal is that witnesses describe allegedly real events in language that is taken whole from science fiction movies. This is usually followed by the claim that the witness had not seen that particular movie at the time of the event. We get a perfect example of that in Hunt for the Skinwalker. One day a hippie of some sort showed up at the ranch, wanting to meditate in the paranormal atmosphere. Tom decided to allow it, but after the hippie started “OM”-ing an invisible monster, described exactly like the Predator in inviso-mode, ran out of the nearby forest and screamed at him. The hippie fled, and the monster disappeared. Needless to say Tom didn’t get the name of the hippie so we can verify this story, and as a coda we are told, of course, that Tom didn’t see Predator (1987) until later.

Long story short, despite spending months on the ranch and being just a phone call away for years, Kelleher and the rest of the NIDS team didn’t come up with anything approaching proof of anything paranormal. One member of the team claimed to receive a telepathic message, another member witnessed a “creature” crawl out of a “wormhole” though a camera recording the event saw nothing, and Kelleher himself was with Tom when the later shot at two strange animals near a tree.

That last incident should probably be expanded on. It was night, and Tom and Kelleher were walking outside. Tom suddenly said he saw a giant cat in a nearby tree and took a shot at it. Kelleher didn’t really see the animal, but Tom ran off into the darkness and kept shooting. Tom would later claim he saw a second creature, this one more like a dog. Both creatures disappeared without a trace. In Kelleher’s description of the event I couldn’t help noting that Kelleher didn’t seem particularly concerned that he was in close proximity to, but not entirely aware of the location of, someone who was shooting a gun at monsters only he could see.

You may be able to see where I’m going here. What was really happening at the Gorman ranch? I suspect Tom Gorman has, for whatever reason, a very excitable imagination, and perhaps was willing to pull pranks on the NIDS people to keep them interested in his reports. There is no direct evidence of this in the book, of course, but if you read between the lines you have to wonder. Among the things I’d say are significant:

- Every report of the supernatural is told from Tom’s perspective, even if another family member should have been in a better position to see what was going on.

- During the NIDS years Tom is alone at the ranch when the most spectacular things happen. For example, Tom finds a mutilated calf and calls the NIDS researchers in. Perhaps not coincidently this particular mutilation is far more spectacular than the usual reported cattle mutilation, and definitely sounds like something a person would do if they were trying to stage one. For one thing, the body of a calf is going to be a lot easier to move around than a full-sized cow.

- The only explanation given for why the Gormans moved to a ranch out in the middle of nowhere is that they wanted to get away from small town gossip. It’s actually mentioned twice. I’d love to know exactly what gossip they were trying to escape. After all, Kelleher doesn’t give us any reason to believe that the Gormans would have been the target of gossip before moving to Utah. He says that they were uncommonly successful cattle ranchers and that the kids did very well in school. I have a feeling that if we knew what the “gossip” was that drove them to move three states away from where they had a successful business we’d have a better idea of what really happened in Utah.

Other incidents sound suspiciously like the work of the teenaged son Tad. Little things go missing around the house, things like that. Then there’s the incident with the fence posts, mentioned practically in passing towards the end of the book. Tom asked Tad and some of his friends to plant some fence posts. Hours later Tom came back and the posts were still sitting where he left them. Tad and his friends swore they had planted them, but some mysterious force must have moved them back. Yeah, right. I think I can come up with another explanation for what happened that doesn’t require any force more mysterious than common teenage rebelliousness. The fact that the book doesn’t even seem to entertain this possibility gives you an idea of how rigorous this “investigation” was.

Hunt for the Skinwalker makes some deceptive claims on the jacket and in the intro about how “scientific” methods were applied to the study of the paranormal events at the Gorman ranch, but the body of the book is a bunch of strange assumptions and unconvincing personal accounts. Move along, nothing to see here.

Posted at 11:07 PM

Mon - March 6, 2006

The Atlantis Syndrome by Paul Jordan

Jordan’s book is a general survey of books by authors who believe in the reality of Plato’s sunken continent. He starts out with a detailed summary of exactly what Plato wrote about Atlantis, then sketches out the case made by the earliest Atlantis believers like Ignatius Donnelly. Then, in an odd bit of structuring, Jordan includes three chapters of background on the methods of archeology, the history of human evolution, and early human civilization before moving on to later day Atlantis authors like the Flem-Aths and J.M. Allen. I suspect Jordan wanted to get in some of the “good stuff” in before the more dry scholarly stuff. Next Jordan covers Graham Hancock’s theories of a lost civilization, even though Hancock never invokes the name of Atlantis. Jordan wrote and entire book about Hancock previously, so I guess he decided to fit the material in thematically. Finally Jordan covers the new relatively new book Gateway to Atlantis by Andrew Collins as an example of where "Atlantology" is today.

This is a entertaining book. I especially like how Jordan points out that Atlantological authors are loathe to credit nearly any ancient culture with having inherent imagination or a capacity for invention. All myths must be literally true in this world view, and all technology comes from the Atlantis precursor culture. (Where did THAT culture get technology from, he wonders...)

Posted at 11:01 PM

Sun - February 26, 2006

The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestial Pop Culture by Jason Colavito

I saw this book at Borders and was very intrigued. Basically the author’s thesis is that the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, in particular “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Out of Time” and At the Mountains of Madness, were a key inspiration on the ancient astronaut theories that were popularized by the likes of Erich Von Daniken (Chariots of the Gods?) and Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods). The first third of The Cult of Alien Gods is a brief history of Lovecraft and his place in genre fiction, and shows how his stories that combined lost civilization motifs with alien gods probably inspired the authors of the French book The Morning of the Magicians, which first floated an ancient astronaut theory. Fair enough, but if you’re halfway familiar with both subjects you aren’t going to learn a whole lot. The rest of the book is a survey of the various ancient astronaut theories, including those of Sitchin and the Raeliens. Interesting stuff, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the Lovecraft. Colavito even seems to acknowledge this, as he asks some of the major figures in the field that would talk to him about the influence of Lovecraft, and he includes their answers even though none of them have heard of the Providence author!

There was another thing about the book that really annoyed me, beyond the misplaced emphasis on Lovecraft. Colavito is seemingly obsessed with the idea that Western civilization is “in decline” and about to fall. His main evidence of this appears to be a reading of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the fact that he thinks public schools are more interested in teaching political correctness than history these days. (As opposed to what other time in American history? The public school system has always been a political entity.) In the middle of the book he even describes it as a “thesis” of the book, but I’m hard pressed to figure out what it has to Lovecraft or ancient astronauts. As the title of the book implies, both are at most of cult interest, and can hardly be considered indicative of society in general. It's also ironic that twice in the book Colavito explains and demonstrates the circular reasoning of fringe history authors, but then applies a little of his own to support his pet theory. He says that the decline in church attendance in the 1970's is indicative of the decline of Western values, then says that the resurgence in church attendance in the 1990's is also proof of this decline. What wouldn't be evidence of a decline? Nothing, apparently. The decline is assumed -- it's non-falsifiable.

Posted at 12:35 PM

Mon - November 28, 2005

King Kong: The Island of the Skull by Matthew Costello

King Kong: The Island of the Skull is the official prequel novel to Peter Jackson’s King Kong. From what I can gather Jackson’s new version is going to be very similar in plot and character as the 1933 version of the story (with one big exception I’ll get to later), so there isn’t really that much of a back story that needs to be told. Carl Denham is a fearless filmmaker who makes movies in dangerous places, we get that in the opening minutes of the movie. Ann Darrow is a struggling actress in New York City, we get that too. The only obvious pre-movie plotline that’s all that interesting is the origin of the map Denham acquired that leads him to Skull Island. The book touches on all three of these.

In the first storyline Carl Denham is off the coast of Canada looking for an alleged giant killer whale. The whale proves illusive, but Denham and the crew of the Venture come across an enormous gathering of seals. Denham’s cameraman, Herb, is mauled by the animals while trying to get some close-up footage of them and loses a leg. From the trailer to the movie we know Herb is still Denham’s cameraman, so I assume the character will have a prosthetic leg. Back in New York Denham agrees to make his next movie in a studio, but secretly siphons funds away form other expenses so he can afford to take the Venture to some exotic place to get location footage. Of course, by the end of the book Denham is in Singapore, where he buys the map of Skull Island.

The second storyline is about Ann Darrow. With work for actresses drying up in New York she temporarily relocates to Atlantic City, where she gets the job of diving horses into the ocean off a pier. That’s about all there is to her part of the story. Pretty much by definition nothing terribly interesting can happen to Ann before she agrees to go with Carl Denham.

The third storyline features a new character, Sam Kelly. Sam is a Navy diver who loses his job when the base where he works as a diver is closed. Unemployed, he takes a job on a shady pearl-diving boat. The boat is searching the Indian Ocean for good pearl beds when it happens across a derelict full of rotting bodies and pearls the size of golf balls. Despite Sam's misgivings the boat's captain follows the derelict's charts to a certain unknown island, where naturally enough the crew is attacked by a sea monster. Sam and the rest of the crew is forced ashore, where they are attacked by all manner of bizarre creatures. This storyline is the most interesting, but it takes criminally long to get to the island. There's basically half a book of character development that could have been summarized as quickly as I did it here.

There was a scene about halfway through the book where Denham goes to a club in New York and meets with Jack Driscoll, who is having a drink at the club with Eugene O'Neill. The scene made no sense to me, so I read it again. It was still gibberish. It wasn't until my third time through that I realized that the reason it wasn't making sense was because I was assuming Driscoll was the same character as the original 1933 movie, the first mate of the Venture under Captain Englehorn. Up until this point I was reading the novel entirely with the 1933 actors playing the roles of Denham, Darrow, and even Capt. Englehorn. But in Peter Jackson's Kong Driscoll is a writer Denham likes to work with, which makes for a completely different dynamic between the two characters.

There was one small subplot that I couldn't quite figure out. Towards the end of the book the author introduces a Dr. Mlodinow, a paleontologist who has come into possession of some bones that prove that a prehistoric sea reptile survived to the present day. He takes it to the American Museum of Natural History, where the curator decides to suppress the find. I'm not sure if this is just supposed to be irony, or if this feeds into some plot point in the movie, or if this is setting up another tie-in novel.

Posted at 10:03 PM

Sun - November 27, 2005

World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island by Weta Workshop

I recently picked up three King Kong books as part of the King Kong fever sweeping my condo. Two are tie-ins to Peter Jackson’s movie, the other is an official sequel to the original 1933 movie. I'll get around to reviewing all three, but here's my thoughts on the best of them.

World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island is built largely around the concept art Peter Jackson had made for his movie, with supplementary text written as if Skull Island were a real place. According to the introduction, after the events of the movie Carl Denham lead a number of expeditions back to Skull Island to catalog the wildlife there. However the island was sinking, and by 1948 it was completely gone. This is both a nice nod to Son of Kong (1933) and a pretty good explanation of why wildlife is so dense on the island -- it's shrinking.

The art is beautiful, and creature designs are uniformly clever. As per usual with these fake non-fiction books the text and pictures aren't entirely consistent, and there are some strange quirks of organization, but those are small quibbles when you're talking about a book this gorgeous.

It will be interesting to see how many of these creatures will appear in the movie. Peter Jackson says that only a "handful" will make it to screen. The Brontosaurus (I think the archaic name is on purpose), V. Rex (like a T. Rex, but meaner), and the raptors are seen in the trailers, as well as the Piranhadon (the snake/fish thing swimming in the water). I'm guessing that Jackson won't give up the opportunity to have as many different creatures as possible in the crevice sequence. The video game based on the movie features the Terapusmordax (a bat/pterodactyl), and Toy Biz has a toy of a Foetodon (a land crocodile).

We'll definitely have a Peter Jackson cameo in the new film, probably with him as a pilot, but the book opens another interesting cameo possibility. On page 184 you can see the "Sumatran Rat Monkey" that appeared at the beginning of Dead-Alive. If you remember that movie, the rat monkey was, despite its name, captured on Skull Island.

Oh, and do you want to go to Skull Island? According to this book it's right here:

Posted at 09:39 PM

Tue - July 5, 2005

Doctor Who: Damaged Goods by Russell T. Davies

I wanted to read this novel because it represents Russell T. Davies sole Doctor Who work before he shepherded his own version of Doctor Who to TV earlier this year. Released back in 1994, Damaged Goods also roughly corresponds with when it first became known that Davies was interested in resurrecting the show, which just goes to show how determined he was.

So does Damaged Goods foreshadow Davies’ approach to the material on TV? Not really. Davies' TV version of Doctor Who is whimsical, fantastic, enjoyable for children, and only scary in that slightly gothic way Doctor Who has always been scary. Damaged Goods is most definitely a novel for adults. It features drug use, illicit street corner sex, self-immolation, drug overdoses, self-loathing, armed robbery, extreme gore, and self-surgery – and that’s just the first 22 pages. The novel also follows the continuity of the New Adventures book series, which took the final season version of the Doctor (as played by Sylvester McCoy) and ran with it. The Doctor is therefore relatively humorless, secretive, and prone to complicated plans that sacrifice people for the greater good. I hated this version of the Doctor as he developed during the last two seasons of the TV show, though I must say that hate was somewhat overshadowed by the whole “not a Timelord” thing, which I hated even more.

The story takes place in “The Quadrant,” a low income housing project in London during the late-1980’s. The Doctor has become aware of a batch of cocaine that has been infected by some sort of alien weapon, and the cocaine made its way to a drug dealer who lives in the Quadrant. The dealer committed suicide by setting himself on fire, but he’s come back from the dead and is now trying to spread the cocaine as far as possible. Somehow this is tied into the Tyler family, who also reside in the Quadrant. They include mother Winnie, daughter Bev, and son Gabriel. Gabriel appears to have some sort of psychic powers that let him manipulate everyone’s perceptions of him, and this seems to be attracting the attention of the cocaine, and the Doctor.

The plot is good, even if it does fall back on the tired plot device of a secret Gallifreyan weapon going out of control. Did the Gallifreyans ever hear of the "off" switch? It would have saved them a lot time. The real strength of the book is in Davies' uncanny and empathetic portraits of all the characters in the book. This guy can write characters like no one's business. Sure, after a while I began to realize new characters were being introduced just so the author can rub my face in more punishing emotional baggage, but this a very well written book.

Perhaps of more interest to fans of the new series is that the story takes place in 1987, the same year as the episode "Father's Day" and features a family named Tyler. Cousins of Rose, perhaps? I watched "Father's Day" but didn't pick up any references to other Tylers, but I may have missed something.

Posted at 10:52 PM

Mon - July 4, 2005

The Loch by Steve Alten

I covered the rather clumsy (and unsuccessful) attempt to create a viral campaign to promote Steve Alten’s latest book. Did the book need the hype? Well, yes. The Loch is another time-waster about giant hostile aquatic life from the novelist, and it isn’t very good.

On the plus side, the prose this time around isn’t horribly bad. It’s much better than the repetitive and tense-confused mess that was Meg: Primal Waters. It isn’t great, either. Most of the novel is in the first person, narrated by our hero Zachary Wallace, but for all the scenes where the monster attacks people happen when Zach isn’t around, therefore requiring third person narration and destroying any possible tension. Alten also tries to give all the Scottish characters authentic accents, and by “authentic” I mean “Groundskeeper Willie.” Alten also seems to think Scottish people write with an accent.

On to the plot. Zachary Wallace is a hot-shot celebrity marine biologist who has devised a lure that will bring a giant squid up from the depths so it can be filmed. Zach tries the lure out in the Sargasso Sea, and it works… too well. Not only does a giant squid come up but so do some (barely seen) creatures that feed on giant squids. In the ensuing fracas Zach’s submersible is destroyed when the panicked squid cracks the sub’s observation bubble. The pilot is killed, and Zach only just manages to get himself and the cameraman to safety. After the accident Zach’s partner David, for reasons that are never explained, lies about the cause of the sub’s destruction, saying Zach caused it by opening the hatch to escape. Not only are we not given any reason for why David would say this (beyond just being EVIL) or why anyone would believe him (David was on the support ship, not the sub), the book ignores the fact that Zach saved the cameraman’s life, meaning there is another witness to what really happened!

In any case, Zach loses his job and goes into a downward spiral where he goes to Miami Beach and has sex with lots of loose women, which I guess means that getting a multimillion dollar NBA contract is a downward spiral. In the middle of this living hell he is contacted by Maxie, the stepbrother Zach didn’t know he had. Their mutual father, Angus Wallace, has been accused of murder and wants Zach to travel to Scotland to be at the trial. Zach has been estranged from his father for decades, but he agrees to go when he’s told that Angus is facing the death penalty.

The death penalty? In Britain?

This is the big problem with most of Alten’s books. The mechanics of the plot are painfully obvious, and basic logic is discarded to keep the story moving. Just as it doesn’t make sense that Zach would be blamed for the sub being destroyed, it doesn’t make sense that Angus would be facing the death penalty in a country that is adamantly against capital punishment. But Alten apparently can’t imagine any way to make Angus’ predicament dire enough for Zach to go to Scotland without his life being at stake, so reality goes out the window.

Angus is on trial for killing a local land developer known as Johnny C. Basically Angus got into an argument with Johnny C., who was in the process of buying some land near from Loch Ness from Angus, and punched him in the face. The Johnny then stumbled backwards and accidentally fell into the Loch. Despite many witnesses to the actual fight, no one but Angus saw what happened to the man after he fell in the water and the body was never found. (I could point out that even if Britain did have the death penalty, this hardly sounds like murder in the first degree...) Angus claims that he saw the Loch Ness monster eat the man, and much to Zach’s consternation Angus wants him to back his crazy story up. In fact Zach did have a terrifying encounter with something in the Loch when he was nine years old, but today he doesn’t want anything to do with the monster because it will destroy his reputation as a serious marine biologist.

There wouldn’t be a book if Zach just went home, so the monster begins killing people, on land and in the water, and leaving body parts all over the place.. The monster’s identity is related to the Black Templars, a secret society of Highland Scots. Think of it as Jurrassic Park meets The DaVinci Code. However, the middle part of the book could be better described as Nancy Drew and the Case of the Malicious Monster. Because Alten has trouble thinking of ways to drive the plot forward he falls back on every cheap device he ever read in a Hardy Boys adventure. People who are members of the Templars are constantly blurting out things they shouldn’t, and Zach keeps happening upon conversations to eavesdrop on. In one bit Zach hides under a tarp on a boat, and in another Zach falls asleep in a barn and wakes up just in time to see the barn’s owner feeding sheep to the monster!

By now you’re probably wondering what the Loch Ness Monster is. If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading now.

I’m not adverse to a little speculative biology in my cryptozoological thrillers. That’s most of the fun. However, Steve Alten has presented his conclusions as the real solution to the Loch Ness mystery, both in his newsletter and in the introduction to the book. He constantly trumpets the “real science” and “research” that went into his theory.

This begs the questions: Is Alten’s solution plausible? Is it based on good science?

The answer to both questions is no. In The Loch Nessie is in fact a giant eel of a species closely related to (and perhaps indistinguishable from) the common European Eel, Anguillas Anguillas. Just about the only thing this candidate for the creature in Loch Ness has going for it is that it is attractively mundane, at least compared to a plesiosaur or some other creature that’s been extinct for millions of years. Beyond that a 50 foot long eel isn’t any more likely to be living in Loch Ness than a dinosaur.

Let me start again at the beginning and look at the science as presented in The Loch. In the scene where Zach’s sub is destroyed, the creatures hunting the squid are the same creature as Nessie. The scene takes place in the Sargasso Sea because that’s close to where the European Eel spawns. Europeans Eels have a complicated migratory life cycle that is quite fascinating, and Alten proposes that the giant eels, which the Scottish characters call Guivres (a type of legless English dragon), share it. Alten further equates the Guivres with the “Bloops,” an unexplained sound picked up by passive sonar arrays in the Pacific Ocean. Some scientists theorize that the Bloops are caused by large unknown animals, while others, noting that the Bloops always come from the south and is almost impossibly loud, think the Antarctic ice pack is making the sound in some fashion. There are three problems with trying to identify the Bloops with giant eels. The Bloops are heard in the Pacific, not the Atlantic where eels spawn; eels, no matter how large, would not have a mechanism to make the noise; and the Bloops are so loud that if the creature that made them were to live in a lake it would be easily detectable.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the giant eel theory is the eel’s migratory behavior. Loch Ness does connect to the North Sea via the River Ness, but the river is shallow and now has locks on it, making it impossible for a large creature to travel it without being seen. To get around this inconvenient fact Alten falls back on a belief much beloved of the Nessie faithful: the underwater passage. The underwater passage between Loch Ness and the North Sea was first proposed to explain how a population of large creatures could be seen in the Loch yet leave none of the usual evidence; they're just visiting. The problem is there is no evidence such a passage exists, and if it did it would drain the lake down to the level of the passage or the sea, whichever is higher. Yet the passage is the lynchpin of Alten's theory, and what most of the book's plot is based on.

Perhaps the strangest thing about The Loch is Alten's portrayal of common eels. In real life they are rather ordinary fish, but Alten keeps ascribing to them all sorts of bizarre attributes. First among these is the ability to travel on land. While it is a "popular fact" that common eels can travel on land, in practice this means thrashing around to get from puddle to puddle when desperate. Alten seems to think eels come on land and slither around like snakes. Zach even gets attacked by an eel while camping in a forest. Also, Alten describes the European Eel to sound like a Moray Eel, and Moray Eels are illustrated on the back cover of the book and the frontispiece map.

Alten's fuzzy science doesn't stop with eels. The big revelation Zach uses to find the monster is that passive sonar would work better than active sonar. Everyone is very impressed by this. What Alten doesn't seem to understand is that passive sonar just allows you to listen to sounds, and maybe tell what direction a sound is coming from. It doesn't create a blip on a map you can follow like active sonar, yet it does in this book.

The Loch doesn't seem to have made as much of a splash (ha!) as the Meg novels. I notice that the hoax-based marketing campaign continues apace. Just recently this interview with the college student who allegedly found a monster tooth was released recently. It makes reference to the fact that "some bloggers feel the tooth was the tip of an antler" (Ow! My ears are burning!), and when asked if he is promoting Alten's book the student answers, "I never met him, never even read his book, though he offered to send me a bunch of copies. I’m not out to promote anything, I just want the tooth back." This denial would be far more convincing if the press release's source, given at the bottom of the page, wasn't "Michael Drew, Promote-A-Book."

Posted at 07:12 PM

Sun - May 22, 2005

Star Wars: Yoda - Dark Rendezvous by Sean Stewart

Star Wars: Yoda - Dark Rendezvous may not be as important to the overall Clone Wars story but it's a much better read. Sean Stewart has essentially crafted an old school science fiction novel set in the Star Wars universe. Count Dooku sends a message to Yoda, requesting a meeting on the planet of Vjun. Though the meeting is almost certainly a trap Yoda feels that any chance to negotiate an end to the war is worth the risk. He, along with two Jedi Masters and two padawans, leave Coruscant secretly by civilian spaceliner.

If your chief complaint about the Star Wars saga is that it doesn't feature enough scenes set in cafeterias or bathrooms this is the book for you. Stewart is more interested in writing about the nuts and bolts of living in a galaxy far, far away than writing big action scenes. Perhaps understandably Yoda is kept offscreen most of the novel, because reading 200 pages of Yoda speak, kill the author, I would. The main character is actually Scout, a Padawan attempting to advance to Jedi knighthood despite being weak with the Force. As such this is more of a character study than the usual Star Wars novel, and a well written one at that. The final confrontation between Yoda and Dooku is gripping, even if it does come down the world's oldest Muppet demanding a shrubbery.

Posted at 09:25 PM

Wed - May 18, 2005

Star Wars: Labyrinth of Evil by James Luceno

The Doctor Who fever that was sweeping my condo has abated, replaced by Star Wars fever. In anticipation of the upcoming Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith I decided to read a few of the Clone Wars novels, set in the period between the second and third movies. As it turns out the order I’ve picked them up is exactly reverse chronological.

Star Wars: Labyrinth of Evil kicks off with Obi-Wan and Anakin participating in an assault on Nute Gunray’s fortress on one of the Trade Federation’s main planets. Gunray’s forces evacuate in such a hurry that they leave behind the mobile chair/holo-communicator we saw Nute use to contact Darth Sidious in Episode I. This chair is a highly unique piece of work, and the bulk of the book is Obi-Wan and Anakin’s adventures as they track down who built it and how it got into Gunray’s possession. The trail leads Mace Windu to believe Sidious is hiding on Coruscant. As the Jedi Master closes in on the identity of the Sith Lord, Sidious orders General Grievous, commander of the Separatist armies, to launch an assault on Coruscant itself. The objective of the attack: Kidnap Chancellor Palpatine! Grievous succeeds, and the book ends with Palpatine a prisoner on board the Separatist flag ship in orbit around Coruscant. This brings us to the moment that Episode III begins.

No one is going to mistake Labyrinth of Evil for literature, but it’s a fun prequel to the upcoming… um, prequel. Besides moving all the characters into the places they need to be, James Luceno takes the opportunity fill in some interesting backstory. We find out where the cyborg General Grievous came from, and even get a rare tidbit about Palpatine’s history. (His Sith master was Darth Plagueis.) Luceno also tries to explain some parts of Sidious’ plots that have been left unexplained. For example, who really ordered the clone army and why was it kept secret? Luceno’s answer directly contradicts the dialogue in Episode II. That surprised me, because usually Lucasfilm usually keeps pretty good track of that sort of thing, and Luceno, as one half of the pseudonymous Jack McKinney that wrote the Robotech novels, knows a thing or two about papering over continuity problems.

While I’m on that subject, there’s another odd bit of discontinuity. All the other Clone War novels drive home the fact that the Republic is losing to the Separatists, badly. In Labyrinth the Republic is winning, and has pushed the Separatists back to the Outer Rim of the galaxy. There is supposed to be three month gap between this book and the previous one, but that hardly seems like enough time to completely reverse the course of the war. Moreover the opening crawl of Episode III (as released by Lucasfilm) stresses that the Republic is losing again. I wonder if the opening crawl has been changed, or if Luceno based his book on an out of date plot outline.

Coming up next: Review a Yoda novel, I do.

Posted at 11:31 PM

Mon - May 2, 2005

Is the Loch Ness Monster Real? Steve Alten Knows!

Steve Alten, who has already inflicted three giant shark novels on unsuspecting readers (see my review of Meg: Primal Waters) is going back to the water for his new novel, The Loch. With all the humility you’d expect from a guy who writes giant shark novels with a main character named Jonas, Alten has claimed that he came up with a solution to the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster that will revolutionize the subject. The promo materials for the book have been coy about what that solution is, and I won’t spoil what it’s rumored to be, at least not until later in this article. If you really don’t want to know, consider yourself warned.

Recent issues of Alten’s official newsletter have been telling an incredible tale. Just as Alten was preparing to release his book new discoveries have been made at Loch Ness that just happen to buttress Alten’s arguments! The following excerpts are from the March edition of Alten’s newsletter.

“Guys, there are things happening at Loch Ness as we speak that are mind-blowing. Some of it is leaking out over the internet, but the best stuff has been saved for the novel, thanks to some non-disclosure agreements I arranged.”

Science and non-disclosure agreements go together like peanut butter and chocolate!

"To be honest, at first I was very skeptical about doing a Loch Ness Monster book, simply because I didn't believe in the creature's existence. But then I began the research, and learned there is Loch Ness myth, and then there is some very real science that points to a mutation/creature that has been inhabiting Loch Ness over the last 70+ years. Yes, I know sightings date back 1500 years, but these were not the same creatures.”

This odd distinction between the “mythical” creature and the modern creature also figured into the movie Beneath Loch Ness. It would be a heck of a coincidence if the same remote lake was reputed to have a creature living in it in medieval times, and later (circa 1930) a real and completely unrelated monster just happened to move into the same lake. Yet that’s what Alten asks us to believe.

Alten then provides us with some background on Loch Ness. Some of the more salient points follow.

“There have been almost 10,000 sightings since the 1930s. Ninety percent are explainable. The rest are quite real.”

I wonder what kind of statistical analysis Alten did to come up with that percentage. Isn't it interesting that he admits that 90% of time people claiming to see a monster are wrong? I'm much more interested to know why people are misidentifying normal objects so often, and how you can trust the other 10% if that's the case.

"THE MONSTER IS NOT A PLESIOSAUR."

I can't really argue with that.

"The locals know what it is, but refuse to talk about it."

And here's where Alten's train of thought jumps the tracks and falls into Idiot Gorge. What possible reason could the people of Loch Ness have to cover up the existence of the creature? Alten seems to be suggesting that the people of Inverness are somehow invested in the idea that the monster is a plesiosaur and will do anything to discredit evidence to the contrary, even though the truth they know is extraordinary.

Alten continues.

"In late 2004, as I was finishing final edits on the novel, I received a call from a private investigator specializing in marine biology. I won't divulge who he is just yet, but his credentials are impeccable and he's worked with me before on two of my other novels. He knew I was writing a Loch Ness Monster thriller (he gets the newsletter too) and had his own theories about what the monster is, based on evidence he has been collecting since 1993."

I'm not sure what the deal is with keeping the "expert" anonymous. Real experts want credit for their findings. In any case the man he's talking about is Bill McDonald. Here's his website.

"To make an involved story short and sweet, he was calling me now, all excited, because several of his British contacts were him urging him to get to Loch Ness as soon as possible, that there were "things" going on. The investigator desperately needed money to make the trip, so he came to me with a deal: If I agreed to arrange his funding, he would give me the exclusive on the monster's identity, why it's hardly ever been seen, and the inside track on anything new that he found. I spoke with the people at Tsunami Books, and they wired him the funds.

"It was a big investment with a BIGGER pay-off.

"He went over in mid-December to meet with other investigators and speak to locals. On his very last day there, he heard about two frightened British tourists who had reported a rare land sighting the night before. He quickly tracked them down at a local eatery (easy to do in the dead of winter) and literally bribed them to take him back to where the sighting occurred.

"The investigator has urged me to ask YOU to spread this link [The link isn't in the archived copy of the newsletter] around so that others may weigh in on these incredible findings and assist him in his on-going research. (He needs funding to continue his research) Because of our non-disclosure agreement, I cannot divulge what species (or mutation thereof) left these incredible tracks in the mud, but after he called me (frantic) from Scotland, I immediately stopped the printing of the hardbacks and added almost 100 new pages to The LOCH just to blend this mind-boggling information into the story. The delay cost us 45 days and a lot of money to meet our deadlines with bookstores, but it was well worth it. (If you pre-ordered the book on Amazon.com at $25.95, you'll notice the price recently went up $2.00 to cover the additional pages)."

So now we get down to it. Alten's book is going to cost more because it's got the proof of the Loch Ness Monster's real identity, and wouldn't you know it, it's exactly what he thought it was!

So what does Alten think it is? From what I can find about The Loch, it's a monstrously large eel. (Oh yeah, I can see why the residents of Inverness would not to cover that up. Who cares about an eel ten times larger than the largest one ever found before?) What is this important evidence Alten is talking about?

First there's this website called Loch Movie which includes footage of an alleged trail left by the creature.

Then there's this website and accompanying video that claims to be from two Midwestern college students found a strange tooth in a deer carcass on the shore of Loch Ness. The tooth was confiscated by a local water baliff, and they were threatened by the local authorities when they tried to get it back. Damn, the Cigarette Smoking Man must have recruited Haggis Eating Man! In any case the video has all the signs of bad improv acting, and the tooth looks like an antler or maybe a thorn from some plant, not a tooth.

What's going on here? I'm 90% sure that all this stuff is just a publicity stunt to promote The Loch. McDonald even sent out press releases, though it only looks like it got picked up by the Guerrilla News Network and Fangoria. I'm not sure if Bill McDonald is in on the gag or not, but he was posting on some e-mail groups defending his "evidence," but since the book came out he's been silent. I ll probably pick up the book from the library and see if Alten comes clean.

Posted at 10:40 PM

Tue - April 12, 2005

The Prey Series Free Sampler by John Sandford

I picked this free sampler up at Barnes and Noble today. It includes a couple chapter from the two most recent Lucas Davenport novels: Hidden Prey, coming out in paperback, and Broken Prey, out in hardcover next month. In the latter it looks like Davenport is hunting a psycho killer choosing victims at random. Should be good break from all the conspiracy-type storylines Davenport has been involved in recently.

I remember reading a while ago that Eriq LaSalle was going to be starring in a movie based on Mind Prey, with an eye on adapting more of Sandford's novels. Casting a black actor caught me a little off guard, simply because racial tensions are an important element in many of the Davenport novels, particularly Shadow Prey, and Lucas being black would make many of the novels require major revamps to work on screen to say the least. Plus, I always envision another E.R. alum as Davenport, namely George Clooney.

In any case it all came to nothing because the movie never came out. Or did it?

Today I visited John Sandford's official site and found out that Mind Prey did come out, though it doesn't sound like it aired very widely. Huh. I'll have to see if I can find it.

Posted at 10:41 PM

Sun - December 26, 2004

The Taking by Dean Koontz

I have probably read all of Dean "the 'R' is optional" Koontz's early horror films, but I stopped reading his novels with 1995's Dark Rivers of the Heart. It's been so long I kinda forgot why I stopped, so last week I picked up one of his more recent, The Taking. Boy, it all came flooding back.

The premise of The Taking is really interesting. Molly, a mediocre novelist, is up late one night working on a manuscript when she notices that a hard rain is falling, and that rain is slightly luminescent. Some vary odd behavior by coyotes outside her remote house convince her something is seriously wrong. She wakes her husband and quickly they realize that what's happening is a worldwide phenomenon. Something large is moving in the close vicinity of Earth, something so large no one can even conceive what it is. It, whatever "it" is, is causing water to be sucked up from the ocean and drop back to earth as prodigious amounts of rain. Other reports indicate that barely seen entities are stalking the streets of some cities, killing everyone they come across.

Molly and Neil (the husband) drive to some of the nearby homes and find only corpses. Then they head to the nearest town where they find the remaining citizens trying to decide on a course of action. Here Molly has a number of encounters that begin to define the crisis. When she first arrives she's confronted in the restroom by her father, Render, who is supposed to be in an institution for the criminally insane. When Molly was in elementary school Render tried to kidnap her after he divorced her mother, and in the course he killed one adult and three school children. Render leaves without harming anyone, but then another person shows Molly something equally disturbing. The rain is carrying spores, and strange funguses are starting to grow where the water pooling. The rain stops falling and a purple mist appears, and Molly and Neil team up with a dog named Virgil to find children, who seem to be immune to the aliens' predation. Corpses come to live, giant reptilian monkeys move through the trees, and giant insects appear in church basements. So a lot like any day in New York City, really.

Pretty interesting stuff. Where does this novel go wrong? Two words: Dean Koontz. There are certain characters and situations that have shown up in far too many Koontz novels to have any power to surprise, or really entertain. It's just distracting. Oh look, another professional woman living in a remote location. Oh look, she's been a victim of violence, usually at the hands of her father. Oh look, an event causes her, and usually one trusted male, to go on the run. Oh look, a friendly dog is instrumental to the plot! Just like 17 other Koontz novels. Oops, make that 18, he finished another novel since I wrote the last sentence.

Perhaps what annoyed me the most about The Taking is Koontz's cock-eyed observations on modern society. He's been going on about this stuff for two decades, and it has little basis in reality. Basically Koontz's main characters are constantly talking about how civilization is going to hell. In most Koontz books every single character is a victim of some random violent crime in the past. Koontz appears to believe that murderers get off on the insanity defense all the time, even though the insanity defense is rarely used and rarely works, and usually results in the the murderer being incarcerated for periods at least as long as if they plead guilty. It's a major point that Molly's father was judged insane, even though the crime Koontz describes would exclude the insanity defense. Koontz further more puts thoughts into Molly's head about how all people incarcerated in institutions for the criminally are given easy access to pornography, and how Render has been living a life of luxury any king would envy! Where does Koontz get this stuff? Considering how chronically underfunded our mental health system is it's tough to see how most institutions could afford the rental fees for porno tapes, let alone pamper the incarcerated criminals to the level that would make Louis XIV turn green. This constant hammering on the "fact" that the world has become more violent over the years, when a quick perusal of crime statistics or history books will show that the opposite is true, wears on me, especially when it turns out to be so central to the concept of the novel. Add to that some sloppy prose, and it's pretty much guaranteed I won't be picking up another Kootz book anytime soon.

Posted at 08:17 PM

Mon - September 20, 2004

Horror Show by Greg Kihn

If you’re familiar with the life and works of Ed Wood Jr., or have seen the movie Ed Wood (1994), the characters of pop musician Greg Kihn’s novel Horror Show will be familiar to you. The protagonist is Landis Woodley, a z-grade director who surrounds himself with misfit talent, including Luboff, a former star now hopelessly addicted to heroin; Tad, a talentless teen heartthrob probably based on Arch Hall Jr.; and Buzz, a special effects man ashamed that on a previous Woodley movie he threw flaming paper plates at the camera to represent the destruction of some flying saucers. Ed Wood’s choice of wardrobe has been transferred to Woodley’s screenwriter. That’s not the only difference between Wood and Woodley. Woodley is obsessed with making his horror moves as gory as 1957 will allow, while Ed Wood’s sense of horror was stuck somewhere around 1935.

The plot has to do with a reporter in 1997 interviewing a retired and reclusive Woodley in his decaying Hollywood mansion. Woodley reveals that rumors that real corpses were used to make his zombie film Cadaver are true, and the book flashes back to 1957 and the making of the film. It’s actually a pretty straight forward story, except that Kihn introduces Albert, a stand-in for Anton LaVey who has discovered a way to make a demon manifest itself whenever he wants. I won’t reveal exactly how this supernatural angle is incorporated into the plot, but it does increase the novel’s interest to people who know Ed Wood’s story well.

Horror Show is a first novel, and it often shows. Some of the prose is a little awkward, and I wished all the disparate plot threads had come together more coherently in the end. But if you’re a fan of b-movies it’s definitely worth a read. I even see that Kihn wrote a sequel, called Big Rock Beat.

Posted at 10:31 PM

Sun - September 19, 2004

Meg: Primal Waters by Steve Alten

I spend a lot of time watching bad movies. When not doing that I can read bad movies too, as is the case with Steve Alten’s newest giant shark book, Meg: Primal Waters.

If you haven’t read the previous two Meg books you’ve really missed out. In the first book, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, it was revealed that Carcharadon Megalodon, a 60 foot long ancestor of the great white shark, survived extinction by adapting to living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific ocean. Some kind of temperature condition kept them down there, but a fluke accident allowed one to escape, and paleobiologist Jonas Taylor had to battle the creature as it hunted off the coast of California. Jonas… Jonas… Do you think he gets swallowed by the shark at one point? Nah, no writer would be so obvious.

The whole scenario was pretty ridiculous, and poor writing made it worse. Once on the surface a Meg subsists entirely on a diet of broad stereotypes. The good people are all really good, and the bad people are completely bad. It’s the kind of book where if someone is mean, or even rude, to one of the main characters you know that person will be shark scat by the end of the book. A giant prehistoric shark is a neat idea, however, and Hollywood snapped the book up for adaptation. No movie has yet been made, possibly because of the book’s climax, where Jonas is swallowed by the shark (shock!) and cuts his way through the animal’s guts to stop its heart with his bare hands. Allegedly Patrick Stewart was going to play Jonas, and I’d pay double to see him crawl through shark innards… but let’s face it, it’s not going to happen. In any case, the delay has allowed several low budget giant shark movies to come out, including Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002) and Shark Hunter (2001).

Alten followed up Meg with The Trench, which actually managed to up the goofiness level. One Meg had been captured and put on display, but in this book it escapes. Meanwhile Jonas’ wife Terry (or maybe she would marry him later, I forget) was kidnapped by a billionaire and kept against her will in a habitat at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Oh, and it turns out that there are Kronosaurs down there, giant aquatic reptiles from the time of the dinosaurs. How do they breathe at the bottom of the ocean? Why, these Kronosaurs have evolved gills. Oh, that makes se… WHAT???

Meg: Primal Waters takes place 18 years after the events of The Trench, so now Jonas and Terry have a teenaged daughter, Dani, and son, David. The odd thing is that are very few indications that the book is taking place in 2020. There are no references to advanced technology, the pop culture is exactly like today’s… In fact the only thing speculative about the whole novel is a chapter that takes place at Giants Field where Pat Burrell of the Phillies overtakes Barry Bonds as the all time homerun champion.

Things haven’t been going well for Jonas since the Meg escaped the artificial lagoon he ran, so he agrees to act as a color commentator on the second season of a reality stunt show called Daredevils. Daredevils is one of those reality shows that only exist in bad fiction, where the producers of the show don’t have any idea what’s going to happen next, and often don’t have any way to film it if it does happen. Two teams of extreme sporting youngster try to outdo each other with outrageous stunts, and this season is based on a sailing ship at sea which is supposed to explain Jonas’ participation. Dani goes along with Jonas because she thinks one of the Daredevils is cute. What Jonas doesn’t know is that it’s all a set up and a Meg is following the ship.

Terry heads to Canada because that country is worried that a Meg is feeding in their waters and causing whales to beach. They’re right, of course, but they don’t want to tell anybody because they Don’t Want to Close the Beaches. Terry arranges to catch the shark so the lagoon will have a new attraction.

And back in San Diego David has found out that Angel, the Meg that escaped the lagoon 18 years ago, has visited the lagoon recently. All he has to do is find a way to close the poorly maintained seawall doors and lure her back and he can recapture Angel easily. He enlists the aid of Jonas’ former partner Mac, and together they come up with a plan. What they don’t do is tell anyone that Angel is back in waters heavily populated by humans, and it isn’t too long before there’s a massacre. They somehow manage to ignore that their willful silence results in a dozen or so deaths.

So there’s been 18 years where no one has seen a Meg, but now three members of the species show up at the same time, and all three end up in the close vicinity of a Taylor. Victor Hugo would look at this plot and say, “There are too many coincidences for my taste.” Also, I’m not exactly sure why that temperature thing is no longer an issue for the Megs. Shouldn’t the Megs be out in force if they can leave the relatively sparsely populated trench?

The meat of the plot is what happens to Jonas, so let me elaborate on that some more. As it develops Jonas was really chosen to go on the Daredevil ship by Maren, a paleobiologist who hates Jonas. Maren feels that Jonas besmirched the reputation of paleobiologists by becoming a celebrity, and so he has used a drone he’s designed to train a Meg to go where he wants via electronic signals. He plans to have the Meg attack the Daredevils and kill Jonas in the process. The producers go along with this because of the ratings, and Maren is counting on the resulting footage of the Meg to make him a celebrity... huh. Maren also has a Sumo wrestler as his chief thug. As Wayland Smithers would say, he just crossed over that line from everyday villainry to cartoonish super villainy.

The climax of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror would be pretty hard to beat for sheer silliness, but credit where credit is due, Alten tries to outdo himself in Primal Waters. As Maren hovers over some survivors of the Meg attacks in a helicopter, Jonas grabs the 42 lb. drone Maren uses to control the shark and steers it towards the helicopter. Then Jonas rides the drone, and somehow makes it jump in the air high enough that the 63 year old Jonas grabs the landing skid of the helicopter AND holds on to the drone. When Maren opens the helicopter door to see what the noise is, Jonas throws the drone into the helicopter, and a few moments later the Meg jumps out of the water and grabs the helicopter, dragging it into the water. Anybody wanting to know how the Meg could keep following the signal even after the drone was out of the water should direct enquiries to Steve Alten c/o stevealten.com.

There's a lot more I could complain about, but I want to get to sleep sometime in the next 24 hours. Let me just finish by saying that the whole book is written in a weird present tense that makes the novel read like a movie being narrated for the visually impaired ("Masao nods uncomfortably. 'I assume you received the letter from my attorney.' Drew looks away, gazing at the lagoon."), and that the title is actually a tease for the proposed fourth novel in the series. Yes, the "primal waters" aren't in this book, but were actually discovered by Maren. Apparently there are trenches off the Philippines that contain all sorts of prehistoric life forms, and now that Maren's dead Jonas intends on taking credit for that discovery himself. More specifically, the fourth novel would be about David being trapped in one of those trenches and menaced by a Liopleurodon (a 75 foot long reptile... with gills again, no doubt), and Jonas training Angel to retrieve objects so he can mount a rescue mission. In other words, expect more badly written shark silliness.

Posted at 07:38 PM

The Confusion by Neal Stephenson

Link by Walt Becker

From A Buick 8 By Stephen King

The White Plague by Frank Herbert

Eddy Deco's Last Caper by Gahan Wilson

Hybrids by Robert Sawyer

God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert

Naked Prey by John Sandford