Douglas Preston

Warner, 1998, 465 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60717-7

Most Canadian schoolboys are familiar with the story of Oak Island, a small piece of land located in the Atlantic Ocean, a few miles away from Nova Scotia. It would be a completely unremarkable island if it wasn’t for one fabulous story; the rumor of a fantastically well-protected treasure hidden under the surface.

It began with the discovery of a tree with a rope-burnt stump by two boys. It continued with various digs, constantly frustrated by the influx of water rushing into the pit through, possibly, cleverly engineered flooding tunnels. The Money Pit has killed a dozen men so far, and bankrupted at least twice as many. Is there a treasure down there? D’Arcy O’Connor’s excellent non-fiction book The Big Dig seems to indicate so. But unless we develop engineering techniques considerably more advanced than those of today, we’ll probably never know.

So ends the “real” story of Oak Island, with all the wonderfully dramatic loose ends implied (I’ve left out rumors of gold bullion, mega-rich pirates, Bacon-being-Shakespeare and various hard evidence of something strange under the island). To get a reasonably satisfying story about Oak Island’s treasure, we must turn to fiction: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Riptide.

Given the well-known story of Oak Island and the author’s usually careful research, it’s somewhat frustrating to note that nowhere in Riptide is any acknowledgement of the source story. American chauvinism? Maybe.

In any case, the initial setup is identical: An island on the eastern seaboard, a fantastic treasure, deadly engineering. For added dramatic effect, Preston & Child move the island to Maine and adds a tortured character who’s already lost a brother to the island.

At the novel’s beginning, an all-out engineering effort is assembled to finally conquer the island and get the treasure out. This being a modern techno-thriller, however, you can be sure that they won’t. (The days of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, when protagonists could become millionaires on discovered treasures, are long past. The new techno-thrillers dictate that ambition and determination is to be squished flat for the sin of arrogance. They call that progress.) It becomes apparent as soon as a preacher warns everyone against the corruption of money that this won’t have a cheery ending. But don’t worry: Even though the treasure is indeed lost, there’s a pretty good reason for that. Chances are that readers, at least, won’t feel cheated at all.

And while Preston & Child’s novels have elevated the scientist-punishment ending to new levels of clichés, it’s indeed quite rare to feel cheated by their books. They know what they’re doing. The pacing is snappy, the details are fascinating and there’s always something interesting going on. Sure, their characters are only adequate and their hypocritical anti-science shtick is wearisome (like Crichton, they revel in the possibilities while decrying them.), but overall, it’s decent entertainment.

There are annoyances, for sure; Readers will guess part of the big secret well before the protagonist (who’s supposed to be a doctor but never makes the link between missing teeth, burns and failing immunological systems.) and guess another plot twist pages before the “team of experts” does (“What if there’s more than one flooding tunnel?”). The ending is overlong and needlessly drawn-out. The human villain is unnecessarily evil, illustrating once more the authors’ obsession with painting ambition as unmitigatingly bad.

But never mind. Riptide, with all its flaws, stands as the duo’s best novel yet, a blockbuster thriller with flaws but also a lot of fun. It’ll be a special treat for everyone who has ever heard about Oak Island and wondered what might lie down there. Preston and Child have done their homework and delivered an imaginative thriller with a lot of bang for the buck. Don’t miss it if you like the treasure-hunting genre.

Warner, 2000, 449 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-52587-1

This is a novel about a rock. Not just any ordinary rock, mind you: For one thing, this one weighs a few thousand tons. For another, it’s most probably not from around here, being exceptionally dense, of blood-red color and unbreakable by conventional means. It’s also located on Isla Desolacion, a forsaken island in Argentinean territory. For most of these reason, this is an exceptionally valuable rock, and our billionaire-protagonist wants it for his museum. One last detail: That rock has the unfortunate tendency to zap lighting bolts into people.

Even if you don’t really like Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s thrillers, you’ve got to hand it to them; they know how to come up with an irresistible premise. From the monster-loose-in-the-museum premise of The Relic to the monsters-loose-under-New-York story in Reliquary, they’ve upped the ante with each successive novel. If the expression “hack writers” didn’t have such unpleasant connotation, that’s what we could call them; they write to mass-market specifications, turning out perfectly competent thrillers with adequate characters, fluid writing, good technical details and a structure calculated to deliver steadily more shocking jolts. Hey, it’s a bestselling living.

As it is, the plot of The Ice Limit is immediately gripping. A meteorite-hunter is hired by a billionaire in order to head an expedition to bring back The Rock to the United States. Given the unusual nature of the object, the novel then introduces one very unusual team, a wonderfully reclusive engineering business (ESS) specialized in huge-scale projects, from volcano manipulation to the re-creation of JFK’s real death. ESS is The Ice Limit‘s real delight, such an intriguing creation that I could easily a series of stories built around that company. But then again, I’ve always been a sucker for engineering fiction.

In any case, the plan to bring back The Rock quickly sets into motion. A boat is built, then heavily modified and disguised by ILM. a sexy female scientist is introduced. Argentinean officials have to be bribed, except one who vows a terrible revenge. The teams arrives at Isla Desolation.

More people die. Secrets are uncovered. More people die.

It’s been said before, but a fundamental difference between techno-thrillers and science-fiction is how the author reacts to change. Science-Fiction usually adopts the attitude that “the genie is out of the bottle” and that we’d better adapt to change because change isn’t going away. Techno-thrillers, on the other hand, often shoo away the upsetting change, burying, destroying, ignoring it in the hope that the day after, everything comes back to normal.

And, unfortunately, -without going in details-, that’s pretty much what happens in The Ice Limit, which nearly ends up being one of the most depressing thrillers I’ve read in a while. The massive body count and ultimate futility of the exercise brings to mind authors handshaking over an agreement that “some things are not meant to be known by humankind”—and that hardheaded engineers are doomed. This attitude is partially redeemed (saving the book from an awful ending) by a last-minute twist that will be familiar with the weirder speculations of British scientist Fred Hoyle. (How’s that for a literate spoiler? Don’t think too much about it.)

Fortunately, the rest of the book is pretty good, and compulsively readable. The characters do the job for which they were created, and The Rock ensures a massive presence over the whole story. The engineering firm, as mentioned previously, is a wonderful creation I’d like to see elsewhere. It’s unfortunate that the end sucks off a lot of the novel’s energy, but feel free to skip the last fifty pages and imagine a better ending for yourself. At least that’ll entertain you until Preston and Child deliver their next thriller.

Tor, 1997, 464 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-54283-5

Something is loose deep under New York. Again.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s first collaboration, Relic, was an unqualified success. Their thriller received good reviews, sold well and was adapted to cinema under the direction of Peter Hyams. (Okay, so the film wasn’t all that great and tanked at the box-office, but that’s not fault of the book itself.) It was inevitable that they’d eventually write a sequel.

The logical premise, of course, is to expand the action. Relic had one monster, why not have more in the sequel? The original was confined to a Museum, why not let the monsters loose under the entire New York in Reliquary?

As I said, obvious but effective. In this volume, the remnants of the monster, glimpsed in Relic‘s epilogue, surface some time later as a wave of creepy homeless death occurs under New York. The novel opens as the crisis reaches a boiling point: This time, no mere bum has been killed, but the daughter of a wealthy socialite was mysteriously murdered. Socialite raises hell, policemen investigate, creepy evidence is brought to Relic‘s heroine Margo Green and here we go again…

Fortunately, Reliquary not only does thing slightly differently than its predecessor, but does them better. This time around, the characters are more clearly defined and more sympathetic. The writing is snappier, even improving upon the lean style that was so successful in The Relic. Scenes are more spectacular, belief is more easily suspended… in short, Preston and Child have improved since their first novel, and it shows. Reliquary is in many respects a more enjoyable book than Relic.

Special mention should be made of the eeriness of subterranean New York so effectively used here. A relatively old city by North American standards, Preston and Child easily populate New York’s underground with forgotten subway tunnels, service tunnels, multi-level outposts and entire underground populations. They state that most of it is true… who knows? Sort of the setting for that old TV show, “Beauty and the Beast”, adapted for a horror tale.

Fans of the first volume will be delighted to find more about Margo, Penderghast, Smithback, D’Agosta and Frock. New characters also join them, including a delightfully feisty NYPD officer named Hayward.

Plus, the novel packs the required chills. There are dead bodies, creepy dark places, riots, carnage, last-minute twists, the promise of world-wide destruction and other sort of fun stuff.

Through it all, one can’t really shake the prefabricated feel that also plagued The Relic, but then again it’s better to have a professional but mechanical thriller than an incompetent one. Preston and Child might build their novels with flowcharts and mathematical models, but the end result is good enough that it doesn’t really matter.

What is a bit more annoying is the unwillingness of the narrative to truly use all the elements it so lovingly sets up. At one point, there’s a congregation of wealthy bourgeois, police squads, monsters, bums and oodles of water all headed for the same point. What happens next isn’t quite as spectacular as what you might think.

Nevertheless, Reliquary exemplifies the type of novel which gave rise to the expression “beach reading”. Undemanding, exciting and unusually readable, Reliquary gets top marks as a thriller. If you liked the first one, don’t miss it.

Tor, 1995, 474 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-54326-2

Thriller fans, rejoice.

You want a scary concept? Imagine a creature, snatched deep from the unexplored Amazonian jungles and brought to New York City. A perfect predator, with the intelligence of a human and the robustness and reflexes of a large reptile. It kills. It eat parts of the victim’s brain. It can’t be shot, it can’t be found…

You want a scary setting? Imagine the New York Museum of Natural History. Halls and rooms and corridors filled with bones and statue and skulls… Abandoned basements left unexplored for decades… Rooms where bugs lovingly eat the flesh of dead animals so their bones can be easily cleaned… An opening exhibition on the subject of Superstition.

You want characters? Imagine Margo Green, young museum researcher. Imagine Dr. Frock, an old wheelchair-bound iconoclast. Imagine Lt. Pendergast, a police lieutenant with the mind of Sherlock Holmes and the street smarts of the best noir detectives. Imagine Bill Smithback, a young journalist with dreams of glory, but a book project hampered by the Museum’s management. Imagine ambitious researchers, overbearing police officers, a control-freak public relation officer, a New York City mayor and a host of other characters.

You want an unlikely succession of events? Imagine that days before the opening of the major exhibition on Superstition, bodies of visitors are found in the museum, horribly mutilated. On the night of the glitzy opening, the killings continue… but everyone’s trapped and the classical storm is raging outside the building.

Given all these elements, it’s no surprise to see that Relic is a pretty enjoyable thriller. The events happen in much the same way that you’d expect them to, with the gradual unveiling of a terrible threat and the impossibly complicated final setup. There are pretty neat final revelations at the end of the narrative. It’s fairly well constructed, doesn’t loses time with needless maudlin romance and lets us wander down the hall of a fascinating place. The style is also at the standard thriller level, which means that clarity takes precedence and that you’ll be able to breeze through Relic‘s fat 450+ pages in almost no time.

It’s interesting to note, however, that this reviewer has a slightly disappointed opinion of the final result. Despite valiant efforts, Child and Preston don’t seem to make the extra step that would transform Relic from a pretty good thriller to a truly stupendous one.

Maybe the fault lies with the characters, who for some reason come along as adequate, but not overly sympathetic. As it is often the case with this kind of book, the world is divided between villains and heroes, and the distinction is pretty clear-cut. Bad things usually happen to bad guys, and the heroes all survive to party another day.

Part of the fault might also lies with the science, which sounds plausible but is still unconvincing. Okay, so there are polysyllabic words, but when you strip them away, you still get a Star Trek: Voyager-type situation. It’s interesting, but not very persuasive. (Not having seen the much-ridiculed movie version of Relic, this reviewer suspects -but cannot prove- that this is what happened in the paper-to-screen translation.)

But the biggest flaw seems to be the level of improbability of the story-line, which places most of New York’s elite in the grips of the monster with glee but not with a lot of justification. And though it might be nonsense to say so, the book seems to lag a bit in the second third.

Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t grab Relic the next time you’re in the mood for this type of reading. It’s the classical Beach Reading book that sells copies because it more than satisfies the reader’s expectation.