Lincoln Child

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.