In addition today, seeing as it’s now getting really cold and dark out there, I’ll be reviewing a very wintry horror novel, TERMINAL FREEZE by Lincoln Child. Bit of an eco-horror, this one, but containing elements of Alien and The Thing, and quite appropriate for our current concerns, I feel.
If you’re only interested in reading the Lincoln Child review, rocket on down to the lower end of today’s post, namely the Thrillers, Chillers section, where all my reviews can usually be found. Before then though, let’s roll back the clock a thousand years to …
A darker age
USURPER will be my first novel for Canelo Books (it’s published on April 27, but already available for pre-order) and though it represents a right-turn on my normal subject-matter, I can guarantee you an all-out, full-blooded action adventure.
The story takes place in that most infamous year in British history, 1066. It’s the late summer, and Saxon England, one of the oldest, wealthiest kingdoms in Christendom, has now been at peace for five decades. Everyone is enjoying the prosperity of these days. The earls and their thegns feast together in their great halls, while the peasants partake in a plethora of village festivals running right through the calendar. After decades of successful harvests, famine in England is unknown. The woods teem with game, the rivers and meres with fish, and there are no restrictive laws to prevent anyone helping themselves to Nature’s bounty. Even the Viking threat to England appears to have diminished dramatically.
The kingdom is subjected to two different but simultaneous incursions by enemies almost too terrible to imagine. In the north, a new and colossal horde of Vikings arrives under the leadership of the notoriously violent and cruel Harald ‘Hardraada’ Sigurdsson, King of Norway, while the south is invaded by William, Duke of Normandy, the bulk of whose enormous army now comprises a new and elite military force, a corps of mounted warriors who are well-armed, well-trained and whose proficiency with weapons is matched only by their loyalty to their overlord; the world will come to know them as ‘knights’, and their efficiency on the battlefield will transform the European way of making war for many centuries to come.
In the face of these implacable foes, and during the course of three near-apocalyptic battles, Saxon England falls.
Yes, it’s a well-known saga, but in USURPER I don’t follow it blow-by-blow. Instead, I focus on the experience of one person, Cerdic of Wulfbury, second son of a fictional Saxon nobleman and a young scholar who, as 1066 approached, was destined for the Church, but who, once the catastrophe breaks over his people, taking away from him everything and everyone he has ever known and loved, finally starts to think that maybe the sword is mightier than the pen after all …
Time for a change
Readers of my crime novels don’t need to worry. I’ve not called time on them, but every so often a change is pleasant, plus it’s nice to have more than one string to your bow.
Think of the reasons why the Western was such a successful hunting ground for so many authors and film-makers over so many decades. Consider the romantic potential of a society stripped down to its basics, where much of the land is wilderness, where men and women can only survive through a combination of ingenuity and back-breaking toil, where the forces of chaos can run riot because law-enforcement is so thinly spread, where justice can often only be served one-to-one, and only by those who are sufficiently heroic to do it.
Well, you’ve got exactly the same scenario in Europe during the Middle Ages and Dark Ages. In addition, you have very dramatic historical events and amazing real-life characters that you can weave into your fiction to add colour, depth, context, authenticity and so on.
It was an intoxicating prospect that I knew I’d have to chance at some point, and I can only reiterate how glad I am that the book found favour with Canelo and will now be published on April 27 next year, though let me offer another quick reminder that it is already available for pre-order (just go HERE).
As I say, fans of my thriller fiction needn’t fear. That side of the Finch operation hasn’t ended. Far from it (watch out for new titles in 2023). But from now on, I’ll be writing historical adventures too, commencing with this duology, USURPER.
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed (I’ll outline the plot first, and follow it with my opinions) … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.
by Lincoln Child (2009)
Outline
In the high Alaskan Arctic, the foothills to the ominously named Mount Fear play host to Fear Base, an old military installation, once a listening post during the Cold War, currently disused except for a skeleton crew of four US soldiers. That is the normal state of play, though things are a little livelier at present as a team of scientists from the University of Northern Massachusetts is staying on site while researching the effects of global warming on the nearby glaciers.
The research team’s leader is climatologist Gerard Sully, but its strongest two personalities are paleocologist Evan Marshall and British computer scientist Penny Barbour. Despite this wealth of experience, not everyone is happy. The scientific expedition, which was bankrolled by National Geographic-type TV channel Terra Prime and their parent corporation, Blackpool Entertainment, is making slow progress in terms of discoveries, and there are disputes aplenty. And then, suddenly, while exploring a lava tube filled with ancient ice, the scientists uncover the body of a gigantic animal frozen beneath the surface.
At first there is confusion about what exactly the creature is. From its terrible eyes and teeth, it is clearly a predator, possibly a smilodon (‘sabre-tooth tiger’ to you and me), but if so, at sixteen feet in length, it’s the largest ever known. The condition of its perfect preservation is also a source of wonder and bemusement.
The team is delighted, feeling they might get something out of this expedition after all. However, when word is sent back to Terra Prime, the channel immediately despatches a film crew to Fear Base, where they plan to cut the discovery free and thaw it out on live television. Despite the scientists’ advice that, as they know nothing about the animal, it should be studied in situ first, the channel orders them to assist the newly-arrived crew, predicting that this will be a blockbuster event that will shoot them to the top of the ratings.
As such, they don’t just send cameramen and roustabouts, but talented line producer Kari Ekberg, network liaison and senior channel rep,Wolff, and the obnoxious and obsessive film director, Emilio Conti, who sees ‘his cat’ as a belated opportunity to put some shine on an otherwise non-too-illustrious career. The show will be presented by the spoiled and beautiful TV anchor, Ashleigh Davis, whose luxurious trailer is brought to the base by doughty ice road trucker, Carradine. Another new-arrival is Jeremy Logan, a historian from Yale, who is keen to look the base over and investigate the mystery of why a bunch of scientists were inexplicably killed there back in 1958.
Regular Lincoln Child readers will know Logan of old, recognising him as an intrepid investigator of dangerous paranormal phenomena. Though he isn’t close to being the lead character here, Terminal Freeze is his second outing to date (several others have been written since).
If the scientists at Fear Base aren’t already worried enough that the plan to thaw out the giant cat is a bad one, the Tunits, the few survivors of an all-but-extinct Alaskan tribe, arrive at the base under the leadership of medicine-man, Usuguk, and try to explain that the ancient creature was the mountain’s demonic guardian, that it is not fully dead, and that, once unleashed, it will kill and kill until all transgressors have been destroyed.
Meanwhile, Marshall and his team have worries of their own. From what they are able to see through the cloudy ice, they deduce that this is not a smilodon, but a prehistoric creature existing outside of science. Despite that, it was clearly an extreme predator, something dwelling at the very top of the food-chain. The animal is therefore priceless, and they are convinced it should be left where it is while more prudent research is done.
However, Wolff pulls rank. Terra Prime will have their live TV extravaganza at any cost. While the irritating Conti takes charge, adopting a melodramatic but painfully unscientific approach, Marshall and co are forced to stand by and watch as the animal is cut free in a hefty block of ice and placed in one of the base’s refrigerated vaults.
Perhaps inevitably, this doesn’t protect it enough. Because a short time later, long before any cameras start to roll, the vault is found to be empty, the huge block of ice clearly having melted – which is a mystery in itself – while the preserved carcass is missing, the thieves having entered through a large hole cut in the floor.
Acrimony and accusations fly, the scientists coming under deep suspicion. Until someone points out that the damage to the vault floor was not done from the outside, but the inside. And that no power-tools were used. If anything, the metal panels were ripped apart by what appears to have been claws and teeth.
It isn’t long after this when the horrific killings begin …
Review
There can’t be many of us who don’t enjoy a good ‘creature feature’ set at the ends of the Earth. Because that is firmly the territory we are in with Terminal Freeze. If you’ve read the outline, you won’t need me to liken it to several icebound monster classics of the past. From HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness to John W Campbell’s Who Goes There?, from Dan Simmons’s The Terror to Robert Banks Stewart’s Dr Who masterpiece, The Seeds of Doom, all the familiar tropes are present: the isolated station deep in the polar region, manned uncomfortably by a combo of scientists and military men; the terrible thing in the ice; the unwise decision to bring it back to base; the pseudo-science about what it might be and where it might have originated; the string of brutal deaths as it somehow appears to have survived its billennia-long incarceration in the deep freeze and now embarks on a non-stop assault against the good guys, who invariably possess no weapon that seems to work on it.
But does any of that mean I didn’t enjoy Terminal Freeze?
Not at all.
Okay, I can’t pretend that I didn’t have one or two issues, so perhaps it’s for the best if I deal with those straight away.
It’s a pity that we never really get to know more about the creature. It’s not a sabre-tooth tiger, it’s infinitely worse, but that’s about the extent of what we learn. Though the sense of terror it generates is real (it vibrates off the page once the hunt is on), and though it is never explicitly depicted, the creature is described sufficiently for us to understand that this is a genuine primordial horror, something that doesn’t belong in any world, let alone the modern one, and that it will cause mayhem if it ever gets back to civilisation. But all that aside – and I’m sorry if this is a bit of a spoiler (it spoiled it a little for me too!) – we never get to know exactly what the monster is.
The author talks in general terms about the ‘Callisto Effect’, an idea that, if memory serves, he and his regular writing-partner, Doug Preston, first aired in Relic, published fourteen years earlier in 1995. This is an evolutionary concept in which an area of geographical confinement may become overpopulated by certain species of fauna, the outcome being the emergence of a completely new and highly aggressive genus, a super-predator that will hunt and kill everything around it until the overpopulation problem has been resolved. This is a neat idea, I’ll admit, even if it’s entirely fictional. It gives us a scary antagonist, there is no question about that, but it doesn’t really allow us to tie up all the loose ends.
My only other brickbat concerns Usuguk, who isn’t just the wiseman of the local Native American tribe, and who’s still inexplicably here even though the vast majority of his people have migrated across the continent to an easier climate, he also happens to have been a former US soldier and even a scientist; not only that, he was involved in the 1958 incident, when the staff at Fear Base were exposed for the first time to the murderous beast in the ice (or another one very like it). Sorry, but I just found this a bit too convenient. Not, I have to add, that Usuguk is really a great help at the end of the day. Not as much as you’d think he would be.
However, these are the only issues I had with Terminal Freeze, and they didn’t do any real damage. Essentially, this book is monster horror par excellence, garnished with lashings of full-blooded action. And it works perfectly on that level. Half the personnel’s attempted flight in the ice-truck trailer doesn’t really serve any purpose, other than to add a few extra thrills (which it does!), but the increasingly frequent battles with the monster in the concrete bowels of the decommissioned base or on the tundra beyond, are convincing and enthralling, giving us more than a passing nod to major movies of this subgenre. For example, the attempt to destroy the monster with an arc of electricity comes straight out of 1951’s The Thing From Another World, while the extreme factionalism of the crew and the fact this weakens them in the face of a common enemy is fond homage to John Carpenter’s 1982 version, The Thing. But again, it’s all ripping stuff.
On top of that, Lincoln Child writes so well. The desolate landscape of glaciers and frozen crags is beautifully evoked, while the scientific analysis, even if much of it is technobabble, sounds authentic enough to keep you engrossed. The characters, while in some cases they are stock (Evan Marshall, for example, though an eco-minded scientist is also an ex spec-ops soldier, while even Child’s regular, Logan, remains an unreadable background figure) range widely enough to remain recognisable throughout the blood-soaked chaos, the villains among them adequately annoying for you to enjoy their inevitable gruesome demise. But it’s with the base itself where Child really excels himself, hitting us not with a small huddle of huts and storage sheds connected by a few primitive metal passages along which the polar wind drones endlessly, but with the brooding majesty of Fear Base, formerly a major outpost in the USA’s defensive line against the Soviet Union, and as such vast and multi-levelled, comprising warrens of tunnels, vaults and forgotten rooms crammed with relics of machinery and defunct kit, all now disused and covered with dust. It’s a depthless labyrinth in which the monster can roam unchecked without anyone even knowing it is there – which makes it all the more terrifying, of course, when they’ve got to try and track it down.
I’m not going to say a lot more about Terminal Freeze. Basically, it does what it says on the tin. It’s a sci-fi action horror, the territory familiar, but the atmosphere deeply immersive, and the thrills, when they start, coming at us relentlessly. Read any blurb and you’ll immediately know what you’re going to get. If that kind of thing floats your boat, go for it.
And now, my usual folly. I’m going to try and cast this beast in the inevitable event someone options it for movie development and then picks me to be casting director.
Evan Marshall – Ben Mendelsohn
Jeremy Logan – (assuming he does much more in a screen adaptation) Kiefer Sutherland
Kari Ekberg – Carmen Ejogo
Emilio Conti – Franco Nero
Sergeant Paul Gonzalez – Benicio del Toro
Carradine – Mahershala Ali
Gerard Sully – Brian Gleeson
Penny Barbour – Olivia Colman
Wolff – Patrick Dempsey
Ashleigh Davis – Amy Seimetz
In the high Alaskan Arctic, the foothills to the ominously named Mount Fear play host to Fear Base, an old military installation, once a listening post during the Cold War, currently disused except for a skeleton crew of four US soldiers. That is the normal state of play, though things are a little livelier at present as a team of scientists from the University of Northern Massachusetts is staying on site while researching the effects of global warming on the nearby glaciers.
The research team’s leader is climatologist Gerard Sully, but its strongest two personalities are paleocologist Evan Marshall and British computer scientist Penny Barbour. Despite this wealth of experience, not everyone is happy. The scientific expedition, which was bankrolled by National Geographic-type TV channel Terra Prime and their parent corporation, Blackpool Entertainment, is making slow progress in terms of discoveries, and there are disputes aplenty. And then, suddenly, while exploring a lava tube filled with ancient ice, the scientists uncover the body of a gigantic animal frozen beneath the surface.
At first there is confusion about what exactly the creature is. From its terrible eyes and teeth, it is clearly a predator, possibly a smilodon (‘sabre-tooth tiger’ to you and me), but if so, at sixteen feet in length, it’s the largest ever known. The condition of its perfect preservation is also a source of wonder and bemusement.
The team is delighted, feeling they might get something out of this expedition after all. However, when word is sent back to Terra Prime, the channel immediately despatches a film crew to Fear Base, where they plan to cut the discovery free and thaw it out on live television. Despite the scientists’ advice that, as they know nothing about the animal, it should be studied in situ first, the channel orders them to assist the newly-arrived crew, predicting that this will be a blockbuster event that will shoot them to the top of the ratings.
As such, they don’t just send cameramen and roustabouts, but talented line producer Kari Ekberg, network liaison and senior channel rep,Wolff, and the obnoxious and obsessive film director, Emilio Conti, who sees ‘his cat’ as a belated opportunity to put some shine on an otherwise non-too-illustrious career. The show will be presented by the spoiled and beautiful TV anchor, Ashleigh Davis, whose luxurious trailer is brought to the base by doughty ice road trucker, Carradine. Another new-arrival is Jeremy Logan, a historian from Yale, who is keen to look the base over and investigate the mystery of why a bunch of scientists were inexplicably killed there back in 1958.
Regular Lincoln Child readers will know Logan of old, recognising him as an intrepid investigator of dangerous paranormal phenomena. Though he isn’t close to being the lead character here, Terminal Freeze is his second outing to date (several others have been written since).
If the scientists at Fear Base aren’t already worried enough that the plan to thaw out the giant cat is a bad one, the Tunits, the few survivors of an all-but-extinct Alaskan tribe, arrive at the base under the leadership of medicine-man, Usuguk, and try to explain that the ancient creature was the mountain’s demonic guardian, that it is not fully dead, and that, once unleashed, it will kill and kill until all transgressors have been destroyed.
Meanwhile, Marshall and his team have worries of their own. From what they are able to see through the cloudy ice, they deduce that this is not a smilodon, but a prehistoric creature existing outside of science. Despite that, it was clearly an extreme predator, something dwelling at the very top of the food-chain. The animal is therefore priceless, and they are convinced it should be left where it is while more prudent research is done.
However, Wolff pulls rank. Terra Prime will have their live TV extravaganza at any cost. While the irritating Conti takes charge, adopting a melodramatic but painfully unscientific approach, Marshall and co are forced to stand by and watch as the animal is cut free in a hefty block of ice and placed in one of the base’s refrigerated vaults.
Perhaps inevitably, this doesn’t protect it enough. Because a short time later, long before any cameras start to roll, the vault is found to be empty, the huge block of ice clearly having melted – which is a mystery in itself – while the preserved carcass is missing, the thieves having entered through a large hole cut in the floor.
Acrimony and accusations fly, the scientists coming under deep suspicion. Until someone points out that the damage to the vault floor was not done from the outside, but the inside. And that no power-tools were used. If anything, the metal panels were ripped apart by what appears to have been claws and teeth.
It isn’t long after this when the horrific killings begin …
Review
There can’t be many of us who don’t enjoy a good ‘creature feature’ set at the ends of the Earth. Because that is firmly the territory we are in with Terminal Freeze. If you’ve read the outline, you won’t need me to liken it to several icebound monster classics of the past. From HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness to John W Campbell’s Who Goes There?, from Dan Simmons’s The Terror to Robert Banks Stewart’s Dr Who masterpiece, The Seeds of Doom, all the familiar tropes are present: the isolated station deep in the polar region, manned uncomfortably by a combo of scientists and military men; the terrible thing in the ice; the unwise decision to bring it back to base; the pseudo-science about what it might be and where it might have originated; the string of brutal deaths as it somehow appears to have survived its billennia-long incarceration in the deep freeze and now embarks on a non-stop assault against the good guys, who invariably possess no weapon that seems to work on it.
But does any of that mean I didn’t enjoy Terminal Freeze?
Not at all.
Okay, I can’t pretend that I didn’t have one or two issues, so perhaps it’s for the best if I deal with those straight away.
It’s a pity that we never really get to know more about the creature. It’s not a sabre-tooth tiger, it’s infinitely worse, but that’s about the extent of what we learn. Though the sense of terror it generates is real (it vibrates off the page once the hunt is on), and though it is never explicitly depicted, the creature is described sufficiently for us to understand that this is a genuine primordial horror, something that doesn’t belong in any world, let alone the modern one, and that it will cause mayhem if it ever gets back to civilisation. But all that aside – and I’m sorry if this is a bit of a spoiler (it spoiled it a little for me too!) – we never get to know exactly what the monster is.
The author talks in general terms about the ‘Callisto Effect’, an idea that, if memory serves, he and his regular writing-partner, Doug Preston, first aired in Relic, published fourteen years earlier in 1995. This is an evolutionary concept in which an area of geographical confinement may become overpopulated by certain species of fauna, the outcome being the emergence of a completely new and highly aggressive genus, a super-predator that will hunt and kill everything around it until the overpopulation problem has been resolved. This is a neat idea, I’ll admit, even if it’s entirely fictional. It gives us a scary antagonist, there is no question about that, but it doesn’t really allow us to tie up all the loose ends.
My only other brickbat concerns Usuguk, who isn’t just the wiseman of the local Native American tribe, and who’s still inexplicably here even though the vast majority of his people have migrated across the continent to an easier climate, he also happens to have been a former US soldier and even a scientist; not only that, he was involved in the 1958 incident, when the staff at Fear Base were exposed for the first time to the murderous beast in the ice (or another one very like it). Sorry, but I just found this a bit too convenient. Not, I have to add, that Usuguk is really a great help at the end of the day. Not as much as you’d think he would be.
However, these are the only issues I had with Terminal Freeze, and they didn’t do any real damage. Essentially, this book is monster horror par excellence, garnished with lashings of full-blooded action. And it works perfectly on that level. Half the personnel’s attempted flight in the ice-truck trailer doesn’t really serve any purpose, other than to add a few extra thrills (which it does!), but the increasingly frequent battles with the monster in the concrete bowels of the decommissioned base or on the tundra beyond, are convincing and enthralling, giving us more than a passing nod to major movies of this subgenre. For example, the attempt to destroy the monster with an arc of electricity comes straight out of 1951’s The Thing From Another World, while the extreme factionalism of the crew and the fact this weakens them in the face of a common enemy is fond homage to John Carpenter’s 1982 version, The Thing. But again, it’s all ripping stuff.
On top of that, Lincoln Child writes so well. The desolate landscape of glaciers and frozen crags is beautifully evoked, while the scientific analysis, even if much of it is technobabble, sounds authentic enough to keep you engrossed. The characters, while in some cases they are stock (Evan Marshall, for example, though an eco-minded scientist is also an ex spec-ops soldier, while even Child’s regular, Logan, remains an unreadable background figure) range widely enough to remain recognisable throughout the blood-soaked chaos, the villains among them adequately annoying for you to enjoy their inevitable gruesome demise. But it’s with the base itself where Child really excels himself, hitting us not with a small huddle of huts and storage sheds connected by a few primitive metal passages along which the polar wind drones endlessly, but with the brooding majesty of Fear Base, formerly a major outpost in the USA’s defensive line against the Soviet Union, and as such vast and multi-levelled, comprising warrens of tunnels, vaults and forgotten rooms crammed with relics of machinery and defunct kit, all now disused and covered with dust. It’s a depthless labyrinth in which the monster can roam unchecked without anyone even knowing it is there – which makes it all the more terrifying, of course, when they’ve got to try and track it down.
I’m not going to say a lot more about Terminal Freeze. Basically, it does what it says on the tin. It’s a sci-fi action horror, the territory familiar, but the atmosphere deeply immersive, and the thrills, when they start, coming at us relentlessly. Read any blurb and you’ll immediately know what you’re going to get. If that kind of thing floats your boat, go for it.
And now, my usual folly. I’m going to try and cast this beast in the inevitable event someone options it for movie development and then picks me to be casting director.
Evan Marshall – Ben Mendelsohn
Jeremy Logan – (assuming he does much more in a screen adaptation) Kiefer Sutherland
Kari Ekberg – Carmen Ejogo
Emilio Conti – Franco Nero
Sergeant Paul Gonzalez – Benicio del Toro
Carradine – Mahershala Ali
Gerard Sully – Brian Gleeson
Penny Barbour – Olivia Colman
Wolff – Patrick Dempsey
Ashleigh Davis – Amy Seimetz
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