There were a lot of books I had intended to read that I didn't get to this summer. Between work, a summer class, and my own writing projects, I didn't have the time to sit down and hastily devour books like I did last year or the year before. Many of the books on my list were technical volumes, like Fins Into Limbs and Gaining Ground: The Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods, but there were a few fiction titles, too. One of them was The Relic by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, and I decided to pick it up again even though the traditional season for it is long gone.
I first picked up the novel during the summer of 1997, just prior to the release of the so-so film adaptation. I was in a bookstore at the mall looking for something to read during the long hours in the car during my family's annual trip to Florida, and The Relic seemed to be just what I was looking for. A primeval monster loose in a New York museum? What could be better?
I was engrossed in the story from the first page. Even though I was only 14 at the time and knew nothing about academia, genetics, or the politics of science that made up the setting for the horror story, I couldn't put it down. It scared the hell out of me. Ever since I saw the film Alligator as a child I have had recurring nightmares about monsters hidden in dark sewers and tunnels jumping out of the darkness to eat me, and a major portion of The Relic takes places in the rotting subbasments of the New York Museum of Natural History (essentially the American Museum of Natural History with a few changes). I found it hard to get to sleep at night the first time I read it.
There's enough action & gore to keep any horror fan entertained, and Douglas Preston's research into the history of the AMNH (collected in the non-fiction book Dinosaurs in the Attic) did not go to waste. Museums can be macabre and scary even when the lights are on, and the authors of The Relic used the already eerie vibe of museums to play up the threat their monster imposes. Many museums house monsters, but they are dead. All that is left of them are old bones. The Relic sets a live one loose.
I can't enjoy the book the same way I did when I first read it, but now I appreciate the subtext a lot more than I did when I was 14. The book contains a lot of commentary on academia and museum public relations. There's even just a hint of the controversy surrounding punctuated equilibria thrown in for good measure. It certainly isn't the best book ever written, but it is one of the few that I like to pick up now and again just for the pleasure of re-reading it.
What about you? Do you have any particular books you return to over and over again? What is it that draws you to them?
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Not really. I'm re-reading Thomas Harlan's The Oath of Empire series because the last time I assayed it I was going through a period of crisis. And finding it a better, more coherent work than I remembered. When you're disorganized what you experience tends to be disorganized too.
Where Relic is concerned; I've never seen the movie. Largely because the extraneous cute kids got saved in it. The only purpose extraneous cute kids play in a horror story is to die gruesome deaths. Helps build the necessary empathy for the poor, doomed monster.
I also stayed away from the movie because horror movies tend to unnecessarily draw out the monster's death. One 30-06 round rattling around in the brain pan at high velocity is really all you need.
There are a lot of books I re-read on a semi-regular basis. There's a lot of pulp and genre stuff...
They Dying Earth series and many, many others by Jack Vance. The Dying Earth is a fantasy series set in the far future -- every so often the now-red sun will gutter and everyone will look up to see if it's going out. Beautiful language, vivid images, moods ranging from the somber to the romantic to the cold-bloodedly black humorous.
The Weird Tales crew, especially the Lovecraft circle -- H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clarke Ashton Smith. It's funny; I've spent years tracking down beat-up old paperbacks of this stuff and now all of a sudden they're back in print everywhere.
Also Manley Wade Wellman. His John stories, now in print as Owls Hoot In The Daytime, previously Who Fears The Devil?, perfectly combine pulp and Appalachian folklore. These were clearly written by someone who knew the territory. They're also great yarns. I'm no Christian but the Christmas story always gets to me.
I first read one of those stories, The Desrick on Yandro, in an anthology called Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum. It's a wonderful book, full of both literary and pulp authors and the selections are so well done that they're all in tune. The creepy collage illustrations gave me nightmares and so did the stories... Especially Slime by Joseph Payne Brennan.
I first ran across that book in the school library as a second or third grader. That's also where I read A Cavalcade Of Goblins. It's a collection of stories from folklore and literary sources. Scandinavian, Native American, Japanese, Indian, and Irish stories are written by Alan Garner. He also selected a number of poems and historical documents to leaven the mix. When I read it for the first time since sixth grade I was startled to find out that it was even better than I remembered. There's a genuinely eerie and poetic tone to this one.
Harry Adams Knight/Simon Ian Childers's short and nasty monster novels -- Carnosaur, Worms, Tendrils, The Fungus, Slimer, and Bedlam. Great B-movies on paper. While they aren't exactly hard science fiction you can tell that the authors went to the trouble of doing a little research.
The Wind in the Willows is a kid's book I keep coming back to.
As are Tove Jansson's Moomin books. Her stuff can be almost unbearably sad but she also can be very funny. The illustrations are wonderful -- Ms. Jansson was a fine artist and it shows in her gorgeous line drawings.
The Judge Dee mysteries by Robert Van Gulik are set in Imperial China. The first time I ran across one of them it was in an edition released by the University of Chicago Asian Studies department. They were written by a Dutch diplomat who was frustrated at seeing American mysteries selling like hotcakes in Japan when there was a rich tradition of Asian crime fiction. Each novel has three different mysteries in it, a pattern taken from ancient Chinese mystery novels. While the novels are short and self-contained, together they add up to a dramatic life-history of the titular character of the series.
The Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser have a hilariously rotten first-person narrator. Intensely researched historical novels, I tend to read them with two bookmarks so I can flip back and forth between the novel and the footnotes. Great fast-paced adventure with lots of high-quality sex, violence, and local color. Each book takes place in a different part of the world and concerns a bullying cowardly anti-hero who has managed to bamboozle Queen Victoria and most other people into believing he's a stalwart and duty-driven individual.
Oh, man, I could go on all day. This doesn't even scratch the surface and I've written way too much here.
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What about you? Do you have any particular books you return to over and over again? What is it that draws you to them?
One I first remember carrying around the halls of HS oh so many years ago: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. A post-apocalyptic tale of the rebuilding of civilization ...just not quite as the protagonist envisions.
I have always wished a film would be made of it ... but I have also always thought they would muck it up horribly like most books-to-movies.
...tom...
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The Relic is one of my top favorite books! Though i wasn't a fan of the movie...I don't believe it did the creature justice - and from what I read, I didn't think the monster in the movie looked anything like the described one in the book...but that may have just been me.
-Erin
The Relic is definitely much better read that viewed. As is it's sequel, and all the books in Preston & Child's Pendergast series. Seriously, read them.
The only book that, when I finished reading it, I started again from the beginning was Decipher by Stel Pavlou. An everyday tale of global apocalypse in which scientists are the heroes trying to save the world.
To do this, they must decipher the warning messages left by an ancient civilisation, hidden in myths and mystical runes. From CERN to the 'lost city of atlantis', from the mayan jungle to the siberian tundra, the adventure ranges. This book tells you everything you ever needed to know about the great mysteries of religion and life on earth. And it has a grat recipe for mammoth steak.
To do this, they must decipher the warning messages left by an ancient civilisation, hidden in myths and mystical runes. From CERN to the 'lost city of atlantis', from the