Monday, October 31, 2016

Getting Lost in a Past Re-imagined

The Lost World (Professor Challenger, #1)The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Who doesn't wish dinosaurs weren't still around? Well, maybe not the big bitey ones, but how cool would that be?! Hell, I'd even take the huge, face-ripping ones too if it were an all-or-nothing deal. I figure a little survival of the fittest would do this world good.

Since that's not likely to happen during my lifetime, I'll console myself with movies and books. The Lost World is a good place to be for those of us looking to get lost in a dino world.

This is a forerunner of the what-if history throwbacks to the Jurassic period. Being an older work it suffers for the style of the day. Sometimes writing styles of various eras aren't all that bad, but this one's no good. Nothing kills the momentum, surprise and thrill of reading when the author preempts a thrilling surprise scene by announcing that "a thrilling surprise happened and I'm about to tell you about it!". Damn it man, we can decide if it's thrilling, and furthermore, do you even know what a surprise is?!

Arthur Conan Doyle did better work with his Sherlock series. This book is a fun adventure, but it's not a great read. The set up takes a while. The action moves a bit and the stakes are fairly high, but "a bit" and "fairly" shouldn't be the descriptives used to describe this.



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