Patrick S. Dorazio 2007-10-07
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I came at this book from the angle of it being about zombies, my favorite horror archetype. This book does delivery zombies, in spades, but they are definitely not your typical zombie of movie and even book fame. Not a big deal, these are servants of an evil god type zombies, the ones that don't eat you but drag you to a place where their evil deity eats you. Potentially scarry stuff...nearly unspeakable, as the book states many a time, but not really.
I never read the other two titles that Geoffrey Caine wrote with Abraham Stroud in them but I don't feel that either are necessary for a reader to get the full flavor of this yarn. We have a main character who is a former military man, former cop, current archeologist and someone with a supernatural heritage who is brought in to deal with a mysterious buried ship in the middle of Manhattan. I won't go into the details of the buried ship inside a pyramid and the logistics of it-another review covers that, but suffice it to say there is a substantial amount of the book dedicated to examining the history of Etruscans and creating a whole mythology and culture for them that I did not find at all compelling or intriguing. That plus landing this ship conveniently in a place that will have enough living souls to sate its needs when it wakes back up.
I was mildly entertained by this story and found it easy to plow through. That is probably the most positive thing I can say about it. The dialogue was uneven at best, stilted and over dramatic in most places, with lots of !!! interjected in case you did not realize how dire the situation was. You get the idea of what the author is trying to convey but I get the sense that he did not try to imagine how any of it would sound coming out of his character's lips.
This is certainly not the stuff that legends are made of but if you need a few hours distraction and want a pulpy little story then feel free to take a look at this one. Perhaps the vampire or werewolf titles by this author are a bit more intriguing though.