A sci-fi horror story about a predatory species similar to manta rays that exist in the ocean depths, rising to the surface and evolving at an insanely rapid rate. How rapidly? The juveniles learn to fly - like real flight, in the air - by watching seabirds do it. That, and lots of trial and error. A few - four dozen to be exact we are told - even figure out how to hover. Like a 1500 pound hummingbird. Within a matter of months of reaching the surface, mind you. Maybe a year, tops.
They also somehow figure out how to breathe air through their air bladder - there's some thing tossed in about there being oxygen geysers at the sea floor that pop up periodically that would explain this adaptation - and all their senses, adapted over millions of years to life at miles below the ocean's surface, instantly adjust to not only life in shallow water, but on land. Their electroreception works, in the air, from miles away, as do their eyes.
They can kill a 900-pound bear with ease, outsmart dolphins within minutes of encountering them, set traps better than the freaking Predator, and from observing one human shoot a deer with a gun, once, understand that humans carry weapons that kill from a distance. To the extent they understand a bow and arrow - because one of the biologists is one-eighth Indian - are also dangerous the moment they see it.
The only hope of stopping this thing, that resembles the fanciful animal a five-year old would devise, is a small crew of marine biologists who were originally just chasing down a rumor of a new ray species to keep their jobs for a dot-com millionaire trying to make a name for himself and impress the old money types at the country club. I am entirely serious.
You could draw several conclusions from the fact I read this entire 414 page book in one night. That it was fast-paced, switching between what the biologists were doing and what the rays were doing so the plot never lingers on boring old scientific exposition for too long? Yes.
That it was bizarre enough of a concept, with ludicrous enough pseudo-science - written in a faux-Michael Crichton level of detail - that the sheer lunacy impelled me to keep going, like reading a Bob Haney comic? Yes.
That it was not a deep book at all, easy to read and with little of the depth to characters or motivations that would force a reader to stop and process what they just read? Yes.
That I was staying in a hotel that night and there was jack shit on the, frankly, piss poor selection of cable channels, so I might as well read this book? Yes.
I can enjoy a "terror from the deep emerges" story. I liked Meg back when I read it, but I think the key was, the Megalodon was still written as basically a shark. A really big, hungry shark, but still just a shark. It gets to the surface in more a less a fluke - another Megalodon gets caught in a cable around a tiny manned submersible as it's pulled up and is wounded, the first Meg attacks at the scent of blood and swims through the layers of cold water, shielded by all the warm blood of the shark it's eating. Ridiculous, but not in terms of the animal's behavior.
This? This is, well, I mentioned Bob Haney, and yeah, this feels like something he would have written in an Aquaman story. "Menace of the Meta-Mantas!" Or like that Simpsons Halloween story where the dolphins come on land and kick the humans off. Like I said, Freedman keeps the momentum, but by setting the pace like he does, the characters' motivations come off as flat or cliched.
When he tries to build a romantic relationship between two of the biologists, it doesn't land. The guy is supposed to notice the lady is dressing more "sexy", but there's nothing about how that makes him feel, what it stirs in him. Or what her thoughts or motivations, if any, were in dressing like that. It feels like an outline of a relationship, waiting to be filled out. Since it isn't, it comes off as perfunctory, "put the two single characters together," trope.
Also, he often writes from a third-person omniscient, peering into a character's mind to describe what they're thinking. But within the same paragraph, will abruptly switch to a first-person transcription of the character's thoughts. It's just awkward and disrupts the flow of the story.
Still, reading this beat paying attention to Game 1 of the NLCS.
'They were goddamn frightening eyes. Not just because they were bigger than baseballs, pupil-less, and in the strangely unnerving color of jet black. But because of what was behind them. They were cold, calculating, and, above all, intelligent. An awfully smart animal lurked behind those eyes. Darryl knew its brain weighed six pounds, but now, actually seeing the creature, he would have believed its brain weighed twenty-five pounds. Look at those goddamn eyes.'
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