A review by cathepsut
Ice Station Death by Gustavo Bondoni
4.0
Scary name for a book. I went into this with extremely low expectations. Low-and-behold, good writing! Not as fast paced or suspenseful as my previous two creature horror reads though.
Creatures from the Triassic survived and adapted. We messed with them and now they are messing back....
Have a look here, after you found out what the big bad monster is:
https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2014/06/12/nh-notes-discovery-of-a-marine-reptile-fossil-trackway/
In the last third of the book my interest started to flag a bit. The monsters were nicely monstrous and really TSTL (probably why they should have gone extinct in the first place), but still—the pacing was a little too sedate every now and then.
And the addition of a crazy woman relatively late in the book brought a wacky element to it that didn‘t really gell well with the rest of the story. I would have preferred if the author had just escalated the actual monster story instead.
Also there was a little too much thinking towards the end, when all I wanted was action and blood splatter. I really don‘t want to know the main character‘s relationship history at that point. I wanted to see him kill things. Which he did, eventually, in funny and creative ways, he was “someone who’s shown courage verging on idiocy in the face of danger.”
Bottom line, it was entertaining, I liked the main character, a little too slowly paced here and there, more focus on the monsters would have been nice. Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. I would read something else by the author.
Creatures from the Triassic survived and adapted. We messed with them and now they are messing back....
Have a look here, after you found out what the big bad monster is:
https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2014/06/12/nh-notes-discovery-of-a-marine-reptile-fossil-trackway/
In the last third of the book my interest started to flag a bit. The monsters were nicely monstrous and really TSTL (probably why they should have gone extinct in the first place), but still—the pacing was a little too sedate every now and then.
And the addition of a crazy woman relatively late in the book brought a wacky element to it that didn‘t really gell well with the rest of the story. I would have preferred if the author had just escalated the actual monster story instead.
Also there was a little too much thinking towards the end, when all I wanted was action and blood splatter. I really don‘t want to know the main character‘s relationship history at that point. I wanted to see him kill things. Which he did, eventually, in funny and creative ways, he was “someone who’s shown courage verging on idiocy in the face of danger.”
Bottom line, it was entertaining, I liked the main character, a little too slowly paced here and there, more focus on the monsters would have been nice. Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. I would read something else by the author.