Ancestor

This book has been out for quite a while but I have only recently read it and I felt the urge to review it.

I spotted this book while searching for something new to read. It was cheap and had a great premise: "Scientists on an island try to clone an ancient monster so they can use its organs in transplants. Everything goes wrong." Sounds good, right? A simple action horror. Something easy to read. Fun.

no no. Fun is not what this book offers. You could honestly get more fun out of raping a cactus.

One of the worst aspects of this book is the characters. Everybody is a stereotype. not even that, they're all a parody. The main character seems to be a parody of every action hero in fiction!

But that's not as bad as the bad guys. A German scientist who's obsessed with getting the Nobel prize is not the major bad guy, more of a dick who doesn't help things. But the major bad guy, beside the flesh eating monsters, is a European, money hungry psycho with lots of guns. His brother sends him to the island to make sure things don't go wrong. They're so generic that it's almost offensive. If this psycho had a curly mustache and an English accent, I would have had to put it down and forget about it.

They're not even slightly fleshed out. Do you remember Gremlins? Do you remember when Phoebe Cates' character would try to talk about a traumatic incident but she'd be interupted? Well, every character has a whole bunch of those moments but nobody interupts them.

for a while, I thought that maybe this was a sequel and that the characters were already fleshed out in an other book and that all of the explanatory dialogue and flashbacks were there to reminder the reader of the previous book. But, it turns out that there is no previous book.

I know, I know "it's just a bit of fun." If the plot was as fast paced and fun as promised, I would have forgiven Scott Sigler for his awful characters but three quarters of the book is dedicated to the details of cloning. I know too much about cloning now. What's worse is, it reads like wikipedia. This makes the book so slow and boring that the last few chapters, where the ancestors start killing, is sort of silly and out of place.

and by the time the plot actually kicks in, I have already guessed who survives and how they get away. I had to imagine the "rat creatures" from "Bone" as the ancestors just to keep myself amused.

Quotes on the book and on Sigler's website say that this book is fast paced, well written, original, scary etc. These quotes say that the writer is the next Steven King. I'm guessing that the quotes were cut off before the speaker could say "only fucking with you, it's awful."

So, to summarise: This book is a slow, boring pile of horse cum with horrible 2-D characters. If you want something easy to read, read the bus schedule.