Copyright 2014 by James Patterson. Published by Grand Central Publishing, New York.
Yes, another book where James Patterson slapped his name on someone else’s work. This time the actual writer is Michael Ledwidge. You can tell that Patterson didn’t write this one because it is science fiction and Patterson doesn’t do science fiction. I won’t be surprised if I next see his name on a romance novel. He apparently is willing to lend his name to any literary venture, for a buck.
But unlike Sunday at Tiffany’s this one isn’t pure dreck. It isn’t great, but it has some value. Enough value that I was able to finish the book and enough value that CBS decided it was good enough to be a TV series. That isn’t a high bar, but the plot is sufficiently interesting to justify it.
The plot. The world is going to hell in a handbasket because animals all around the world are aggressively attacking humans, often in pack behavior unlike anything ever seen before. This weird behavior, which evolved over a decade, was noticed early on by a few biologists, among them Jackson Oz who became alarmed and tried to warn others of an impending ecological catastrophe. But no one listened. Oz was ostracized (Oztracized?) as a kook. But the attacks worsened until people were living in bunkers. Oz finally got some ears.
I won’t tell you what was making the animals go bonkers. I think the cause is plausible. But it comes to Oz in an instant. The last 50 pages reveal the reason and the initial attempts of world government to deal with the crisis. But the first 350 pages are largely devoted to detailing horrific animal attacks. That makes for salacious reading – and probably a TV series that can get good ratings – but it isn’t great literature. I also object to Patterson’s (ok, Ledwidge’s) use of tense: past tense is used to provide the narrative involving Oz and others trying to figure out what is happening and present tense is used to document the attacks. Seems like a cheap literary conceit to me.
So not dreck. But not very good either.
5 out of 10.