Terminal freeze

Review by Booklist Review

At a remote science outpost near the Arctic Circle, researchers find what appears to be an animal frozen in the ice. A film crew arrives and digs it out, intending to make a documentary around the creature. But after the animal thaws out, and starts tearing people apart, everybody suddenly has only one thing on his mind: staying alive. This thriller bears more than a passing resemblance to John W. Campbell's well-known 1938 novella, Who Goes There?, in which a monster terrorizes a remote Antarctic research station. Campbell's story, published when the world was on the brink of war, was about claustrophobia, paranoia, and fear of the unknown; Child's is a much more traditional monster-on-the-rampage story, lacking the thematic depth that made Campbell's an enduring classic. Campbell's monster was a creature from outer space, long buried in the ice. Childs's is an earthly animal, long buried in the ice -- in function, the same creature, just with a different back story. There is no pressing need for this novel: we already have the Campbell novella, plus the two movie versions (1951 and 82), plus a myriad other variations on the theme. But Childs is a solid writer with a solid track record, and the book should do well with his fans. Recommended more on the strength of the author's name than on the strength of the story itself, which is well handled but ultimately unmemorable.--Pitt, David Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this taut, suspenseful SF thriller from bestseller Child (Deep Storm), an obscure scientific expedition in Alaska's remote Federal Wilderness Zone stumbles on the frozen body of what appears to be a saber-tooth tiger in a cave, though only the eyes are clearly visible through the ice. When news of the find reaches the cable television network sponsoring the expedition, Emilio Conti, a legendary documentary filmmaker, rushes to the scene, where he plans to film the thawing of the animal on live TV. After the frozen creature disappears, Conti suspects sabotage, until horribly eviscerated corpses begin to pile up at the military base hosting the expedition. Paleoecologist Evan Marshall suspects that the prehistoric beast is responsible-and that the initial identification of it as a saber-tooth was mistaken. While the story line of a horrific monster picking off a shrinking group of survivors in a confined area is nothing new, Child's superior writing raises this above the pack. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Scientists at work above the Arctic Circle discover a large, catlike creature encased in ice and thaw it out with much fanfare. Bad idea. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Furry prehistoric beast thaws, then makes up for lost meals with human victims. Paleoecologist Evan Marshall leads a group of scientists into "The Zone" in northeastern Alaska. Working out of a small base known as the Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation, his team from Northern Massachusetts University is doing research on global warming. The only other humans around are a small number of Native Americans, Tunits, to the north. Beneath the ice floor in a cave, the team spots a frozen creature, two fist-sized yellow eyes surrounded by black pupilsperhaps, as the team believes, a saber-toothed tiger. When Usuguk, an elder of the Tunits, arrives to warn the team of evil and advise them to leave, Marshall politely but firmly refuses. Meanwhile, in Virginia, Dr. Jeremy Logan discovers some ominous, though unspecified, information about Fear Base in top-secret documents from the 1950s. More turmoil rocks The Zone with the arrival of brash Emilio Conti, an executive producer with a documentary film crew, big as Marshall's and twice as boisterous, that promptly sets up a makeshift adjoining camp. The only respectful filmmaker is attractive producer Kari Ekberg. Marshall tries to oust Conti and company, but the producer's smug announcement that the film has financed the entire expedition effectively neutralizes any objections. After Conti sets about melting the block of ice, the creature inside proves much larger than a cat, though it disappears before anyone gets a good look. Then the tastefully depicted carnage begins. As the body count rises, an ice-road trucker named Carradine boldly drives most of the cast to safety while Conti prepares to film the beast and Marshall seeks help from the Tunits. Child (Deep Storm, 2007, etc.) depicts his frigid setting with greater authority than his characters, diminishing his thriller's impact. Far from a classic, but a minor-league Jurassic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 "Hey, Evan. Lunch?" Evan Marshall put the ziplock bag aside and stood up, massaging his lower back. He'd spent the last ninety minutes with his face inches above the ground, collecting samples from the glacial sediment, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust. The voice had been Sully's, and now Marshall made him out: a squat, slightly portly figure in a fur-lined parka, standing, arms crossed, thirty yards up the steep valley. Behind him rose the terminal tongue of the Fear glacier, a rich, mysterious blue riddled with white fracture lines. Large ice boulders lay scattered along its base like so many monstrous diamonds, along with daggerlike shards of ancient lava. Marshall opened his mouth to warn Sully against standing so close: the glacier was as dangerous as it was pretty, since the weather had turned warmer and the ice front was calving off deadly chunks at an unprecedented rate. Then he thought better of it. Gerard Sully was proud of his position as nominal leader and didn't like being told what to do. Instead, Marshall just shook his head. "I think I'll pass, thanks." "Suit yourself." Sully turned toward Wright Faraday, the party's evolutionary biologist, who was busying himself a little downslope. "How's about it, Wright?" Faraday glanced up, watery blue eyes oddly magnified behind tortoiseshell frames. A digital camera dangled from a heavy strap around his neck. "Not me," he said with a frown, as if the thought of stopping to eat in the middle of a workday was somehow heretical. "Starve yourselves if you want to. Just don't ask me to bring anything back." "Not even a Popsicle?" asked Marshall. Sully smiled thinly. He was about as short as Napoleon, and radiated a combination of egotism and insecurity that Marshall found especially annoying. He'd been able to put up with it back at the university, where Sully was just one arrogant scientist among many, but up here on the ice--with nowhere to escape--it had grown irksome. Perhaps, he reflected, he should be relieved that their expedition had only a few weeks to play out. "You look tired," Sully said. "Out walking again last night?" Marshall nodded. "You'd better be careful. You might fall into a lava tube and freeze to death." "All right, Mom. I'll be careful." "Or run into a polar bear, or something." "That's all right. I'm starved for some good conversation." "It's no joke, you refusing to carry a gun and all." Marshall didn't like the direction this was leading. "Look, if you run into Ang, tell him I've got more samples here for transport back to the lab." "I'll do that. He'll be thrilled." Marshall watched the climatologist make his way carefully past them, down the rubble toward the foot of the mountain and their base. He called it "their base," but of course it belonged to the U.S. government: officially known as the Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation and decommissioned almost fifty years ago, it consisted of a low, gray, sprawling, _institutional-looking structure, festooned with radar domes and other detritus of the cold war. Beyond it lay a frigid landscape of permafrost and lava deposits spewed ages ago from the mountain's guts, gullied and split as if the earth had torn itself apart in geologic agony. In many places, the surface was hidden beneath large snowfields. There were no roads, no other structures, no living things. It was as hostile, as remote, as alien as the moon. He stretched as he looked out over the forbidding landscape. Even after four weeks on-site, it still seemed hard to believe that anyplace could be so barren. But then the entire scientific expedition had seemed a little unreal from the start. Unreal that a media giant like Terra Prime had picked their grant applications for approval: four scientists from Northern Massachusetts University with nothing in common save an interest in global warming. Unreal that Excerpted from Terminal Freeze by Lincoln Child All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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