So, I just finished this book so I could talk about it in my book club tonight. Holy cow. I'm slightly disturbed. No ... I'm seriously disturbed with this book. It's on par with Jeremy Robinson's other works, but I'd have to say this book takes the-Most-Effed-Idea-Ever award. Probably my least favorite out of Jeremy Robinson, not because of the book itself. It was very well written, the characters were developed awesomely, which is pretty much Jeremy Robinson in a nut shell. However, just the idea behind this book is freaky as hell. I'm the type of person who doesn't really enjoy watching movies like Saw or The Human Centipede (which I was duped into watching after being coerced by peer pressure .. don't ever say peer pressure disappears with age) because I just can't wrap my brain around the type of people it takes to even come up with an idea like those for a movie versus a storyline that has a baseline in history. Part of me wanted to sit in a corner and suck my thumb while rocking back and forth behind a triple-deadbolted door. It's mindboggling that there are indeed people in this world that are so severely effed up, they may be doing something like this book entails in their basement in the name of science. I'm a scientist. I agree to expanding our knowledge of our universe right down to our stem cells, but holy freaking nutballs... there has got to be a line somewhere, and I have a feeling there are tons of people in this world who not only toe it, they kick dirt over it and then skip on gleefully. (So enough of that tangent .. onto the book...) This may contain spoilers.
This book contains genetically altered chimeras, ranging from psychotic sea gulls with piranha teeth to crocodiles with squid-like tentacles that shoot from their gullets (which kind of reminded me of the vampires in the third Blade movie). In other words .. the stuff from your worst nightmares. And that's not even touching the main plot of this movie, human transfiguration/mutilation/experimentation. Transplanting arms, sewing people together, giving people extra appendages, not to mention cultivating brand new species by basically implanting a fertilized, effed-up genetically egg into a person and seeing what gets birthed. It was awful. Not the book was awful, but the idea was gut-wrenching. Definitely my least favorite book by Robinson, but that's not saying I hated the book. Of course, I grew to love the characters, rooting for them when they needed it, boohooing when they got injured or captured, smiling and laughing along with them to ease the tension when the moment was needed. As always, I caught myself wondering how they are doing currently, as if I was reading their first-hand accounts of the events and they were real human beings. (To this day, I still fleetingly wonder how the main character from SecondWorld is, until I remember he was a book...) I definitely grew attached to them, and I'm sure I'll catch myself thinking about them in the future (the same way I'll randomly remember that terrible movie The Human Centipede at the worst times possible). I'm sure my dreams tonight will be vivid, and I'll probably wake my husband up with my thrashing and he'll wake me up so I can find myself in a cold sweat. Great. Can't wait to sleep now.
With all of that being said, I still rated this a 4 out of 5 stars on my Goodreads account, simply because I enjoyed reading it, but it didn't make my Favorites list alongside with his other novels.
