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A review by trish204
Beneath the Dark Ice by Greig Beck
3.0
Oh boy. 2.5 stars, very generously rounded up
People who know me and my reading habits a little also know that I started liking military thrillers / military scifi as soon as I gave the genre a chance. This was largely thanks to Matthew Reilly, an Australian author who likes his action a liiiiittle over the top but still manages to create cool treasure hunts or fun fighting sequences.
I was told that Greig Beck is like Matthew Reilly and together with the premise of this book (ancient ruins under Antarctica, a VERY old monster lurking there), I was sold. Sadly, it was a complete let-down.
It wasn't BAD per se (in fact, it was still much better than the other military sci-fi book I read this year), but everything just left me cold. Nothing could move me (in a positive way), I didn't like ANY of the characters, the monster was just MEH and I spotted quite a number of things that were either flat-out wrong (things even I know about so an author should know these things too, especially after some research) or supposed to show a character's ignorance - I'm still not entirely sure which of the two.
Anyway, this is a story about Alex Hunter, a member of the elite American special forces team HAWCs (they recruit from the best special forces units and are therefore the uber-special-forces-team because the SEALS or Delta aren't already special enough). Alex has a problem because after an incident in the past (as touched upon in the novella I read prior to this novel), he is left with an increasing rage (he was always "temperamentful" but now it's getting out of hand) and some superpowers like extremely heightened senses, super strength etc.
After a corporate jet crashes in the Antarctic, revealing a vast underground system of caverns, he and his team accompany a team of scientists that investigates the crash site after the initial search-and-rescue team has vanished without a trace. But what they find in the cave beneath Antarctica is even worse than the Russian assassin on Alex's heals (we met this lovely man in the afore-mentioned novella too).
Several things irked me especially:
1) The author didn't bother to research and correctly name tier 1 military groups in the US (the Rangers, for example, are NOT tier 1 but at least one former Ranger is a member of HAWCs despite them only recruiting from tier 1 units).
2) Either a name from the novella was recycled or we're actually talking about the same person who has gotten a different background here as opposed to the novella (I'm talking about).
3) The scientists portrayed in this have GOT to be the stupidest smart people on the planet. I mean, I get.
4) EVERYONE is a stereo-type and a really bad / unrealistic one at times even. These types of books always have at least some generic characters but even those can be fun if done right. These weren't done right. The soldiers were downright incompetent. Even if they had been fresh recruits, their behaviour would have been a bad joke. Just plain STUPID.
The Russians too, by the way..
5) The monster. Another big sigh. I like monsters. I like Jules Verne. I like prehistoric animals that have somehow survived even if the science is murky. But this thing ... just too much at the same time.
6) Alex. I get that we need an indestructible superhero. Heck, I enjoyed all those movies with Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and others so I don't really care about a realistic plot. But there were so many lines about this guy that just threw me right out of the story. Like him having only been "average" before the superpowers thing - then why the hell did he get his own team??? Or how he responds to the constant flirting - is what gave him those superpowers a kind of super-viagra too (it wasn't actually that bad but everytime it was even only brushed upon, I immediately got annoyed as hell, also because it seemed the author wanted to cover all his bases and only therefore included it in the book)???
7)
Maybe it was the wooden dialogues or the horrible character interactions. I don't know. In any case, there was no emotional impact (and we're talking about me, the emotional fluffball).
So while lots of people died - and not in nice ways - even the way they died didn't feel right to me at times. *feels cheated*
I liked the pseudo-political commentary about fossil fuels and the international affairs (the different plots of the countries) as well as the claustrophobic feel of the cave/tunnels when they were being hunted. Moreover, I'm a sucker for Olmec and Mayan legends, and versions of the Atlantis and Kraken myths. Since I like archeology and pseudo-science in such books (the more accurate, the better however, and the author didn't always get evolutionary processes right), I also liked the bit about the cephalopods in general as well as the whole discovery/exploration angle (it reminded me a bit of the set-up for the "Alien vs Predator" movie which I also enjoyed), but that alone just wasn't enough to make me really enjoy this.
Bottom line: the author mentioned in the intro that he got compared to, amongst others, Jules Verne. Well, a monster doesn't make you Jules Verne. Sorry. JV was a master in getting technical stuff right so the readers almost couldn't distinguish between reality and fiction, enabling them to immerse themselves so much in those stories. Greig Beck got lots of technical stuff plain wrong (simple stuff that would have been very quick and easy to research). A real shame.
People who know me and my reading habits a little also know that I started liking military thrillers / military scifi as soon as I gave the genre a chance. This was largely thanks to Matthew Reilly, an Australian author who likes his action a liiiiittle over the top but still manages to create cool treasure hunts or fun fighting sequences.
I was told that Greig Beck is like Matthew Reilly and together with the premise of this book (ancient ruins under Antarctica, a VERY old monster lurking there), I was sold. Sadly, it was a complete let-down.
It wasn't BAD per se (in fact, it was still much better than the other military sci-fi book I read this year), but everything just left me cold. Nothing could move me (in a positive way), I didn't like ANY of the characters, the monster was just MEH and I spotted quite a number of things that were either flat-out wrong (things even I know about so an author should know these things too, especially after some research) or supposed to show a character's ignorance - I'm still not entirely sure which of the two.
Anyway, this is a story about Alex Hunter, a member of the elite American special forces team HAWCs (they recruit from the best special forces units and are therefore the uber-special-forces-team because the SEALS or Delta aren't already special enough). Alex has a problem because after an incident in the past (as touched upon in the novella I read prior to this novel), he is left with an increasing rage (he was always "temperamentful" but now it's getting out of hand) and some superpowers like extremely heightened senses, super strength etc.
After a corporate jet crashes in the Antarctic, revealing a vast underground system of caverns, he and his team accompany a team of scientists that investigates the crash site after the initial search-and-rescue team has vanished without a trace. But what they find in the cave beneath Antarctica is even worse than the Russian assassin on Alex's heals (we met this lovely man in the afore-mentioned novella too).
Several things irked me especially:
1) The author didn't bother to research and correctly name tier 1 military groups in the US (the Rangers, for example, are NOT tier 1 but at least one former Ranger is a member of HAWCs despite them only recruiting from tier 1 units).
2) Either a name from the novella was recycled or we're actually talking about the same person who has gotten a different background here as opposed to the novella (I'm talking about
Spoiler
the former leader of Alex's HAWCs team, who got his fingers garrotted off by the Russian but seems to have survived despite the fact that the Russian wouldn't have left any of them alive on purpose and wouldn't have been too stupid to finish the job of garrotting this soldier3) The scientists portrayed in this have GOT to be the stupidest smart people on the planet. I mean, I get
Spoiler
greed, which was the prime motivator for Silex, but even then a whiney idiot should have acted a little less predictably. And Amy. *big sigh* From the very first sentence introducing her, I hated the bitch. Sorry, but nothing she did redeemed her, on the contrary. We had her always getting what she wants simply by staring at people like a petulant child; her throwing tantrums; her immediately hitting on the male MC; her hitting on Alex no matter what situation they were in (picture being assaulted by a creature 10,000 years old and definitely deadly and your only concern is flirting with a soldier; we had her basically saying out loud that she gets her facts from the Discovery Channel4) EVERYONE is a stereo-type and a really bad / unrealistic one at times even. These types of books always have at least some generic characters but even those can be fun if done right. These weren't done right. The soldiers were downright incompetent. Even if they had been fresh recruits, their behaviour would have been a bad joke. Just plain STUPID.
The Russians too, by the way.
Spoiler
Considering how brutal the Russian was in the novella, his "fight" in this was over too quickly, Alex having superpowers or not5) The monster. Another big sigh. I like monsters. I like Jules Verne. I like prehistoric animals that have somehow survived even if the science is murky. But this thing ...
Spoiler
it was a Kraken, it was sentient, it could tranform into human shape, ...6) Alex. I get that we need an indestructible superhero. Heck, I enjoyed all those movies with Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and others so I don't really care about a realistic plot. But there were so many lines about this guy that just threw me right out of the story. Like him having only been "average" before the superpowers thing - then why the hell did he get his own team??? Or how he responds to the constant flirting - is what gave him those superpowers a kind of super-viagra too (it wasn't actually that bad but everytime it was even only brushed upon, I immediately got annoyed as hell, also because it seemed the author wanted to cover all his bases and only therefore included it in the book)???
7)
Spoiler
They did the Journey To The Center Of The Earth thing and smelled around for blood worms. I kid you not.Maybe it was the wooden dialogues or the horrible character interactions. I don't know. In any case, there was no emotional impact (and we're talking about me, the emotional fluffball).
So while lots of people died - and not in nice ways - even the way they died didn't feel right to me at times. *feels cheated*
I liked the pseudo-political commentary about fossil fuels and the international affairs (the different plots of the countries) as well as the claustrophobic feel of the cave/tunnels when they were being hunted. Moreover, I'm a sucker for Olmec and Mayan legends, and versions of the Atlantis and Kraken myths. Since I like archeology and pseudo-science in such books (the more accurate, the better however, and the author didn't always get evolutionary processes right), I also liked the bit about the cephalopods in general as well as the whole discovery/exploration angle (it reminded me a bit of the set-up for the "Alien vs Predator" movie which I also enjoyed), but that alone just wasn't enough to make me really enjoy this.
Bottom line: the author mentioned in the intro that he got compared to, amongst others, Jules Verne. Well, a monster doesn't make you Jules Verne. Sorry. JV was a master in getting technical stuff right so the readers almost couldn't distinguish between reality and fiction, enabling them to immerse themselves so much in those stories. Greig Beck got lots of technical stuff plain wrong (simple stuff that would have been very quick and easy to research). A real shame.