Week Eleven: Relic

This week it’s out of the cold and into the museum in the novel Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

First, let’s talk about the monster. The bad beastie in this novel is called Mbwun, which translates into “He Who Walks On All Fours.” The name itself is an indication of the rich history Preston and Child gave their monster, which I don’t always need, but almost always enjoy when it’s given to me. Mbwun is an ancient creature. The son of a demon who’s the South American equivalent of the Devil. Part primate, part lizard, all intelligent killer. A clear image of Mbwun is never given, which reminds me of how the audience isn’t given much of a chance to look at the Alien.

Flash forward (or backward) to the nineties, and an artifact bearing Mbwun’s image in a crate full of egg-like pods and unusual plant fibers is sent from the Amazon Basin to the New York Museum of Natural History. But no one expected the stowaway….

Dear Mbwun hitched a ride with the crate to the museum, and he has an addiction to hypothalamus glands in human brains. He is able to live quietly for years eating the plant fibers in the crate, because these fibers have a genetic makeup that mimics hypothalamus glands. But once his access to the plant fibers is cut-off, our monster must find sustenance elsewhere.

With this, the brutal killings start.

Overall, I liked Mbwun as a monster. He’s not merely a killing force of nature who only acts on instinct. He is highly intelligent in an almost human way. He knows to remain out of sight and only started the killings after his plant source ran out, which I think is interesting. He’s practically indestructible with a thick hide that bullets can’t penetrate, but his weakness is a bit cliché: the eyes. Ah well.

What I didn’t like was how this particular monster came into being. Throughout the entire book, everyone keeps focusing on the egg-like seed pods, which left me assuming they weren’t seeds at all. There were a couple mentions of Whittlesey—the head of the exhibition that went to South America and brought back Mbwun—disappearing, but it doesn’t seem too far-fetched because there’s a monster on the loose. Yet in the epilogue it’s revealed that Whittlesey became Mbwun by eating the plant fiber. I had to read the explanation a couple times before resigning myself to an “Okaaayyy…” It bothered me that I’d been led through this book to believe that Mbwun had hatched, when on the last couple of pages the rug was pulled out from under me. I now have some trust issues with this book.

Anyway, another thing I enjoyed was the setting. I love museums, and some of the exhibits lend themselves to letting imaginations run wild. Not only are there plenty of places in the museum itself for the monster to hide, but the museum is built over an elaborate tunnel system. And while the museum is large, it becomes a prison if locked with Mbwun sneaking around inside looking for tasty morsels.

Now, even though there were aspects of the book I liked, I had an issue with pacing. The probably impacted my perception of the pacing, but for whatever reason, this almost 500 page book was 959 pages on my Nook. One flip of a “page” might have counted for three pages, but there’s no denying parts of this book were slow. A lot of time was focused on the technology used to analyze what Mbwun was, and these parts dragged. Even though the search to find out more about the museum monster was a constant throughout the entire story, I felt there was a lot of down time between when I got to see the monster in action.

Overall, not my most favorite book, but parts of it I enjoyed. Not sure if I enjoyed it enough to want to see the movie, though. But I might just be more careful of the shadows next time I go to the museum.