Fragment by Warren Fahy

How this book caught my interest I'll never quite figure out. I guess I was in the mood for literary junk food. And that is exactly what I got.

This book is a knock-off of "Jurassic Park", which as Nolo had pointed out was a knock-off of Doyle's "Lost World". Basically a tiny island in the middle of the South Pacific is discovered, first in 1791 then again in the present day. The second time the island is found by a ship that is the setting for a "scientific reality show" called SeaLife. About fourteen cast and crew members step ashore, and within five minutes all except two are eaten by the island's denizens. This action happened so fast I was not sure what was going on. The two survivors escape by jumping in their landing boat and going back out to sea. It is here we see that the creatures are afraid of salt water (which sucks for them, seeing as they're on a tiny island).

Soon the US Navy gets involved and cordons off the entire island. A base is established on the island, supposedly made of material that is supposed to keep out microbes and can be used in space. It is eventually ascertained by the scientists on the base (including the female lead who survived the first attack) that all the creatures on the island, great and small, have somehow evolved separately from the rest of Planet Earth, and that they all come from crustaceans, in particular mantis shrimp (which in real life can, I understand, be pretty nasty). How they left the sea to evolve on this tiny island, and then have sea water become anathema to them, is never fully explained. These creatures range in size from "disc ants", about the size of a quarter, who carry their voracious young on their back and can eat through flesh in an instant, to tractor-sized "spigers" who hop around on eight legs and can bite a human in half.

Needless to say the creatures soon breach this impregnable base and the humans are on the run again, but not before the leads discover an intelligent species that has six arms, has the power of speech, flash like neon signs, and actually have the power to become invisible...yeah, invisible. They befriend the human leads instead of eating them. How sweet.

At the end all sorts of things start to happen. Apparently this island, after having sat in the ocean for millions of years, is starting to fall apart due to earthquakes. The president of the US decides the best course of action is to drop a nuclear bomb on the island instead of risking these creatures escaping and wiping out the human race. The human leads race against time to rescue the intelligent creatures, of which there are about six. The human bad guy of course works to thwart them at every turn. Finally the island is nuked just as the last earthquake crumbles it into the sea (just a little bit of overkill here), the intelligent species is saved, and the bad guy of course gets his comeuppance (he gets his face eaten by an insect from the island, how charming).

The book was awful and hilarious when it didn't mean to be. The one good thing I got out of this was that if tripe like this is published, then there's no reason why something of my own can't get out there as well.