Mark Ellis is a prolific writer, well known for the stories written as James Axler (including the popular Outlanders series) as for those written under his own name. A firm grip on the adventure aspect of storytelling is his forte, and Cryptozoica is a fine example of this. This is an adventure done right. I can easily see it rolling onto the big screen as naturally as a newborn coming out of a womb, already perfect, with hardly a change necessary. Somehow, Mark has managed to marry the Hollywood approach to filmmaking (Indiana Jones crossed with Jurassic Park), that typically makes for much excitement but often falls short for the more sophisticated viewer, with the best traditions of the written genre, capable of pleasing the brainiac science fiction readership. The baby has the best of both. What’s more, a lover of Dan Brown may even throw the parentage into question, claiming that the baby clearly must be a product of secret societies at work–and (s)he’d be right!
Cryptozoica also marks a debut of the Mark & Melissa husband-and-wife team as a small press publisher. This shows in the plethora of small but welcome modifications of the standard book layout. The very first pages contain the portraits of the unlikely crew to brave the Island of Big Tamtung–as all other illustrations in the book (including the cute dinosaurs figures next to the page numbers), drawn by Jeff Slemons. The artist has done a great job. The images are eloquent representations of the characters. Interestingly, “Tombstone” Jack Cavanagh bears some resemblance, in my biased opinion, to the author himself. He, along with Augustus Crowe and a teenage Maori girl Mouzi, make the “two captains and one crew member” team of the Cryptozoica Enterprizes: two former members of the U.S. Air Force and Navy respectively, and an ex-pirate girl who doesn’t shy away from cutting a man’s throat.
Jack’s helicopter and Gus’s boat are about the only things remaining of the Cryptozoica Enterprizes, their failed attempt to make money out of their discovery of an island in the Pacific teaming with surviving dinosaurs. Joining them is an unlikely trio of a dwarfish scientist, Aubrey Belleau, led to the island by a suppressed portion of Charles Darwin’s diary (suppressed, of course, by his secret society), his enormous bodyguard Oakeshott, a black belt who fights dirty in the to-the-death arenas in Bangkok, and Honore Roxton, a woman paleontologist with the handicap of being the only one clueless at the start of the adventure–but with the advantage of being good-looking, if not in the conventional sense, and smart. As if this were not enough, the Asian organized crime gets involved, as a dashing Chinese swordswoman and an enigmatic Naga dancer Bai Suzhen, the operational leader of the White Snake triad, joins the fray.
There is both beauty and danger aplenty on the Island of Big Tamtung. But it is not the “big-monster” type of dinosaurs that cannot be killed by a machine gun, like a Majungasaurus, that are the most dangerous animals on the island. Although small and vulnerable to a sword, a pack of Deinonychus is far more deadly, not merely thanks to their sharp claws but more so because of their pack tactics; they are smart enough to figure out how to climb onto a monorail! But even more dangerous are other humans. Stranded on the island, the team is torn apart by conflicting goals and loyalties, while also being pursued by the modern-day pirates. Escaping a Majungasaurus on a personal vendetta is nothing next to that.
Nor are the Deinonychus the smartest dinos on the island. Mark has done a great deal of research, and his (or rather, the paleontologist Dale Russell’s) speculation that, had they survived to our time, the Troodon species of the warm-blooded dinosaurs may have evolved into an intelligent species is convincing enough. The appearance of this so-called anthroposaur is one of the highlights of the story, and Mark ties it to the numerous legends about the snake-like Naga people of the Asian antiquity.
An astute reader may notice a few text layout problems in the book. But they do not take away from the story. Cryptozoica is not to be missed, and I’m looking forward to the next book coming out of this husband-and-wife team.