Radioactive Review: 'Carnosaur' (1984)

 

Going through more of my own personal stash of Paperbacks From Hell.

Read it as a wee one circa 1985-ish, and thought I'd give it another gander.

(Y'all know by now I loves me some dinosaurs, so will spare the usual navel-gazish rambling.  And OF COURSE y'all are aware Jurassic Park hit the stands in 1990.)

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Like Thomas Hobbes' "State Of Nature" and Billy Barty on a bender, Carnosaur is nasty, brutish, and short.  It's a lean 214 pages, and the exploitative pulp is exploitatively pulpy enough (despite a nigh-dinosaur-less middle slog).

Starts promisingly, as a "scythe-like middle claw opened up [him] from neck to groin before he even realized what was happening" by Page 4.  (The him in question is an unpleasant, misogynistic farmer who catches a critter in his chicken coop.)

On Page 5, his aggrieved wife sees "something out of a nightmare.  It was all teeth and claws and it was eating him... the monster pushed its snout into her husband's open stomach and tore out a length of intestine."  She dies via heart attack.

Later on Page 5, there's some backseat statutory rape; by Pages 7-8, there's a headless, unpleasant lothario and an unpleasant head-crashed-into-a-tree jailbait.

Whew!  And that mayhem was all inflicted by the same beastie!

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Flip the page, and we meet the ostensible protagonist, one David Pascal: an unpleasant, misogynistic reporter yearning for His One Big Break to escape the sleepy English hamlet of Warchester, England.

He gets to investigatin' the mysterious deaths, presumably caused by a rogue tiger from unpleasant local aristocrat-slash-captain of industry-slash big game hunter Sir Darren Penward's manor menagerie.

Cue some stuffy politics and corrupt-ish law enforcement, which is blessedly interrupted by more mysterious monster mayhem on Pages 31-33:  a dead little girl ("[She] died instantly, her skull completely crushed."), a dead pony, and a dead mom ("The cruel, razor-sharp middle claw slashed through [her] neck and deep into her chest.  She was already dead by the time her body fell backwards onto the bload-soaked hay.")

Again, all the same critter!  Thang gets around.

Now onto the slog.

There's more politicking.

There's Jenny, Pascal's fetching ex who is both a better journalist and, unpleasantly, a doormat for his nonsense.

There's a scummy plan for Our Hero to seduce Lady Jane (Penward's unpleasant, nymphomaniacal-in-a-judgey-way wife) to gain access to the menagerie.  The graphic fellatio makes it more unseemly.

There's Pascal's break-in to the compound zoo.

And finally, on Page 94, action resumes.  Those are a lonnnnngggg dinosaur-less sixty-something pages.

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Pascal gets captured.

Penward, a lifelong dino-fanatic, monologues on Pages 109-110 about his demented Master Plan that involves cloning dinos via extracted-from-fossils-DNA merged with chicken embryos.

Crichton Knew A Good Idea When He Heard It...

Going to put it here in its entirety, because it's GLORIOUS.

"I intend to re-establish the dinosaur on earth, Mr Pascal.  I intend to release dinosaurs into the wild in [remote properties in Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand].  I am giving the greatest animals that ever lived a second chance.  And then we will see who is the rightful victor in the struggle between mammals and dinosaurs."

[insert Pascal's protestations here]

"People don't interest me, Mr Pascal.  There are too many of them on this planet as it is.  They... are like some awful vermin that has spread out over the world leaving filth and pollution everywhere.  As far as I'm concerned, they are one of nature's failed experiments.  It is time they went."

[insert Pascal's confidence that Man's technology, like "cannons and guided missiles", will defeat dinos here]

"Man's technology is about to run amok, Mr Pascal.  I predict an atomic war, either by accident or design, within a few years.  It is inevitable.  And when the pieces settle, my dinosaurs, by then well established in the remote areas of the world, will be free to thrive and multiply.  What remains of the human race will be helpless against them."

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By Page 125, the book turns into pretty much into the second half of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Yes, Penward Manor Even Has A Fossil Museum!

The jilted Lady Jane releases all the dinos and they rampage throughout the mansion and into the countryside.

The Dilophosaurus and Deinonychus eat unpleasant security guards and butlers.

The Tarbosaurus wrecks a vacant shopping mall.

The Megalosaurus [which I need to mention suffers from madness-inducing horniness] fights an eighteen-wheeler, ultimately losing but taking out an unpleasant, rapey trucker in the process.

The Scolosaurus demolishes an army tank.  (It's off-handedly described as carnivorous early on, and then detailed to be herbivorous later.)

Add That Editorial Goof To A Few Typos And
An Annoying Mis-Count Of The Actual Number Of Dinos In The Book

The Plesiosaur eats a bunch of unpleasant party-boaters, fishermen, and navymen.

The Altispinax eats a cow.

The baby Brachiosaurus gets adopted by a kid.

The military ultimately wraps everything up.  The book's in the final pages...

...but then out pounces the secret double-Deinonychus that devours Jenny's family and baby sister!

Pascal pitchforks it.

And then the extra-secret ending happens, where two Tyrannosaurus rex hatchlings eat Lady Jane and the already-dead-from-bloodloss Sir Penward.

The end.

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I feel the need to reiterate how much David Pascal sucks.

He's a mopey sad-sack that, at the onset, broke things off with Jenny outta both professional jealousy and she'll-just-hold-me-back-and-keep-me-stuck-here-in-Shitburgh-itis.

He later walks in on Jenny having secret office sexytimes with her new beau and has the gall to make her a villain, using that incident as fuel for his seduction of Lady Jane.

But Lady Jane is both a codependent and a fragile abuse victim, and Pascal grossly exploits her by manipulating her affections.  Like so:

"It is true!  If only i could prove [my love] to you!  I promise!  I promise I'll stay with you forever!" — p. 114

Then, mere pages later, Jenny has launched her own covert attempt to rescue Pascal from the compound.  Cue this exchange:

"I love you!  Of course I do.  I finally realized how much this afternoon when I was locked up downstairs.  I knew I only had hours to live... and the most painful thing was the thought I'd never see you again." — p. 128

It's not long before Lady Jane realizes his deception and true feelings for Jenny, so she unleashes dinosaur hell...

Substitute 'Heiress' For 'Barbarian'

...leading Pascal to confess his scumbaggitude:

"Jenny, I knew she was mentally unstable, but what I did to her tonight has pushed her over the edge.  Don't you see?  She was pinning all her hopes on me--she saw me as her last chance--and I more or less kicked her in the teeth!" — p. 140

Later, after some dumb (in the "this is terrible timing" sense) office sex, Pascal and Jenny encounter the mall-crawling Tarbosaurus.  Because she's competent, she daringly tries to get photos of it for a big news scoop.

Pascal's reaction:

"You stupid bitch!  Don't ever do that again!" — p. 193

Romance lives, eh?

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Despite being chock full o' unpleasant, awful people, Carnosaur goes by quickly and has, in the style of the time, plenty of satisfying British creature carnage.

Also deserves points for using atypical dinosaurs.  I mean, John Q Civilian had never heard of a Scolosaurus or an Altispinax before, and the pint-sized T-rexes aren't even a plot point until the end.

Carnosaur also definitely deserves credit for throwing the pass that Jurassic Park turned into a touchdown.  [Editor's Note:  That's the only sports analogy Yours Truly has made in his life.  Hope I did it right!]

And it got a Roger Corman flick outta the deal (with some some primo blog-fodder, too!), so can't be all terrible.

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RPG Relevance:  "Doomsday dinosaurs bio-engineered to become dominant post-apocalyptic lifeforms" is a ready-made campaign.  Just pick yer game engine and let 'er rip!

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Final Review Score:  Three Dinosaurs Attack! Wax Packs Outta Five