They Rise by Hunter Shea
My rating: 4/5 cats
“Chimaera. According to Webster’s, the word is based on a creature of mythology, an amalgam of different species in one terrifying beast. Or, in the current vernacular, one ugly fucker.”
i read this book for shark week, only to find out that “ghost shark” is apparently a nickname for the chimaera fish – a creature distantly related to without actually being a shark. as our hero brad whitley, or “whit,” explains, that’s “distant in the way of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary paths winding away from one another.” so, oops. i broke shark week.
chimaera fish are “living dinosaurs,” existing even before sharks, clocking in at an impressive 400 million-years. and they’re pretty cute, with their armored faces and toofless mowfs. they even have precious little stingers that release toxic venom from a spine near their dorsal fin, but don’t worry – they aren’t deadly to humans.
i mean, except when they are GIGANTIC prehistoric chimaera fish, suspended in time in frozen methane that has just now begun to melt because of some bizarre thing this author invented to make this story work about the globe getting warmer or something.
this delivers exactly what you’d expect from a book about giant killer fish, right down to its stock characters out of a syfy movie cast. that’s not necessarily a bad thing. it’s perfectly satisfying when one’s expectations so neatly line up with the actual reading experience.
these books always seem to feature a divorced couple, frequently both scientists of some kind, brought back together to fight a giant killer cryptid. check and check. and the hero – a rumpled self-deprecating alcoholic ichthyologist and appreciator of women who says corny things like:
“Nestor, you’re turning out to be handier than Tabasco sauce at an oyster eating contest.”
and wise things like:
Gotta watch out for those librarian types.
and delivers dreadful quips during his badass action hero scenes while fighting twenty-foot-long monsters:
“This definitely isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel.”
groan. but it’s a groan that i anticipated groaning during this book – a perfectly acceptable groan of good-natured dismay at how perfectly appropriate the character is.
“So what’s an ichthyologist?”
“It’s a fancy way of saying I study fish – cartilaginous fish to be exact. I try not to brag too much.”
there’s a spunkily irreverent punk chick scientist with a green mohawk working for whit’s ex – a climatologist who is totally quitting smoking, like right now. i mean, unless some unexpectedly stressful situation arises.
“I need Marlboros. Better get us to Miami.”
also appearing – a superfan of hemingway, delighted at finally following in the footsteps of his hero; marlin fishing off of key west, having buffed up for the trip, after all – He didn’t want Hemingway looking down thinking he was a pussy.
and a minority character who is cheerfully servile, ready to drive whit around, bring him coffee, make arrangements, acquire seaworthy vessels, access confidential medical records, all with a grandfatherly smile and infinite patience at being written in such an antiquated and stereotypical way.
and a gruff but good-hearted fishing boat captain and his teenaged son, stepping up into rescue mode because it’s the right thing to do.
and a wealthy entrepreneur whose business involves filming college girls flashing their boobs for a successful DVD franchise,
who is out on the open water, aboard a yacht filled with boobies and libations and camera-inspired lesbian experimentation, where he is so, so bored by his own excesses.
and a little moppet of a girl with golden ringlets who recites facts about marine biology like a puppy doing tricks for a pat on the head who is there for the “oh please let the little girl live!!” people.
and many more – because the reason books like these have such a large cast of characters is because many of them are there solely to be killed off by monster fish, either by their evidently very poisonous to humans stingers and those innocently toothless jaws powerful enough, once their scale is amplified, to pancake a human, making one character refer to a corpse as “a grisly Flat Stanley.”
like a bigger version of this, with less flopping and more killing
it’s fun and funny and bloody and salty and it saves room for a possible sequel at the end!
they’re gonna need a bigger sea lion…
