Whitley Strieber, The Forbidden Zone

With this book Strieber shows his background in movies by writing something that can best be described as a novelization of a bad 50's monster movie, with the characteristic lack of plot, absence of reason behind the decisions taken by the main characters, and the total indifference to the motivation and nature of the opposing forces.

The story, what little there are, consist of such standard ingredients as a menacing government operated experiment gone wrong, the courageous physicist who ran the project earlier but left it before it went bad and now has to fix it and some badly described supernatural monsters breaking through to our reality from a non-specified and obviously never though out "other place". Add a sprinkling of cult worship by leading town figures (quickly dropped again as it doesn't fit the rest of the book, but unfortunately not removed as it should have been), a transformation effect that makes "normal" people into more monsters (except for a newborn child, immune due to innocence, but still sought after by the "monster") and you'll end up with something like this book, slightly entertaining at first read, but not worth reading again and definitely not worth handing out money for.

Before reading the acknowledgments, my reaction to this book was that it seriously lacked the scrutiny of an editor, but since it acknowledges "the patient and determined help of my editor", I have been forced to revise this and now think it is lacking in the scrutiny of a competent editor and an author aware of his responsibilities as a storyteller.

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