jacobpollak

Bad things are happening at the Fairfield Institute of Genetic Research, where the unhinged Nobel Prize Winner Professor Fraser is conducting experiments in Plasmids (DNA swaps) with subjects supplied by the government - murderers, rapists and the like. One of his subjects, Barker, loses all of his melanin but gains superhuman strength and goes insane, escaping into the sewers. Luckily, local radio newsreporter Paula Scott is on the case, following the leads. I was really looking forward to this read and whilst the opening chapter is very good, with plenty of excitement and suspense, the writing style is creaky and just gets worse as the book goes on. POV dots around, even within the same paragraph and sections of it read as if they’ve been lifted straight from stage directions in the screenplay. Logic falls over in several places - Paula is allowed to broadcast whatever she wants, with no editorial input and anyone, it appears, can just wander into the Institute - where, in a film, it might not have been so noticeable and some bits didn’t make any sense at all - like how could the plasmid be so easily passed to create more monsters?. It’s a good idea, with some nicely played sequences (and I can imagine it as an early 80s movie, with perhaps Caroline Munro as Paula), but they’re lost in the poor writing lapses of logic. As an aside, according to reports on the Net, Jo(e) Gannon wrote the screenplay for Stanley Long, but the film was never made. The novelisation, credited to Robert Knight, was actually written by Christopher Evans, who later co-edited anthologies with Robert Holdstock.

2022-11-14 14:18