I know this isn't exactly horror, but...
In Hawaii, Marlo Rodriguez, a P.I. hired by Chinese lawyer Willy Fong, breaks into the offices of Nanigen, a reclusive new research company. Nanigen is shrouded in mystery. Fong wants to know what it is they do there. Upon breaking in Rodriguez is astonished to find no guards. Suddenly, he receives a cut on his forehead... apparently from nothing. Then another. And another. He flees Nanigen and drives to Fong's office. Fong and another Chinese man, apparently a client of his, are shocked when Rodriguez staggers in, slashed up and bloodied. Dying from bloodless, Rodriguez lives just long enough to witness the other two men begin to get sliced and diced in a similar manner...
On the US mainland, a group of grad students are working in a secluded college laboratory. In short order we meet Peter Jansen, an expert on venomous reptiles, a kindly, bookish introvert, Karen, a specialist in spiders and a martial arts expert (!), Rick Hutter, a self-professed expert in tribal herbal remedies, Amar Singh, an Indian student, Erika Moll, a German student, and Jenny Linn, a student who may or may not be of Asian descent, but is definitely a lesbian. The group's competitive research (why so many students of wildly different fields all work in the same lab is not gone into) is interrupted by the arrival of Peter's brother Eric and a man and a woman, the three driving up in Lamborghinis (!!!). The man is Vincent Drake, head of Nanigen, and the woman is Alyson Bender, who works for him, and they're here to offer the students jobs at the up and coming research center. They have various misgivings, but all eventually say yes. While snooping in one of the Lamborghinis, Peter absently picks up a pebble-looking thing and pockets it. After a chat with his brother, they depart.
Then we meet Danny Minot, who isn't a biological science expert of any sort but some kind of halfassed philosophy expert whose research is to prove there are no objective truths. No one else at the lab likes him, but he seems unaware of this. After learning about the Nanigen job offer, he essentially forces himself onto the group and they let him come for some reason. Examining the pebble doohicky he found in the car, Peter discovers it appears to be a tiny airplane. When he and Amar examine it under a microscope, they discover this is indeed the case! Everyone wonders how Nanigen can make a plane so small.
Later, Peter is awakened by a text message on his phone from Eric, warning him not to come to Hawaii, but not saying why. It appears it was sent in haste. Attempts to call his brother yield no results. Worried, Peter flies to Hawaii ahead of the others and is told Eric fell overboard in a freak boating accident and is presumed drowned. His body hasn't been found. The police show him a videotape shot by some tourists which shows Eric not falling but jumping off of the boat. In the same tape, Peter spots and recognizes Alyson Bender, the woman who came to the college with Vincent Drake, among the onlookers.
The rest of the grad students arrive in short order and they're driven to Nanigen's isolated jungle facility in a Bentley. Drake takes them on a tour of a diverse jungle ecosystem before revealing that Nanigen's secret is shrinking technology! By means of something called a tensor core, invent by a scientist named Ben Rourke, Nanigen can shrink objects and people down to tiny size and send them into the "micro-world." Their scientists have been exploring the Hawaiian jungle for some time in this manner.
Peter decides to confront Drake about Eric's mysterious death. The two men and Alyson go into another room where accusations are hurled... and quickly proven correct. The minute Peter so much as suggests Drake had something to do with Eric's death, Drake punches him. He and Alyson quickly decide they need to "disappear" Peter. Fearing he spoke to the other six about his suspicions, Drake decides they ALL need to disappear. Hitting an alarm, he manufactures some nonsense about an emergency and gets everyone to go into what he calls a saferoom. He and Alyson "assist" the stunned Peter, and, finding a technician in the control room, Drake pushes the guy into the "saferoom" with the students to "help" them, and promptly shrinks all eight people down.
Capturing the teeny humans in a bag, Drake initially intends to feed them to a snake kept in one of the labs, but is interrupted when the cops come around with questions about Eric's "accident." While Drake is talking to them, Alyson has an attack of conscience and sticks the shrunken humans in her purse. Rather than actually help them by returning them to normal size, she "lets them go" outside. Finishing with the cops, who depart, Drake comes up with a foolproof plan. The students, rejoiced at being hired, went and got drunk, and drove off a cliff into the ocean. Oh, and, as punishment for betraying him, Alyson is knocked out and put in the car. She goes over the cliff and drowns.
Meanwhile, Peter, Karen, Rick, Erika, Amar, Danny, Jenny and the Nanigen technician guy, Jarel Kinsky, discover themselves in the teeny tiny jungle world. It isn't long before poor Kinsky gets gobbled up by hungry army ants, leaving the remaining seven to realize just how thoroughly screwed they are, unless they can make it back to the lab and make themselves normal sized again. In the meantime, Drake, not content to trust in nature to kill off the shrunken humans, shrinks Johnstone and Telius, two of his hired goons, and sends them into the micro-world to hunt them down...
This was only a partially finished novel by Crichton, published posthumously and finished up by another author, Richard Preston in this instance. I'm unsure which parts were written by Crichton and which were written by Preston; Crichton being credited first certainly suggests he wrote the bulk of the novel, but, then again, it could also be out of simple respect or because he's the more well-known author.
In any event, I'd never heard of
Micro prior to seeing it for sale at Kerr Drug the other week. The cover, depicting a silvery spider following silvery human footprints immediately called to mind Richard Matheson's
The Incredible Shrinking Man. This and the book's title certainly clued me in to the idea that it was about shrinking, but I found the plot summary on the back to be very cryptic.
I flipped through it. What little I glanced over didn't exactly grab me. Nor did the book's nearly $10 price point. Seriously, $10 for a paperback? In the end, I'm unsure what finally did possess me to just chuck it onto the checkout counter at the pharmacy and go home with it... but I do know that once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. I devoured it, finishing it in just one night.
Despite this, I can't say I exactly enjoyed it. It all feels very, very rushed. Like it was a very detailed but incomplete plot outline that was very quickly finished and then published. It reads like a junior novelization of a Hollywood movie and a particularly dull one at that. Despite this,
Micro is at least very gory in some parts. Kinsky's death by ants is quite nasty, very bloody, with him getting ripped to shreds. The demise of Telius is nasty as well. We get a pretty detailed description of what happens when a normal-sized spider bites a shrunken human... and it ain't pretty. Telius' body swells up from the venom and bursts out of his armor, and he basically pops in a big gush of blood, venom and pus which the spider happily gobbles up.
Then there's Danny. Oh boy. Poor, poor Danny. Stung by a parasitic wasp, he has wasp larvae wriggling in his arm for essentially the entire remaining portion of the novel up until his death. The scene where he's first stung is written as being uncomfortably sexual in manner. It happens while he's asleep, and he's having a wet dream about a beautiful woman while essentially getting raped by the wasp. And when she inserts her stinger into his arm, she is described as making noises like a woman in childbirth as she lays the eggs in Danny. Very creepy and unsettling.
I was rather disturbed by the manner in which the book, and the other characters, treat his predicament. When his plight first comes to light, the reaction of Rick and Karen basically boils down to not giving a crap. Even Crichton and Preston forget he's infected with wasp larvae half the time, up until the three encounter Rourke, whose solution is to... cut off Danny's arm. What? Can't they cut the larvae out one by one? Surely they're easy to see. Why do they need to cut his entire arm off?!
Except for Peter, the characters are all some of the most cliched caricatures I've ever encountered in a mainstream novel. And even Peter is pretty bland, and gets sniped by Johnstone at the end of the novel's second act, one of the only genuinely shocking moments.
Rick is the typical stoic manly man's man. He has belligerent sexual tension with Karen. So, of course, in the finest tradition of 1950's-era sci-fi, they wind up falling madly in love for no reason. No, really. It just suddenly says they're falling in love, and that's it. Karen is your typical butt-kicking female protagonist.
And then there is Vincent Drake, who is the most unbelievably cartoonishly evil villain I've ever encountered since Darren Penward in
Carnosaur. Nothing he does makes even the barest minimum of logical sense, serving only to dig him deeper and deeper into the hole of his own creation, and he is at all times needlessly sadistic, without even the smallest sympathetic or humanizing qualities. He even has a portrait of himself in his office, he's so stereotypically arrogant!
And yet, I loved him. Why? Because other than Peter he was the one character I felt had any passion to him. He takes such joy in being evil for the sake of it, and his hyperactive insanity while committing his evil acts is pretty infectious; it's hard not to respect the guy for loving what he does, despite how boneheaded he is, as far as evil masterminds go.
So what stuff
did I like? Well, as I said, I liked Drake, despite how ineffectual he is. And while the novel was pretty by the numbers, it did take some interesting turns. The author(s) throw you off by killing off the most obvious first victim, Kinsky, making you think you know who'll make it and in what order they'll die... only for Peter to die not long afterward. Once Peter, up until now the main character, eats it, you aren't sure who'll make it, and to be honest, despite being disgusted with how he was treated by the narrative, I was amazed Danny lasted as long as he did.
I liked the fight with the centipede and the concept of Drake covering his bases by sending shrunken hitmen after the heroes, rather than trust in the jungle to kill them, the one smart move he makes as a villain. I liked the Japanese cop, Watanabe, and his investigations into Drake and the missing students and how despite not knowing about the shrinking technology, he can put two and two together. I liked how Eric turned up alive.
The sequel hook with Drake's business partner Edward Catel was odd. Catel disappears for half the novel only to reappear at the end, long after most people have forgotten about him, and swipes a disc containing info about the tensor, intending to sell it off or something. But with Crichton no longer with us, I doubt we'll see a
Micro II, unless Richard Preston writes it wholly himself.
Anyway, to bring this rambling excuse for a review to a close,
Micro was good but not great. It felt rushed and cliched but had enough good parts to be well worth a look.
