Customer Reviews

Labyrinth: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In 2004 at the University of Tennessee, internationally renowned physicist Dr. MacPherson notices the findings that an assistant Gregor obtains with a moon rock specimen. An elated MacPherson claims the results that show rock 66095 contains strong superconductivity traits as his own. He boasts how he will receive the Novel prize for the work. A stunned Gregor kills the professor. Gregor is convicted of the crime, but not before he hides the rock inside Labyrinth Cave, Kentucky.

Three years later NASA hires Tom Burke and his daughter Cricket to escort them into Labyrinth Cave to find the missing rock. His wife Whitney suffers nightmares and though internationally famous refuses to enter the cave where last year her assistant died while she barely escaped.

However, Gregor escapes with some fellow prisoners and heads to Labyrinth Cave to collect the rock that will make him rich and famous. He and his associates capture the Burkes and the NASA team inside the cave. Only Whitney can lead a rescue party, but she has not entered any cavern since the nightmare occurred, but the stakes are the two people she loves most.

At times LABYRINTH seems more like a Hollywood thriller than a novel, but Mark T. Sullivan cleverly augments the plot with a personal crisis and an incredible underworld panorama. The story line is loaded with action on a global scale and on an individual level as the world is in trouble if Gregor regains the rock while Whitney battles herself. Mr. Sullivan provides a powerful tale that winks at the movie industry, which works fine for this novel.

Harriet Klausner

I've been caving in Tennessee for almost 30 years, and I teach at
the University of Tennessee, where the first murder takes place.
Think of a short, 1-page document about how to set up, say, a DVD
player that was written by a Sumerian with minimal knowledge of
English, but who owns a Sumerian-English dictionary. So the
words are all English, but the words often make no sense in the
context. Labyrinth has some of that flavor--you say "Huh? Did I
miss something?"

A rock with mysterious powers is brought back from the moon in
1972. In 2004, the villian, Dr Gregor, murders his professor and
steals the rock. In 2007 Gregor and some fellow prisoners escape
from state prison in Kentucky. "Huh?" Apparently Gregor only
partially strangled his professor in Tennessee, popped the prof
into the trunk of his car, drove to Kentucky, and finished
killing him there, hid the rock in a cave in Kentucky, and was
caught 2 weeks later, the body still in the trunk. How do you
tell at that point where the murder actually occurred?

Tom Burke, the world's greatest caver--"Huh? There are
rankings? Maybe in 2004 the NSS News will publish annual
rankings?"--and his daughter Cricket are about to start a
through-trip of the world's longest cave--Labyrinth--which he
discovered and mapped 380 miles in 5 years (another very large
"Huh?" here--a 3-man team that surveys half a mile of cave has
had a very good day surveying). The 125-mile long through trip
is so NASA can test the feasibility of mining on the moon--Huh?
crawling through a cave at Earth gravity is the same as walking
in a mine on the moon? No attention is paid to the weather
forecast--Huh? Cavers going into extensive stream passage pay
attention to weather forecasts or are short-lived--I have seen
water shooting out of a 6x6 foot cave entrance (normally dry) as
if from a fire hydrant.

Gregor and his gang, rather than go into an entrance close to the
moon rock, go to an entrance some 40 miles away--carrying no
caving gear at all (Huh?) and by coincidence, arrive at the
entrance just as Tom Burke and his crew arrive--so the bad guys
grab cave gear and take Tom and Cricket to help guide them
through the cave to the rock--a trip which will take several
days. We then have scenes of going through the cave. Meanwhile,
Tom's wife Whitney is recruited by the police to guide the in
the cave--she and Tom are the only ones able to find their way
around (Huh? Did Tom and Whitney do all the mapping and set up
the resupply dumps all by themselves?).

Problems occur when a huge earthquake collapses various passages
and cave entrances. A gargantuan storm has occurred, causing
flooding, and the lightning has caused the moon rock to trigger
the earthquake (Huh? This is the first thunderstorm in central
Kentucky in 3 1/2 years? Why no earlier earthquakes?). A dam
breaks near the cave causing further flooding and more problems
for those in and out of the cave. Eventually Gregor and the
Burkes (Tom, Whitney,and Cricket) all get to the moon rock.
Soon, the book ends.

I still don't see how carefully-planning prison-breakers would
go to a remote cave entrance without cave gear--but I guess that
such things are forgotten amongst the action that follows.

There is little in the way of good (4 or 5 stars) cave fiction--
Under Plowman's Floor by Richard Watson is a 5-star novel about
exploring caves in Kentucky--based on Watson's own experiences
in the Mammoth Cave complex--no murders, no moon rocks. Shibumi
by Trevanian--not a cave novel--has some fine caving scenes.
Nevada Barr has a 2 to 3 star mystery centered on a cave in the
Carlsbad area. On the bottom lies Dallas Down, which has the
hero exploring caves in his cavemobile, and who thwarts the
people who are trying to collapse Dallas into the giant cavern
under the city. There is plenty of excellent non-fiction:
Watson & Brucker's The Longest Cave, about the exploration and
connecting of the pieces of the Mammoth Cave system; Subterranean
Climbers by Chevalier is also a classic. Exploring caves can be
enormously exciting--when you squeeze through a tight crawl into
a huge chamber no human has been in previously, for example. You
don't need fiction to make it exciting. Labyrinth would not have
suffered if the cave was not the world's longest cave and if
Burke was not the world's greatest caver--these are overworked
devices, much like thrillers where the president's daughter is
kidnapped--good fiction doesn't need such devices--the daughter
of the vice-mayor of Wartburg does just fine if someone must be
kidnapped in the plot. Sullivan has a lot of the pieces--he
calls cavers cavers and not spelunkers, for example, but there
are too many times when you pause and say "Huh?"

During the Apollo missions a special rock was brought back. No one knew it was special. Not until a disturbed genius gets a hold of it via fraud. The rock can superconduct at room temperature (currently we can only do this at about -250 F). When his superior points out that the discovery will be credited to the boss, the scientist kills him.

Now we have a "worlds most famous cave explorer" leading a NASA mission to train on mining on the Moon. The training ground will be Labyrinth cave, a mammoth cave discovered by the explorer in 2000.

But then the scientist escapes prison and heads for the same cave system. Seems he used to play in it as a boy and he hid the moon rock there before he was caught. NASA does not know their missing rock is in the cave.

Just as the NASA mission starts, the escaped convicts arrive and take over. They need the explorer to guide them to the cave areas the scientist knows. To ensure cooperation, they have his 14-year-old daughter as hostage (yeah, NASA let her come along).

The race is on. There is the race for the rock, the race for the rescue and the race against a storm that is coming and could cause flooding in the cave. To make matters worse, when lightning strikes, the rock amplifies it and causes an earthquake. Apparently during the years the rock was hidden, no lightning ever struck the mountains. Right!

The ending is typical of the genre, no matter how prepared at the start, all weapons are gone at the end and there is a fist fight. Even the "surprise" ending was no surprise.

Examples of the bad writing:
When faced with the criminals, Tom the explorer does this. "Tom blanched. He understood that he was facing not men but animals. That understanding triggered the survivor instinct in him, an instinct honed over years spent navigating the bowels of the Earth. He felt himself turn to iron inside. He looked around at them all. "You sick bastards. I promise you, you'll pay--" at which point one of the bad guys backhands him to the ground. Boy, that kind of survivor instinct could cause you to walk into traffic.
At a later point as one of the bad guys is bathed in the brilliance of the stone, it is remarked that his skin turned opaque and that you could see the shadows of bones and webs of veins. Not by any definition of opaque. That means you CAN'T see through something.

Labyrinth cave is located near Mammoth cave, although separate. The author seems unaware of Mammoth cave's true expanse (it was discovered that it was actually joined to other systems and thus much larger than originally thought). Some of the Labyrinth cave galleries have the same names as those in Mammoth cave. The rescue team seems to go through completely different terrain from their quarry even when following footprints. Bad.

The reader is left with 400 pages of mediocre to bad writing, a pointless plot without proper repercussions, no real drama, just a bunch of scenes strung together with descriptions of rock formations.

This is the fictional equivalent of an action-adventure flick set to be released on Memorial Day weekend, with plenty of explosions, thrills, and chills and little plot to get in the way of the action.

You know a book isn't Pulitzer material if at the halfway point you begin fantasizing about which actor would play which character in the book.

It's a pretty fast-paced book with the general plot involving planetary geology and cave exploration. The author explains cave exploring well enough via his characters, but I'm sure hardcore cavers would nitpick. The main character is apparently a moon rock "66095" which is a powerful superconductor and is possibly capable of creating "a thousand Hiroshimas under our feet," according to one scientist character in the book.

Possession of said moon rock is between the US government, a dying scientist who actually studied the rock and who killed his professor over it; a group of hardened criminals, including an arsonist and a strangler; a family of cave explorers. My favorite character is the 14-year-old daughter, Cricket. She deserves her own action movie franchise if this book is ever filmed.

The book reads more like a screenplay, which was the same complaint I had with Peter Benchley's "Beast". There are even sound bites from the characters like, "When I go into caves, people die." The character who states this, Whitney, reminded me of Sylvester Stallone in the beginning of the movie "Cliffhanger."

I really want to like the book, but I can honestly say I've read better techno-thrillers.

I liked this book, but it never seemed to maintain the "seat of the pants" action story that I had expected. I read an earlier book by Mr. Sullivan, "The Purification Ceremony" which was quite good. This one just does not maintain the suspense that it could have, and was a bit predictable.

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to descend into a deep, dark cave, then you are in for a treat and a ride into terror as Mark Sullivan gives his readers another block buster of a tale.

Labyrinth centers on hard-core cavers, a bunch of escaped convicts, NASA scientists, U. S. marshalls along with Whitney Burke, expert caver who's trying to save her husband and daughter. To cap it off, Whitney's afraid to go into the cave because of a bad experience she suffered the year before involving a close friend. She's racing against the elements, too, as she's foreseen that the area is going to experience a violent thunderstorm that will cause havoc. Whitney will do what she has to to save her loved ones no matter what, and believe me, it is edge of your seat excitement. It keeps you glued to the story like a pit bull not wanting to let go. <Ouch> I hear it is going to be made into a movie by Paramount Studios. I hope this is true because it will be a winner!

Somehow, I think we are going to be hearing more about an item that turns up missing, that will be the focus of a book in the future, as well as two interesting characters who will now be adults. This story is too good not to have a sequel. Mark Sullivan is something else as a storyteller. He's a knockout!
He's gotten me into reading suspense again. Don't miss his latest thriller, THE SERPENT'S KISS. Excellent!
Suzanne Coleburn, The Belles & Beaux of Romance

Mark Sullivan's book has the traditional characteristics that appeal to today's fast-paced movie fanatics: action and cliff-hanger suspense. This book reads like it's written from the screenplay of the movie instead of vice-versa.

Mr. Sullivan is at his best when working the reader over with simultaneous plot lines ending each chapter with a life-threatening, cliff-hanger situation. He is at his worst with explaining the book's "silly science" bedrock premise that a moon rock is somewhow fantastically powerful and can provide virtually unlimited energy through room-temperature superconductivity. Naturally, the uber-valuable rock has been stolen and hidden inside the vast Labrynth Cave in Kentucky, and somebody's go to go after it. Unfortunately, all of the major characters (except for one) behave exactly as you'd expect them to from the heavy foreshadowing, and all face their worst-nightmare challenges in the cave.

If you're reading this book for pure entertainment and aren't distracted by the disoriented forays into superconductivity theory, this book's for you. Otherwise, wait until the movie comes out. You'll save yourself enough money for popcorn.

See storyline above.

Labyrinth is one of those stories that you seem to be able to read in a day, only because it's made for a speed reader. There are many parts you can just glance over. There are only so many things you can describe about a cave chase scene. Predictable falls, trips, slides, and cave ins. The saving grace, obviously, was the mad scientist and his search for the moon rock.
The premise of using this mostly unexplored cave for the practice of moon miners seemed somewhat silly. Would not regular mines suffice? They're dark.

The best books immerse their readers in a part of the world they've never experienced before, selecting a special time or place to deliver a powerful story that can resonate with the everyday lives of those they take along.

LABYRINTH -- a smashing success by this measure -- takes us on a tour of an almost unimaginably immense cave beneath Kentucky, 200 miles or more from end to end, for a four-day chase that offers a heartfelt message on the strengths we can draw from those we love.

Tom Burke and his teenage daughter "Cricket" are the key figures in the Artemis project, experienced "cavers" taking a trip deep into Labyrinth to draw insights on the difficulties that would be involved in mining on the moon. The two are taken hostage, however, by an obsessed physicist, three escaped prisoners (including a depraved strangler) and a guard who have an entirely different motivation for heading into the cave.

Amid relentless danger, the travelers traverse ridges, shafts, fissures and mounds of rubble in a task one character compares to mountain climbing underground. There are gusting winds and waterfalls in a world where night and day cease to exist and death literally could await right around the corner.

Whitney Burke, Tom's wife and Cricket's mother, leads a rescue team of U.S. marshals and an Indian tracker. Haunted by the death of a colleague in a cave drowning, Whitney must overcome her dread of the underground just as -- wouldn't you know it? --nature poses the threat of another flood. A science crew on the surface provides additional support amid problems of its own.

It all plays out like a collage of "Cape Fear," "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Central to the story is a moon rock with almost magical powers to conduct energy -- a potential solution to the world's energy problems. I must say that judged by the standards one would apply to science fiction, the rock is a bit implausible. But it serves as what Hitchcock used to call the "McGuffin," a device designed basically to propel the larger plot. LABYRINTH is a thriller, not SF, and a good one.

And if you despair of the occasional tortured metaphor ("the young mother's body collapsed like a marionette severed from its strings" -- "his fingers lashing the air as if he were keying an invisible piano") -- now a hallmark of the Sullivan novel -- do what I've done: refer to them as Sullivanisms and start to look forward to them!

For in the end, LABYRINTH is a story about family and three people who never give up on the idea of family, a strength as enduring as a hundred miles of rock.

In spite of several cliches that have been used in many books before, Mark Sullivan makes them work for him and us in the cleverly constructed "Labyrinth." A maze of complex plot twists and stirring action scenes, the novel chronicles what happens when a precious moon rock is hidden by a deranged physicist who killed his mentor to prevent him from claiming its discovery. Suffice to say, what goes on in the caves is a wild ride, indeed. It's a very cinematic novel, one that would probably be easier to digest if it were a movie. Much of the cave description becomes redundant, and sometimes the actions of some of the heroes borders on stupidity. But the characters have their strengths, especially those of Damian Finnerty, the dedicated marshal; Chester, the brilliant but tubby 19 year old who really solves many of the mysteries; and Cricket, the resourceful 14 year old who becomes a real woman during the crisis. (Physically as well as metaphorically---which is one of the original plot devices Sullivan uses). It's almost a Matt Reilly book in that the action is pretty consistent, although far from the cataclysmic action that adorns Reilly's books.
A good read, though, with plenty to keep you occupied.
RECOMMENDED.