Customer Reviews

Terminal Freeze

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(40)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(31)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I've been a fan of Lincoln Child's work (solo, and paired with Douglas Preston) ever since I read "The Relic" more than ten years ago. The fact that I've purchased and read all of the books they've published since then might be the reason why I'm becoming disillusioned with their work now. Child long ago discovered a formula that works for him (and his writing partner), and is very faithful to it. Whether you will like "Terminal Freeze" depends entirely on how you feel about that formula.

Some examples? Well, like most of their stand-alone books (outside the Pendergast series), "Terminal Freeze" has a mysterious treasure, one which experienced readers of Lincoln and Child know they shouldn't get attached to. That treasure might be pirate gold ("Riptide"), a rare meteorite ("Ice Limit"), or the strange creature in "Terminal Freeze", but it's always gone by the end of the book. I often feel a bit bad for their heroes, who go through hell and never seem to have much to show for it.

And Child is also very fond of using obsession as a plot device. Good luck finding a Child/Preston book that doesn't have at least one character who is obsessed to the point of insanity with SOMETHING. Naturally, that obsession is guaranteed to cause all sorts of hijinks as it's gradually revealed over the course of the book. In "Terminal Freeze", it's a sign of how formulaic Child's work has become that I picked out one particular character as the book's requisite obsessed nutjob the moment he was introduced. And I was right.

The rest of the formula involves a group of people (usually a mix of scientists and military/police types, often depicted in very stereotypical ways) trapped in an isolated place (museum basement, arctic base, aboard a doomed ship, island, etc) with a mysterious and deadly creature/force. Storms are frequently added to heighten the isolation and/or level of desperation. References to the unheeded wisdom of native peoples is possible ("The Relic", "Terminal Freeze", "Wheel of Darkness"), and since it IS the 21st century maybe we should be moving beyond using them as a plot device like that? By the end of the book, most of the stereotypes (and the obsessive loony) will be dead, and the hero figures out enough of the mystery to prevail.

Does this formula appeal to you? If it does, "Terminal Freeze" is the book for you. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Child's work; if I wasn't, I wouldn't care enough to take the time to write this review. It is a fun read, and Child's imagination produces genuinely creepy monsters. He (and Preston) are good writers, but I hope they shake things up a bit and introduce some new elements to their future books.

I thought for a moment that somehow I had mistakenly picked up "Relic" which was the first work of Child and his frequent writing partner Douglas Preston. Relic (written in the mid '90s) was fun, fresh and introduced Agent Pendergast who is a truly original and interesting character.

This new work has the same basic elements...a nightmare creature stalking various scientists and heroines in peril in dark corridors. Sadly, the result of mining old ideas is a stale plot and poorly fleshed out characters that don't resonate. To get in enough backstory to move the plot along, Child throws in a secondary character, an enigmatologist (who apparently dabbles in "black ops") who should have been the main character. He is far more interesting than the protagonist but you have no idea what he is doing in the story. Where was the editor?

Maybe Child thinks that an entire generation of his original readers has now died and he can get away with a repackaging by throwing in some snow and ice on top of the monster and we won't notice.

The good:
*Child writes in an easy to read, fluid style.
*Pacing is good. If you can get Relic out of your head, the story moves nicely along.

The bad:
*derivative plot we've read a hundred times before. What's even worse is that Child wrote the same book almost 15 years ago.
*characters are weak.


My recommendation: buy the paperback of Relic. You'll have more fun. Skip this one and don't spend your hard earned cash on the hardback. Definitely disappointing.

This is my first Lincoln Child book and I almost didn't read it because a lot of the other reviews said that it didn't have a lot of action and it wasn't his best work. I remember reading the same type of comments for `Blasphemy' by Douglas Preston. I'm glad I ignored the detractors both times! I really, really enjoyed this book! The premise was too good to pass up and, for me; this was the perfect book at the perfect time. I was looking for a quick, bloody, and exciting read. I found it.

Mr. Child has blended science, adventure, suspense (tons of it actually), slight humor, horror, history, mystery, and machismo in a way that all of these genres work together in harmony. If this was one Lincoln Child's "slow" books I'm extremely interested to see what his "better" books are like.

This was the limp and cliche-ridden story about a scientist stationed in an Arctic military base, who uncovers what appears to be a sabretooth tiger buried in the ice of an old lava tunnel. When the mission's sponsor insist on digging it up for a reality show (they intend to thaw it and film it on TV), the scientists are understandably angry. So is the monster. It is still alive, and when it defrosts... It starts killing.

What can I say? This was bad. Its like made for TV Sci-Fi channel original movie level bad. At first, I thought this had a decent premise. But the protagonists were so boring! None of them had any personality whatsoever and there were parts that just made no sense. Marshall and Logan were ciphers. The media people were ciphers. The only thing interesting was the cat.. And they didn't even explain enough about it to make its motives or biology understandable or even believable.

I was quite disappointed by this book. If you are going to make a cheesy horror book, at least write something original and give your protagonist some personality. Bad.. And not in a good way.

Do you remember the classic sci-fi flick of 1951, "The Thing From Another World"? James Arness played a creature from space found frozen in the Anarctic ice. A group of scientists cut off from civilization thaw it out and...well, you know the rest. That's the gist of "Terminal Freeze". As other reviewers point out, many of the elements from earlier Child and Child/Preston thrillers are present in this one. As I progressed through the novel, I found it hard to find anything new. If you read "The Relic", well, that could be the creature you meet in "Freeze". Substitute the museum opening in "Relic" with the filming of a documentary in "Freeze", and you'll find the same arrogant know-it-alls who ignore the scientists' warnings. And so on, and so on.

"Terminal Freeze" is a good read if this is your first encounter with Lincoln Child. He has the formula down for generating suspense and keeping you wondering just what this mysterious horror looks like and comes from. But if you're a fan, I think you'll be disappointed in "Terminal Freeze". "Deep Storm" and "The Ice Limit" are much better.

Lincoln Child's a talented author, but his solo novels are largely uneven in quality. TERMINAL FREEZE is an okay entertainment, but it's severely handicapped by a threadbare plot that's been done about a million times before.

TERMINAL FREEZE is essentially a re-make of John W. Campbell's THE THING, which involved an alien monster trapped under the arctic ice. In this novel, a group of scientists at a military base accidentally uncover the monster. The results are almost painfully predictable: the monster comes back to life, quickly gets loose, begins killing people at the base, and the scientists have to figure out how to destroy the monster before its too late.

Child's a solid writer, so this novel is well paced and moderately suspenseful. But Child takes almost no chances with TERMINAL FREEZE's storyline -- I guessed every plot development in advance. Simply put, this novel is pure formulaic storytelling, with Child piling one tired cliche on top of another. The end result is a readable thriller, but an uninspired one.

All in all, TERMINAL FREEZE is adequate, but you can do much better -- my advice is to read Child's earlier novel DEATH MATCH, or any of the early novels he co-wrote with Douglas Preston. Those books are a lot more imaginative than this one.

If you like monster movies and horror novels, you've already seen/read TERMINAL FREEZE. Skip it. This book is a disappointing paint-by-the-numbers ripoff of the Kurt Russel movie THE THING, i.e., an ancient monster frozen in the ice wakes up and kills a lot of people. Some of the descriptions of the monster stalking through the arctic base are great. Otherwise, bleh. The characters are all straight out of Central Casting. There's the hero with the tragic past, the wise native shaman, the obsessed-with-his-own-genius film director, the superbitch movie star, the competent old Army sergeant, and the burly tough guy who turns all to pieces when he finally confronts the monster. There's a major plot thread that amounts to nothing, and the main story itself is predictable all the way down the line.

After finishing this book all I can really think is that it could of been much more. There is a pretty cool story in this book but there just isn't enough action to go along with the topic. This book has the same vibe as Child's last solo book Deep Storm. There is a sense of unknowing that the characters go through for the entire book that I both liked and disliked. Child is good at writing characters struggling with the unknown and being wrapped in a mystery but being in the dark for most of the story took away a lot of face time for the deadly creature these characters unleashed. For a creature feature style of story I would of liked to see some more action. All around it is an ok book but there is nothing really there that makes it stand out from any other book of this genre.

I had pre-ordered this book and forgot all about it until it showed up in my mailbox. I started it on my lunch break at work, and it was supposed to last me a whole week, but I ended up taking it home and finishing it that night :-)

The setting is a huge military facility in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. A group of scientists are doing studies on global warming when they come across a large creature frozen in ice. A large media crew (which subsidized the scientific expedition) comes to make a documentary about it. The creature thaws and is still alive, and terrorizes the base.

Terminal Freeze borrows from The Relic and Deep Storm. The creature was created supposedly for the same reason as the monster in The Relic - when a population becomes too large and it needs to be reduced. The creature is just like the creature from The Relic - very strong, intelligent, and fast. The chase at the end is similar as well (although in Terminal Freeze, the "bait" doesn't survive). On Deep Storm, the scientists were stuck in a large government facility deep under water. In Terminal Freeze, the scientists were stuck in a large government facility 1/2 under ice.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It didn't creep me out nearly as much as The Relic did, but it did keep me on edge.

This is my first Lincoln Child novel, and it will be my last. It reads like a poor, made for TV movie on the SciFi Channel.