Customer Reviews

The Wild Boy

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The esteemed Golden Gryphon press makes a solid breakthrough into the novel field with Warren Rochelle's compelling debut novel _The Wild Boy_. Golden Gryphon is a publisher that's renowned for its line of excellent short story collections, nearly every one of which I highly recommend. Here Warren Rochelle makes a marvelous debut with his story of alien invasion that harks back to SF's early wild-and-wooly adventure stories.

But don't confuse this novel with Andre Norton's interplanetary space operas or L. Ron Hubbard's _Battlefield: Earth_, to which this novel is quite similar. _The Wild Boy_ is an engaging and exciting book with novel characters and intriguing alien/human interaction.

The story is simple enough. Aliens search for an ancient race which are similar to humans. They unleash a plague on humanity and enslave the majority of the survivors in an attempt to mold us into the lost race. Humans are kept as pets and called 'dogs'. Their breeding is curtailed. The alien experiment begins to bear fruit when a 'dog' and his alien master form a mental bond.

This book receives the highest praise I can give a book; it kept me up past my bedtime. It's thrilling, compelling and literate. Critics may claim that the aliens aren't alien enough. There may be some truth to that but it wasn't an impediment to my enjoyment of the novel. A sparkling debut novel. Recommended.

Warren Rocheele's The Wild Boy is more surreal and less straightforward, with a healthy dose of complexity spicing the story of a human raised and owned by Lindauzi aliens. It's sometimes difficult to discern who is the animal and whom the intelligence in this intriguing story of a boy who learns a strange fact about his race's past. A very different, involving presentation worthy of attention and commendation.

The Wild Boy is a daring first SF novel and a social commentary on par with Pierre Boulle's "Planet of the Apes" and Orwell's "Animal Farm". Dark and disturbing, alien, with a touch of intrigue and compassion, and what it means to be human, and then some... Gary S. Potter Author/Poet