PRIMAL SHADOWS by Alan
Dean Foster
A Dark Thriller of Papua New Guinea
Forge Books - July, 2001
ISBN: 0312877714 - Hardcover
Thriller - for explicit
material
Reviewed by Susan
McBride, MyShelf.com
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a Copy
Alan Dean Foster's "first
contemporary mainstream thriller" PRIMAL SHADOWS begins with a man
telling a story at a bar. The "if I told you what just happened to
me, you wouldn't believe it...." cliche. That should have set off
the warning bell in my brain, but the book had been highly recommended
so I figured it was worth digging into. So dig, I did. What I found wasn't
so much a thriller as a male adventure novel with all the usual trappings:
disgruntled protagonist Steven Bohannon goes searching for something (himself?)
in Papua New Guinea, ends up robbed after great sex with an anonymous
redheaded woman, and decides to go chasing after her into the rain forest,
up mountains, through tribal fighting and so on. The men in PRIMAL SHADOWS
are brave, reckless and remarkable lucky. The women are slaves, concubines
or prostitutes. Not exactly a feminist manifesto.
PRIMAL SHADOWS is one
of those bigger-than-life novels where the main character gets wounded
(over and over) yet merely grits his teeth through each knife wound, snake
bite or spearing. The dialogue is far from fresh and the descriptive passages
are heavy on the adjectives. Foster's foray into "mainstream fiction"
seems geared toward a male readership looking to vicariously live out
a jungle fantasy. This may be just the antidote to civilization for some,
but not for me.
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