“A wild, non-strop thrill ride of epic proportions.”
It’s been a while since I read a book from cover to cover in a single setting, much less in an airport where I was stranded by a recent blizzard. A book with a title like ICEFALL is probably best avoided in such a predicament, especially since somewhere around half the book takes place in a raging Alaskan snow storm. But that’s not the real storm confronting the book’s unique assemblage of heroes.
A few hundred thousand years ago, an alien ship crash landed into Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier where it was buried in the ice until climate change reared its ugly head and thawed the ship out, along with its none-too-happy passengers. With the snow raging outside the airport, as well as inside the pages, astrobiologist Jules (short for Julia) Bevins finds a jagged breach in the ship through which whatever was on board recently escaped.
It falls on her husband, and fellow astrobiologist, Kai to make tracks to an Alaskan village where the escapees made their first stop in the company of a crack special ops team that can handle pretty much anything. Except, it turns out, for whatever killed forty-five of Chichagof Springs’ forty-seven residents, sparing only a baby and an old woman riddled with bone disease. Bone, we learn early on is what these things feast on to fuel their geometric rate of reproduction. And before you can say Extinction Event we’re off on a wild, non-strop thrill ride of epic proportions with nothing less than the fate of all mankind hanging in the balance.
ICEFALL reads like a fine-tuned mash-up of Michael Crichton’s “The Andromeda Strain” and John Carpenter’s seminal film “The Thing” (based on John Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There?”). And the authors, thriller vet Jon Land teaming with debut star Michael Newman, make no secret of who they’re paying homage to. Chichagof Springs’ main drag is called Piedmont Street after the New Mexico town in the Crichton classic where a different end-of-the-world scenario was nearly triggered by a satellite capsule that similarly ended up where it wasn’t supposed to be.
Wait, there’s more, a lot more. Turns out another alien race that actually seeded our planet sent a team of protectors here, a kind of intergalactic Magnificent Seven except there are nine of them, just in case this second alien race’s progeny faced such a threat. The Nine are warriors straight out of the Marvel Universe, superheroes with the weapons to match who initially seem up to the task of saving the world, until they find themselves up against a million or so “Things” with the number growing by the minute. This even as they begin to discover terrible truths about themselves and their true purpose on Earth.
The fact that they’re going to unite with Professors Jules and Kai Bevins is never in doubt. But Newman and Land throw us blizzard-bound readers a curveball by introducing a younger hero who would make Marvel’s Professor X and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngers proud. As a result, the stakes, and the body count of both monsters and humans, ramps up with each successive action scene which come in fast and furious fashion. How fast and furious? Try searching for an outlet to plug in your iPad behind snow-encased windows in a creepily deserted departure lounge. At least I was safe inside, while the heroes of ICEFALL faced threats on sea, land and even air, if you count the summit of an Alaskan volcano where the book climaxes with the mother of all eruptions.
The flow of molten lava has nothing on ICEFALL’s rapid-fire pacing. And it won’t take a blizzard to make this a one-sitting read for thousands of readers not similarly stranded. Newman and Land have hit a homerun in this planned series’ first trip to the plate. ICEFALL is both a sci-fi extravaganza and thriller extraordinaire, mixing equal parts of each to create a riveting and relentless read. An instant classic best devoured someplace warm.
