Book Review – Lincoln Child’s “Terminal Freeze”

Continuing with the cold theme in Stephen King’s The Shining, today we’re taking a look at Lincoln Child‘s Terminal Freeze, a thrilling novel set in the frigid Arctic.

First published on February 24, 2009, Terminal Freeze tells a tale of scientists discovering a terrifying creature frozen in ice in the Arctic.  Their discovery leads to a television documentary crew arriving to film the process of thawing the prehistoric animal.  When the ice melts quicker than expected, and the prehistoric creature turns out to be alive and well, Terminal Freeze becomes a monster book that pits scientists, a television crew, and a few soldiers against a menacing creature that is impervious to bullets and kills people with the greatest of ease.

Terminal Freeze takes place in Alaska at a fictional decommissioned military base north of the Arctic Circle.

Terminal Freeze begins north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska as a small team of scientists analyze a retreating glacier in hopes of studying the causes of global warming.  Leader of the scientists is Evan Marshall, a paleoecologist; person who studies ecosystems of the past.

One day as the team of scientists is about to gather new samples uncovered by the retreating glacier, they notice that a large chunk of ice broke free from the glacier and revealed an ancient lava tube inside of a nearby mountain.  They cautiously enter the frozen lava tube and quickly discover some sort of prehistoric creature buried in the ice.  The scientists cannot see all of the creature, but they believe that it might be a Smilodon populator, a type of saber-toothed cat.

Considering the magnitude of their discovery, the scientists report their finding to their corporate sponsors, Terra Prime and Blackpool Entertainment.  They quickly receive word to not touch the creature or enter the lava tube as a production team is being rushed to their location.  The production team will recover the frozen creature, thaw it, and reveal the prehistoric animal as part of a grand documentary.

It sounds simple enough.

The leader of the documentary team is Emilio Conti, the director of the film project.  Assisting him are a wide variety of people from the various assistants to the cameramen to the general workers.  After the crew arrives at Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation, a decommissioned military base, they quickly proceed into the mountain and carefully retrieve the block of ice containing the frozen prehistoric animal.  The ice is taken back to the Fear military base where it is locked inside of a secure container.

Shortly later, a truck arrives carrying the luxurious trailer for Ashleigh Davis, the star of the documentary.  The truck driver also carries a special passenger, Dr. Jeremy Logan, a private investigator.  Logan had been researching some recently declassified material concerning the decommissioned military base, and he discovered that the base was conducting some classified research experiments.

Scientists are interviewed for the documentary, and camera crews shoot additional footage around the glacier and Mount Fear.  On one of the days it becomes unseasonable warm outside.  Nobody thinks much of it, and the cold Arctic weather quickly returns.

Everything seems fine until one of the workers is found brutally murdered out in the snow.  His attack seems to be the work of a polar bear, but Evan Marshall and other people disagree with the conclusion.  The fact is, nobody knows what killed the man in a bloody and sadistic manner.

To make matters worse, it’s also discovered that the prehistoric creature is missing from the secured container.  Most of the ice had melted, and there was a large hole in the floor of the container.  When the people take a closer look, it’s noticed that the hole was created from inside of the container, and not from the outside.

The military base goes on alert as people try to scramble for answers.  Their efforts become significantly more important when other people are also killed.  A survivor of one of the attacks claims that it was the creature, but when questioned about its description, the survivor goes hysterical.  Whatever it is, it’s apparently something that looks terrifying, it’s very strong, and it can kill people very easily.

Clues about the creature and the research that was conducted at Fear Base are slowly revealed.  It’s also questioned about whether or not the creature is connected to a Native American legend.  Is the creature really a demon?  Is it an anomaly created by nature to “thin out the herds”?  More importantly, can the creature be stopped?

It turns out that this isn’t the military’s first encounter with such a creature.  Back when Fear Base was active, a small team of scientists had captured a similar creature.  They conducted experiments on the creature and socialized with it until they reached a critical turning point.  Suddenly the creature decided to be lethal, and it killed most of the scientists.  The creature was ultimately killed, but its body disappeared and could not be found.

That was forty or fifty years ago.  The catch is that the creature that the scientists studied was about the size of a fox.  This creature that’s hunting people today is larger than a bull.

It’s theorized that the creature was caught in super-cooled air and was frozen so quickly that its cells survived the freezing process and basically put the creature in a state of suspended animation.  This occurred with a special type of ice that doesn’t behave like regular ice.  When the area experienced a day of warm temperatures, the warmth quickly melted the ice and freed the creature, allowing it to return to life.

Readers are in for a thrilling (and pretty chilling) ride towards the end of the story when the remainder of the people hunt and try to kill the creature while inside of Fear Base.  It’s discovered that bullets only make the creature mad, and it cannot be electrocuted.  The creature can basically heal itself almost instantaneously.

The creature is lured into a trap and eventually killed when high-intensity sound waves are aimed at it.  Evan Marshall, Jeremy Logan, and a few other people survive.  By the time that a rescue team is alerted and they arrive, the creature’s body had disappeared.

Terminal Freeze ends with Marshall and Logan discussing the origins of the creature.  Logan suggests that the creature is really an extra-terrestrial, and it was a mother that was searching for its child.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So is Lincoln Child’s Terminal Freeze a good story?

I thought that Terminal Freeze had a decent story revolving around a terrifying creature.  The science behind the flash freezing (a.k.a. terminal freeze) was interesting, and the cat-and-mouse game near the end of the book kept the hairs raised on the back of my neck.  As the killings increased, so did the pace of this book.

One of the worst parts of Terminal Freeze dealt with the characters themselves.  Except for Emilio Conti, the vast majority of the book’s characters were bland, very one-dimensional, and they seemed to run together.  Lincoln Child throws a ton of names at you early in the story, and they way that he pretty much only refers to them in their last name creates some confusing, and rather boring, situations.  It becomes rather difficult to tell one character apart from another.  Had I not read a synopsis and saw that Evan Marshall was a main character, I doubt that I would have known that until the very end of the book.

It seems strange that Lincoln Child did such a poor job with these characters when he did great work with his some of his other books, Death Match and Utopia.  Let’s also not forget that when teamed with fellow writer Douglas Preston, their books have had some terrific characters along the way.  That’s why it seems so out of place to read a Lincoln Child book and for him to have such lousy characters in the story.

Another negative part of Terminal Freeze deals with the lack of terrifying descriptions of the creature.  Considering that the creature was so horrendous, I would have liked to have known a little bit more about it.

There’s also the Native American legend in this story, or rather, an attempt at linking a legend with the events in the story.  The legend seems to be more of a coincidence than a supernatural element.  That’s even more true at the very end when it’s suggested that the creature is really an alien from outer space.

As a whole, Terminal Freeze is a decent enough horror story with plenty of bloodshed, especially towards the end of the book.  You just have to read through a lot of mediocre plot to reach the horror elements.