So prolific was Michael Crichton (Westworld, Andromeda Strain, Sphere, E.R.) that he is releasing books well after he passed away in 2008. Featured at Costco and every bookstore everywhere, Dragon Teeth was sure to be a bestseller, perhaps even a film or series, which it doesn't merit. So disappointing.
Despite the jacket references and cover illustrations (recalling his most famous novel Jurassic Park), this has little to do with dinosaurs, and everything to do with a half-baked Western. In 1876, brash young Yale graduate William Johnson takes a bet that he can't survive a summer trip across the barren and wild US from New York to Wyoming. Two seperate science expeditions are searching for dinosaur bones and he joins one as a photographer. Along the way Crichton manages to weave in cameos from historic figures like Calamity Jane, Brigham Young, Louis Stevenson, General Custer and Sitting Bull, Wild Bill Hickok, and drop lessons about Charles Darwin. When they reach Wyoming, Johnson is separated from the group, deep in the Sioux hunting grounds, and presumed dead.
Say it isn't so - as we are only halfway through the novel. Actually, Johnson finds himself stranded in Deadwood and opens up a photography studio. The rest of the story includes a romance, a friendship with Wyatt Earp and the inevitable shoot-out.
Even though I knew nothing about this book going in, my hopes were dashed. Under written (as well as poorly written), you can see clearly the bare bones of the story tied together with historical facts, so roughly inserted as to be from a textbook. This read more like an outline for a novel, to be fleshed out and rounded. Indeed, it was an idea he started in 1974, didn't fully complete (or set aside for other novels), and now after his death, it was published as is. It would have been better for another Western writer to brought in to co-author it into completion. After reading the excellent early Elmore Leonard westerns, this so pales in comparison as to not even rate.
I can't recommend it - the writing was very simple, the ideas not complex or original, the structure incomplete - and actually I feel bad for people who are going to pay to read it. It will sell for his name, tricking some people into thinking it's akin to Jurassic Park. It's what you might expect from an unpublished novel, posthumously released. Best forgotten.
I am a Crichton fan, so my disappointment can't even rate this a Just OK,
I have to give it a Stinks.
2017 / Hardcover / 296 pages
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