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Monster Tale's An Indulgence

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By KEVIN WALKER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 22, 2009

"Terminal Freeze," by Lincoln Child (Doubleday, $24.95)

This is something I probably shouldn't admit, at least in certain company, but there are times I really just want to kick back with a page-turning thriller that involves people running for their lives from forces they cannot understand. Even if those forces end up being kind of ridiculous, that's all right.

By ridiculous I mean a monster from Indian myth, an "eater of souls" that enjoys shredding its victims, which is what you are going to run into in this book. Doesn't matter. People are running, elaborate plans are made only to fall apart in the worst sort of way, and you keep turning to find out which characters make it and which don't.

(I think of this as the "They killed Dallas?!?" factor, from the film "Alien," in which the ship's captain meets his maker. That shocked me because I had become accustomed in my youth to the captain always surviving.)

As he often does, Child - author of "Deep Storm" and co-author, with Douglas Preston, of "Relic" and "The Book of the Dead" - provides several hundred pages of pure escape for the sort of person who found Doc Savage novels diverting as a kid and isn't too concerned with realism. I would not recommend a steady diet of this, but it's good to cut your dose of nonfiction and literature with some fun.

I obviously don't want to give away the plot, as books like this are all plot. Suffice it to say a group of scientists and filmmakers are trapped in a remote Arctic military station when something - some thing - begins to hunt them down. Run!

Kevin Walker edits Friday Extra and the Books pages for the Tribune.

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