Justin

The worst book I've ever finished on Audible

Revisado: 07-23-21

It reads like a rough draft, with zero editing. The characters outside of like two are interchangeable, most of the plot is filler (walk around in jungle, get attacked by dinosaurs, shoot them, repeat), and "hardpan" was on the author's word of the day calendar on every consecutive day he was writing this book.

Absolutely no research on prehistoric life was done, if it was possible to do negative research he seems to have done that. He had a fixation on describing eyes with random round household objects, and weirdly precise descriptions of the women. Description of everything was both flowery and generic at the same time. The pacing was awful. Many sentences were repeated, and I don't know whether that was the narrator or the author.

Even if you're into this genre, I would not recommend this book. It's just really really bad.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Just a good creature horror book

Revisado: 02-06-19

The characters are good and enjoyable, the monster is horrifying, the chase is energetic and thrilling... it's just simply a good book, no bones about it.

I will say I didn't love a certain plot development near the end, because it happens in almost every creature horror book and it's just silly and irritating. Still, the overall experience and story was good in spite of that. A+.

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esto le resultó útil a 70 personas

Generic and Toneless

Revisado: 01-02-19

I see a lot of 4-5 star reviews for this novel. I do not understand.

The story moves at a steady, unflinching pace that allows for absolutely no tension, development, or... anything else but the bare facts of each event described. It's irritating to listen to, after a while; none of the characters have more than 1 personality trait each, all of the sci-fi concepts are bland and have been done much better by others, and there's just no spice or feeling in anything.

A character is killed off at one point, and much more time is spent on his funeral than was spent establishing him. That's kind of inevitable, since I'm not even sure the guy spoke once beforehand, and we barely knew his name... but all the characters act like they've just lost their best friend.

It's hard to explain much more about how bad this was without going into spoilers. But whenever something happens, you can think "what is the most basic, shallow way this could be treated?" and that will usually be how it turns out.

It reads like a first draft... but instead of being bloated, there's just hardly anything there. Like the author laid out the plot, but then ran out of time to elaborate on anything.

The performance is okay. Timothy McKean isn't given much to work with here, but he does a good job with what there is.

Altogether, I wouldn't recommend it, even as a time-filler for people who like dinosaur novels.

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The story is great, then a Yeti has to come along

Revisado: 11-02-18

So first things first: the book is fantastic up until the point where the yeti enters the picture. It's philosophical, character-examining, informative, and interesting. Than the yeti comes in and the plot kind of distorts, and the previously believable climbing parts are taken down absurd paths that seem completely implausible considering what was stated earlier in the story. Basically Mt Everest itself goes from being a potent threat looming over the story to a mild inconvenience in the face of the plot-bending power of the yeti; the mountain has to be made less dangerous to shift the danger onto the yeti, apparently.

It kind of goes in some strange, wonky directions... but the characters remain good and the story continues at a decent pace, so I can't dock it too much for the story going bonkers later on. It's a good book and it's still worth your time, aside from a couple of minor problems. The magic of the early scenes isn't really recaptured in the later scenes, but I was still satisfied in the end.

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Very messy

Revisado: 11-02-18

It's hard to put into words the feelings I have about this book. It's kind of a mess. The characters are rather flat, there are several roughly-interchangeable personalities involved and at least one character whose 'personality' is just saying the word 'dude' a lot.

The dinos are the worst I've ever seen in the genre, full stop. They are just... soulless machines programmed to kill humans at the expense of their own lives, en masse, constantly, for no reason. That's 90% of them; there is one dino that is just a giant dog, even though it's the first generation of its kind in captivity. So yeah, all animals are mindless human-hating death machines, or friendly dogs. Other kinds are briefly mentioned, but they play no part in the story.

The odd thing is that while all of the wild dinosaurs are mindless, automated killing machines, actual automated killing machines still play a part in the story. One particular nationality, I should mention, are pretty much labeled as 'the worst thing ever' and play the part of the mustache-twirling supervillains in the story, who use exclusively automated weapons. They seem a bit needless... but then, that describes a lot of the bloated plot. This book uses the "characters tell other characters the plot points at play, what actions are about to happen, and then those actions happen" type of plotting, which I do not care for. It gets old fast, especially with all the jargon and the silly names plastered onto things.

Also the story's method of raising the stakes is to, basically, tell the audience that the stakes have been raised. 'Dinosaurs are coming for the base! Hundreds of them! All of them twice the size of a T Rex for some reason and also super-intelligent and agile! Also even though they're all super duper smart, they'll all just run straight into a machine gun nest over the corpses of their own kind in a suicidal frenzy for hours!' It gets so absurd, it kills all tension. And after the first third or so, there is no tension; the stakes just keep getting artificially raised and the characters just blandly explain the off-screen plot to the audience and it's all this constant stream of dull noise. Characters explaining the characteristics of a few 'animals' make them out to be one thing, but then when or if they show up they just do the same thing every other mindless automaton creature in the setting does. Stuff is happening, but it's impossible to care.

Overall, probably the worst dinosaur novel I've ever read on this service. I wouldn't bother; there were many times I just wanted to quit.

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Good to start out with, devolves considerably

Revisado: 11-02-18

Let me first say that if you're writing a scifi book with completely absurd, nonsensical science, pretending to explain it in a way that makes even less logical sense is not the angle you want to go for. The science in this story is probably the worst I've ever seen bar a couple of outliers.

But, in the beginning, it's interesting enough, and the characters are engaging. I'd say I'd give the story 4 stars if one scene in particular had been removed in editing... but that one scene alone adds a ludicrous dogpile of plotholes that the story never gets around to filling. It's rare to see a single scene that so completely shoots the narrative in the foot.

Anyways, give it a go if you're into the water-monster-horror genre, but not quite the Megalodon subgenre. It's decent, minus one truly horrible scene.

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It's a good book

Revisado: 11-02-18

Okay, so this book is actually pretty good. The animal behavior is decent and understandable (unlike many dino stories, like Flipside, where dinosaurs are mindless automatons who think of nothing but consuming human flesh), and not TOO far removed from paleontological possibilities. The characters are good enough to root for (or against, in the case of the villain). The plot developments are good and follow a logical course, people act like people, dinosaurs act like animals... it's just a good book about dinosaurs.

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Good!

Revisado: 07-11-17

What made the experience of listening to The Invasive the most enjoyable?

The characters.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Bishop. He's very reasonable.

What about Charles Constant’s performance did you like?

Clear and of proper volume.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Seriously, What Was Up With That Bird-Thing?

Any additional comments?

A lot of swearing, graphic violence, and one brief (to the point of being even more pointless than most) scene, but other than that it's a great book.

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