Remember those stories you and your friends used to make up? The ones that involved dinosaurs coming to life and eating everybody you hated: your teachers, your parents, the annoying kid down the street, etc...? Remember how you grew up and forgot all about those kinds of stories now that you had discovered sex, driving and alcohol (hopefully not all in the same night)? Well, Leigh Clark didn't forget. The result was Carnivore.
I'm just going to let the back of the book blurb speak for itself here:
In an Antarctic research outpost, a group of scientists made a discovery. For the first time, modern man would come face-to-face with the ruler of the prehistoric world, the king of the dinosaurs--the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Blinded by scientific zeal, the researchers thought only of the importance of their find, the contribution to science. But soon they are forced to open their eyes to an inescapable fact--once revived, the specimen would need to feed.
That's either the first thing you thought when you saw the cover artwork, or you're a visitor from another world/dimension/time trying to discern a reason not to exterminate all of humanity to the last hominid, in which case I beg of you not to judge me by the contents of my bookshelves, but rather to read on and understand.
One part Roger Corman's Carnosaur, one part Carpenter's The Thing, and one (very small) part Crichton's Jurassic Park is the easiest way to describe this 1997 novel which crosses the line between 'homage' and 'rip-off' the way a drunk weaves across roads. You know going in it's going to be bloody awful, the cover compels you to pick it up off the shelf because there's no way in hell somebody got paid to write it, and yet...and yet...
Well, there you have it.
You cannot take Carnivore seriously.
At all.
Ever.
The moment you try, the moment you even think about treating it as though it's worthy of your respect, you'll hate yourself. So trust me, don't even let the words, "But that couldn't happen because..." meander through your brain, or else you're screwed before the third chapter. Approach it like you did Sharknado: you already know it's bad, you just have to see how bad for yourself. My grasp of language and the written word is unable to explain this in a review. There's only one person on the planet who can tell you how absurd Carnivore is -- unfortunately, his name is 'Leigh Clark' and to understand, you have to read his book. Nevertheless, here's my rudimentary autopsy.
There's a pseudo-plot in here concerning frozen dinosaur eggs, a T-Rex mutating after exposure to radioactive waste (dude, this was published in 1997...radioactive waste was so last decade!), and a cast of characters so inept and foolish they may as well have "MONSTER CHOW" scrawled on their heads in large block letters. Ignore the whiny environmentalist whack-job who doesn't want to die but doesn't want anybody to kill the poor "little" dino. Ignore the testosterone-laden male lead who exists only to impress the whiny environmentalist whack job (and can't even do that very well). Ignore the inept commander of this "small" research station who isn't fit to direct traffic much less the day-to-day operations of an outpost in the middle of nowhere. Ignore the fact said outpost supposedly has such limited supplies, yet somehow manages to house, arm, and feed hundreds of people (and dogs) for the dinosaur to eat. Ignore the fact that in sub-zero temperatures and high-velocity winds, lacking shelter or protection of any kind, an animal the size of the T-Rex would freeze to death in a matter of an hour or so if warm-blooded, and minutes if cold-blooded.
Just ignore it all. Write it off with a wave of your magical sense-banishing wand. Leigh Clark does. Just read and enjoy.
Enjoy the myriad ways people become bipedal beef jerky. Enjoy all the bone-crushing, blood-spurting, fire-starting, wall-smashing, limb-amputating, fetid-breath-smelling mayhem. Enjoy the campy dialog, written with tongue firmly lodged in cheek. That's what Carnivore is all about. One does not attend a slasher flick to gain new insights on the human condition, one attends a slasher flick to see a horde of mostly-deserving assholes involuntarily acquire new body piercings in horrifyingly painful and fatal locations.
The story is awful--I cannot impress this enough--but despite that, I've read this book three times now and I will probably continue reading it every few years because it's perversely pleasurable watching the disaster unfold, especially when one considers the utter absurdity Clark ends with to set up a possible sequel. Come on, dude, I saw that at the end of a freaking Godzilla film made thirty years ago...so of course you're going to use it here, aren't you?
SIGH
Yes, yes you are. Okay then...
Content-wise, this ginormous waste of processed tree corpses and everybody's time isn't worth even one rating symbol out of five. For sheer gas factor, though, it earns three sudden decapitations out of five. If you want to see just how cheesy creature-feature horror can get and still be worth a read, then grab Carnivore and check your brain at the door. There's a monster on the rampage, after all, so who has time for all that thinking?