The Flock

by James Robert Smith

(Waterville: Five Star, 2006)

Hardcover, 363 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9781594143779, US$25.95

ABCD Rating: DITCH

From the Cover: SALUTATIONS USA is the ideal town built by Berg Brothers, the studio that for generations produced family films. Constructed on a parcel of the decommissioned site of what was the Edmunds Bombing Range, it is the great Studio’s intention to create a place that is what America once was, with room to expand. But the land beyond Salutations is wilderness—450,000 acres protected from development because of its former military status. Other forces struggle against the company for control of those acres. Vance Holcomb, billionaire ecologist wishes to construct a research center, saving the rare habitats. Winston Grisham, retired Marine colonel, wants all parties away, capitalist exploiters and meddlesome tree-huggers alike; he and his militia wish to be left alone. Ron Riggs, Fish & Wildlife officer wants to know what is lurking at the edges of Salutations. And the lawyers slug it out in the Florida courts. Unknown to most, this backcountry is home to the last population of a creature believed extinct: Titanis walleri, a predatory ground bird of saurian form. The creatures, possessed of near-human intelligence, have hidden since the first Native Americans came from the north. With humans on the doorstep, knocking to come in, the Flock does not wish to be disturbed. The Flock is the story of the conflicts between developers and protectors, between warriors and thinkers, between Mankind and a creature not unlike the theropod predators they so resemble in body and spirit; an adventure and suspense novel of epic proportion.

My Review: Recently, my son has become obsessed with prehistoric mammals: Smilodon, mammoths, megatherium, glyptodonts, etc. etc., so when we saw the BBC’s video Walking with Prehistoric Beasts at the library, he had to get it. In one of the series’ segments, it has a pair of “Terror Birds” stalking a baby Smilodon. My son loves to look at pictures online of his various obsessions, and after seeing the Terror Birds, that’s what he wanted to look at online. So, as I was finding pictures of these prehistoric creatures one of the images that Googled up was the cover of a book called The Flock (it turns out it was posted in the comments section of a blog post on ancient giant birds, and was James Robert Smith promoting his book). Since my local library had a copy (two, in fact, one in large print) I snatched it up and started reading.

There is a line in a famous movie from 1942 wherein, after being reproved by his mother, a secondary character repeats his father’s lesson of “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” I won’t fully adopt the “Thumperian Principle” in my review of The Flock, but it will direct the following comment: The story is very compelling, and in spite of the fact that I could not stand the writing … I read the book in just about four days, because the premise was good and I kept hoping that Smith would transcend his writing and make something out of this great premise. Unfortunately (and here’s where I abandon the “Thumperian Principle”) he doesn’t.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I both read the same book: Meg by Steve Alten. It is the story of a Megalodon found in modern times. (This is a theme of this genre of novel going all the way back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.) Meg is book with such a great premise and piss-poor execution that my wife and I use it as a baseline for comparison of bad books (“At least it wasn’t Meg” or “It was worse than Meg”). Well, unfortunately, The Flock is worse than Meg, and is my new baseline for bad books.

The writing and plotting in this book are so awful and so very stereotypical for a novel of this genre (with one notable exception, and we’ll get to that in a moment) that I just could not believe that this book has seen the light of day. It is all so contrived: all the women are beautiful, all the men are manly, all the moneyed individuals are richer than God, the politics are so black-and-white, all the executives are ruthless, there is very little grey room in this novel. Hell, Smith even tells what probably amounts to a third of the story from the damn terror birds’ point of view. The narrative from an animal’s point of view never works. I have never read a book where this is done convincingly … not even Stephen King (who is William-Freakin’-Shakespeare when compared to Smith) manages to pull it off, and the portions of Gerald’s Game and The Stand and Cujo where he attempts to tell the story from a dog’s point of view fall flat. Smith’s sections that are told from the birds’ point of view, however, fall right through the book and out the bottom. The birds have names (Egg Mother, Egg Father, Scarlet, Walks Backwards, etc.), they have a culture (Egg Mother and Egg Father “tell” their flock’s history), they have distinct personalities … it’s all very distracting, especially since the birds have more personality than the human characters which never arise above being stereotypes: the frosty Amazon, the eccentric billionaire recluse, the militant retired general, the cut-throat studio executive, the butch woman in a man’s job, the bumbling government official, the corrupt Senator, the drunk and divorced journalist … they’re all there.

According to Smith’s website, a Hollywood studio has bought the film rights to the book with the intent of making a film version of The Flock. I can only imagine that this means a monster-of-the-week movie on the SciFi Channel or a Direct-to-DVD release because that is about all that this book could sustain. There is just not enough substance here to support anything more than that.

The one bright point in the whole novel, other than the premise (which while intriguing, unfortunately, falls apart in the execution) is the ending. I have to admit that I did not see the direction that the ending took coming, which was a pleasant surprise. On the whole, though, this is a book that is best avoiding. If Twilight is Literary Crack (i.e. addictive but not good for you) then The Flock is Literary High Fructose Corn Syrup (i.e., something good and natural (the book’s genre) that has been perverted beyond what is healthy and good as found in its natural state). If you want to read this book, find Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park or, better yet, get your hands on a copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, both of which takes this premise of the extinct-prehistoric-creature-alive-and­-well-in-modern-time and do so with élan and panache and style.