Terror of The Abominable Snowman

by James Baack, Eric S. Brown

A University of Chicago expedition into the mountains of Tibet and Nepal returns to America with a triumphal prize: A living Yeti - the fabled 'Abominable Snowman' of the Himalayas! Heading to Chicago from the polar north, the expedition's aged Hercules cargo plane becomes lost in a blinding, white-out blizzard, the most severe snowstorm in over 100 years! The doomed aircraft crashes near the Wisconsin north woods town of Eagle River, a snowbound place totally isolated from the rest of the world by the fierce storm... A place that feels just like home for the captured Yeti, now freed from his constraints by the wreckage of the plane. The savage, but wily beast surveys his new world, where he is certain to hold sway... And where the body count will soon begin to rise.

Genres: Horror

78 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2014

Reviews

[Kaisersoze]

There are two ways to view this novella by James Baack and Eric S Brown. The first is through the "It's so bad, it's good" filter. If you're someone who appreciates this type of read, then pick this one up, because you will be howling with laughter by the 40% point.

But I'm not someone who reads books to be entertained by how bad they are. Sometimes my movie watching proclivities tend in this direction (I know, I'm not proud of it), but when I read I want to be entertained in a genuine way. So I viewed Terror of the Abominable Snowman through a very different type of filter - one in which I was horrified, but for all the wrong reasons.

How else can you react to a novella in which a researcher gets funded to lead an expedition to Nepal to find the mythical yeti, but opt to look for this "snowman" in the jungle, where they are promptly set upon by cannibals. The survivors find the yeti, but as they bring it down, there is a double-cross and another powerful country comes into play. An escape follows, the yeti goes on a mid-flight rampage, but manages to fall to earth safely and then goes on another rampage in a mountain area of the US. There it runs into the apparent hero of the piece, a Chicago cop who, fresh from his latest shoot-out, has been dragged off on a skiing holiday by his girlfriend. And all this occurs in 74 pages!

So what we have here is a novella that has a plot a young teenager would dream up, with the character building to match. Seriously, some of the characters are detailed as far as their name and penchant for which weapon they like the use. That's it. Only Rick, the Chicago cop, gets any kind of detail to his backstory, and that basically consists of liking monster movies because of his dear old Dad and killing bad guys on another typical day on the job.

Any idea that Baack or Brown cared about this tale was quickly eliminated when I realised they and their proof-readers/editors weren't even prepared to keep the same tense in their writing. By the end of page one, they've shifted from the present tense to the past tense, and then on several other occasions through the book lapse back into present tense. For a sentence or three. And then we're back to past tense. It's decidedly jarring. Then there are the multitude of typos and copy-editing errors to contend with. At one point, for example, the group discuss having to contend with "viscous Yetis". I know it's only a letter missing, but it changed the meaning of the sentence significantly enough to have me laughing about what kind of threat an oozing, sticky, liquid type of yeti would have.

Look, I could go on. I really could. But I dislike ragging on people's creative work, so let's just sum up that I found this to be a terrible novella. I know Brown has had some serious success with his BIGFOOT WAR series, so maybe there's a great deal more to those reads. Regardless, pick this one up only as a quick curiosity, but don't say I didn't warn you ...

1 Bullet-Dodging Mythical Beast for Terror of the Abominable Snowman.