Earthcore

Earthcore, by Scott Sigler, was first published in 2001, but the 2018 edition has been fully updated and is apparently around 50% longer.

“Sonny had been a prospector for long enough to know that he was onto something big, but he could never have imagined just how vast this platinum deposit in the Utah desert was. Connell Kirkland knows, and will go to any lengths to ensure his company, Earthcore, is the first to reach the mother lode.

It won’t be easy. The platinum is buried three miles beneath the surface, and will require a world record mining operation to reach it.

But what awaits his team is beyond anything he could have imagined – something that has killed many times before. Something that lurks in the darkness of the tunnels…”

When I reached the latter stages of Earthcore I began to have the distinct impression that this was very much a book of two halves. Unfortunately, that means there is a good half, and sadly a bad half.

The first half of this book is a dark and gritty story which examines the shady practices that occur in the mining industry. Several primary characters are introduced, none of which are what could be described as likeable. That’s okay. A character doesn’t necessarily need to be likeable to work. But it’s difficult to identify who precisely is the story’s protagonist. The nearest we have is Connell Kirkland, who appears to run Earthcore, even if he doesn’t actually own it. He is an example of what is so odd about this book. In the first half, he is a tough, uncompromising, humourless charisma vacuum. Again, I’ve no problem with that. (Those qualities could easily be used to describe me. Apart from the ‘tough’ bit). He was an interesting character and showed great potential. However, in the second half, Connell Kirkland is a completely different character. He’s now a bit of a wimp. He’s never fired a gun, has no confidence in taking command and is regarded as a desk-bound stuffed suit. I know, it’s quite bizarre.

But don’t worry, a classic love interest is set up for him in the shape of a beautiful and headstrong archaeologist. She arrives threatening him with all kinds of legal actions, and demands to accompany the exploration team. Oh, it’s a match made in heaven. But wait. Nope, we get one snog and then that’s it. She goes back to hating him and nothing ever develops. There is a clunky, unconvincing ‘love’ story, but it involves two apparently side characters and is so contrived that it’s surely not going to convince even the most undemanding of readers.

Throughout the first half, the tension slowly builds, a sense of tangible doom hanging over the entire story. Something is waiting in those dark tunnels. I actually had butterflies during some of these moments, which tell me this is a good story, with good characters. To be honest I was certain this was cruising effortlessly toward five stars. And then we get to the second half of the book, where it all starts to go wrong. We go from tense, slow moving but riveting plot development to all out action in the blink of an eye. What awaits them in the tunnels three miles beneath the Earth’s surface is revealed very quickly. That was an appalling decision. The essence of horror is not to show the monster. An enemy you can’t see is far scarier than one that you can. Remember how ominous it was in Jaws when the three yellow barrels suddenly appeared? Or Alien, where for most of the film all you see is the double jaw dripping with mucus, and the flick of a serrated tail.

From this point on, Earthcore is just action all the way, with no time given to character development or building a sense of mystery.

Logic and believability also go absent without leave in the second half, and this is no more obvious than with the infamous ‘Kool suits’. These are skin tight outfits that miraculously allow the characters to operate comfortably in 200° F temperatures. Okay, this may be sci fi, but it still needs to have a sense of plausibility. There are other areas where logic seems non-existent, but you get the idea. This is also a gratuitously violent book, with several scenes of torture.

Which brings me to the main villain, a psychopathic former NSA agent. She gets off – literally gets off – by crushing men’s knuckles with a pair of pliers. But to humanise her, we are told of her childhood, and how she and her sisters had been terrorised by an abusive father. So, a standard technique to offer some kind of mitigating explanation for the evil actions of the bad guy – or girl in this case. It just makes her into a very two-dimensional character.

Having said all that, this isn’t a terrible book by any means. I just wish Scott Sigler’s publisher had had the courage to tell him that the second half is a mess and to go and rewrite it. How many times have we seen that, though? Andy Weir’s Artemis springs to mind. Another book that should never have been published without extensive rewrites and edits.

There’s plenty to like here, but I’m just disappointed that an opportunity to produce something truly remarkable was lost. So, go and read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth instead. It does more or less the same job, but with far more class.

Good techno thriller with a hint of lovecraft.

This is a book I normally would not read, but I really enjoyed it. A romp.