The main villain will offend some readers because of the ethnic stereotyping, and the monsters will feel very familiar to anyone who has seen Jurassic Park. That said, Subterranean isn't a good book by any stretch of the imagination, with boring characters and frequent action sequences that defy logic.

Many authors would've used aliens to explain away the pre-human ruins, and I will give Rollins credit for coming up with a more imaginative and more interesting idea. The novel is about finding out what creatures inhabited Antarctica in the 30-million-year gap between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the coming of the ice. The monsters populating Subterranean are not prehistoric survivors in the strictest since, but the plot and the setting rely heavily on paleontology, so I'm not bending the rules too much. Carter and Brust will lead an expedition into the depths of the Earth to find out, a journey that a previous team attempted, but never returned. Who - or more precisely, what - built the ruins? The answer lies deeper in the cave system. There are archaeological ruins inside the cave dating back before humankind had evolved. military to investigate an enormous cavern in Antarctica. Subterranean opens when the two main characters, paleoanthropologist Ashley Carter and expert caver Ben Brust, are recruited by the U.S. But that’s exactly what we have in this techno-thriller. It takes a lot of nerve to write a lost world story set in the modern day, particularly one that borrows heavily from Journey to the Center of the Earth. Toward a miracle that cannot be…toward a mystery older than time. Where breathtaking wonders await you-and terrors beyond imagining…Revelations that could change the world-things that should never be disturbed…ĪT THE BOTTOM OF THE EARTH IS THE BEGINNING. OVER THE ROCKS… ACROSS THE YAWNING CAVERNS…BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER… They are not the first to venture into this magnificent subterranean labyrinth. A hand-picked team of specialists makes its way toward the center of the world.

Subterranean by James Rollins