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Summary
Summary
David Morrell's Creepers was a publishing event in 2005, a powerful, edgy, dark thriller by a master of the genre. A New York Times best-seller, it won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award and earned numerous critical raves. Scavenger , Morrell's latest novel, takes us in a harrowing new direction: a desperate high-tech scavenger hunt for a 100-year-old time capsule. Frank Balenger, the resolute but damaged hero of Creepers , now finds himself trapped in a nightmarish game of fear and death. To save himself and the woman he loves, he must play by the rules of a god-like Game Master with an obsession for unearthing the past. But sometimes the past is buried for a reason. Scavenger is a brilliant, frightening hunter-hunted tale that layers modern technology over the dusty artifacts of earlier times. The result is a surreal palimpsest, one that contains the secret of survival for Balenger and a handful of unwilling players who race against the game's clock to solve the puzzle of the time capsule, only to discover that time is the true scavenger. Morrell's trademark action sequences are embedded with fascinating historical clues that make Scavenger a thrill-a-minute page-turner as well as a mesmerizing literary experience.
Author Notes
David Morrell, an award-winning Canadian writer of horror fiction, was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He was educated at the University of Waterloo and earned his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. Morrell is best known as the creator of John Rambo, the hero of his first novel, First Blood. The novel was adapted for screen and starred Sylvester Stallone. Although Morrell was not happy with the depiction of the Rambo character in the movie, he did write several sequels to First Blood and two further scripts for the sequels to the original movie. He also wrote a number of other books including The Brotherhood of the Rose which became a best seller in 1984.
David Morrell has written one scholarly work, John Barth: An Introduction, published by Pennsylvania State University in 1977 and has taught at the University of Iowa. He now lives in the United States with his wife and daughter (another child, a son, is deceased).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This unwieldy thriller from bestseller Morrell (First Blood) becomes so caught up in its headlong action that it never stops to explore the possibilities of its intriguing premise. Frank Balenger, the emotionally banged-up hero of the Stoker Award-winning Creepers (2005), finds he must play an elaborate time-travel game to save himself and his lover, blonde, blue-eyed Amanda Evert, who reminds him so much of his late wife. The nefarious Adrian Murdock, a history professor at Atlanta's Oglethorpe University and a member of the Time Capsule Society, sends the pair on a hunt through time that keeps them in constant danger as they attempt to discover the secret of a series of time capsules. While Morrell delivers race-against-the-clock thrills with his usual aplomb and does a good job educating the reader about actual time capsules, the minimal characterization makes it hard to care about Balenger and Amanda. Video gamers will be most satisfied. 15-city author tour. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Ex-cop Frank Balenger, introduced in Creepers (2005), returns for an even, well, creepier adventure. While attending a lecture about time capsules, Frank mysteriously blacks out. When he awakens, he discovers that the lecture was a ruse, and his girlfriend, Amanda, is missing. Turns out a fiendish puppet master is playing a deadly game with Frank and Amanda (and an assortment of other people), and the key to winning the game--and staying alive--is, like a time capsule, buried somewhere in the past. This is just a wonderful novel, a near-perfect balance of thriller, horror, and historical mystery. Balenger, the deeply troubled hero (his wife was murdered, and this is the second time Amanda has been kidnapped), is one of those characters you want to spend more time with, just to figure out what makes him tick, and (without divulging any of the novel's secrets) the villain is full of interesting surprises. Morrell has a reputation for smart, tightly written, genre-bending fiction, but here he exceeds himself, producing a superbly entertaining novel that will attract readers from multiple genres. --David Pitt Copyright 2006 Booklist
Guardian Review
David Morrell gave us Rambo in his 1972 novel First Blood (infinitely better than the film), and many subsequent bestsellers. His latest hero is the resourceful former policeman Frank Balenger, who first appeared in the thriller Creepers and is now plunged into an adventure that will delight anyone who has ever used a Playstation or X-Box joystick. Balenger and his main squeeze are kidnapped by a crazed millionaire computer-game designer and forced to play a very real game in a remote desert valley, where progressing from one level to another is full of lethal traps. The goal, if they are to survive, is to find the mysterious Sepulchre of Worldly Desires. The book is impressively researched, but I was a little disappointed for the same reason that computer games leave me cold - I am unable to suspend my disbelief when plots become so improbable that they make me want to giggle instead of hold my breath. Caption: article-marchthrillers.2 David Morrell gave us Rambo in his 1972 novel First Blood (infinitely better than the film), and many subsequent bestsellers. - Matthew Lewin.
Kirkus Review
In thrillermeister Morrell's 26th, the game's afoot big-time. It's a dangerous game--fatal, actually--for those unfortunate enough not to win. Scavenger, it's called, and the sought-after prize has been hidden away by a nutcase who sees unmistakable resemblances between himself and God. He's the Game Master, he tells the players, who are not exactly volunteers. At the outset, there are five, all brought to the starting line after being drugged and kidnapped. Drugged and drafted is the dauntless, durable Amanda Evert, a young woman with a difficult past (see Creepers, 2005). She's the lover of Frank Balenger, who shares much of her history, but who, for plot-stirring purposes, has not been pressed into game-playing service. Drugged, yes, conscripted, no, Frank awakens on the site of an abandoned hotel in Asbury Park, N.J., Amanda gone from him. He's frantic, desperate to find her, senses evil at work. Bit by bit, he puts together clues that point him toward a ghost town in Wyoming, Scavenger's arena. In the meantime, Amanda and her playmates are counting the ways Scavenger has been designed to sow civil discord. There have been quarrels--savage and bloody--deeply relished by the ever-watchful GM. Amanda wonders if Frank can somehow come to her rescue. Frank wonders if he'll ever again see Amanda alive. Beset as they are by the GM and his harnessing of inimical forces, both take time to wonder, "Why would anybody do this?" A fair question some readers will find insufficiently addressed. Not much of this makes sense, but then, prolific Morrell has never been a stickler for seamless plotting. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Morrell introduced readers to the somewhat esoteric concept of urban exploration with his Bram Stoker Award-winning Creepers. With this sequel, he tantalizes with a page-a-minute thriller on another fairly obscure pastime, geocaching, which involves hiding an object and then leaving a series of clues or coordinates to follow so that object can be found. Frank and Amanda, the only survivors of an incident at the Paragon Hotel, are swept into a deadly situation by a devious video game designer. Amanda is kidnapped, and while Frank searches for her, she is forced to search for a geocached time capsule in a Roanoke-like town in Wyoming. Told in near real time, the novel is fraught with tension and ever-ratcheting suspense; the tight, fast-paced plot races along at breakneck speed. As is typical of Morrell, not much internal character thought or motivation is given; the characters are developed mostly through their actions and interactions with one another. Good for public libraries, especially where suspense/thrillers are popular.-Charli Osborne, Oxford P.L., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
