Fragment

Fragment by Warren Fahy

I do so love a good monster and Fragment boasts several of them. The story starts off with the crew of a ship that is filming a reality show being called to a remote island in the South Pacific. Once they arrive they encounter ecology unlike anything else on Earth. One populated with fast, nasty, and voraciously hungry critters that make short work of the landing party. This all happens on a live stream, which brings the attention of the US government. The navy quarantines the island and scientists are sent in to poke a bit at the local flora and fauna, which pokes back in some rather nasty ways!

In many ways Fragment is a pretty standard creature feature story. We are introduced to a group of characters that are very familiar stereotypes. Once they are established the author puts them in danger and picks a few of them off in gruesome ways. This alone isn’t very thrilling or unique. But Fahy does a few things so well that it makes the rest of the book a blast to read. First up the manner in which he dispatches some of the characters is very nasty and described with a bit of glee. This might turn a few people off, but I got a kick out of the vivid descriptions of people ripped in half, eyes drilled out, and a particularly nasty blood sucking “plant” to be fun. I wonder what that says about me as a person?

Fahy also does a neat trick where you think you know who the main characters are going to be, as he establishes a group only to quickly kill most of them off and introduce a new group. Initially this sort of bugged me, but then I realized that no one was safe. One of the biggest problems in most stories like this is that for the most part you sort of know certain characters are going to make it out alive. Here not so much. So when he puts characters in danger you really don’t know what is going to happen. This made the book a lot of fun to read.

The last thing that I wanted to mention specifically are the creatures. Fahy does a wonderful job establishing a whole new world of creatures. Not only that but he creates a realistic ecology that spawned them. This world has it’s own logic and really makes sense. There is nothing worse to me then reading a book like this and wondering how creatures like this could have gone unnoticed or even lived at all. Now this can be a bit of a double-edged sword as I think Fahy goes a bit overboard on the science at times. As much as I dig the description of the creatures and the speculation of the scientists as to how they came to be it does go on a bit long. Because of this there are parts in the middle of the book that dragged a bit for me. Again not really a big criticism, but I did want to mention it.

The one big issue that I have with the book has to do with 2 of the characters. Geoffrey Binswanger and Thatcher Redmond are scientists that play heavily in the ending of the book. While they are kind of archetypical and “flat” characters with Geoffrey playing the hero and Thatcher the villain that really isn’t my complaint. For much of the story neither character is anywhere near the island. Which means that Fahy keeps leaving the island to establish and connect these characters to the story. To be honest the book is much better when it is on the island dealing with the nasty critters that inhabit it.

Both of my complaints are fairly minor and I do recommend the book. Fragment is an entertaining and interesting bit of science fiction. So if you are looking for something to kill a few hours this summer you should check out Fragment.

reviewed by John Shatzer