Cover blurb
A haunted paleontologist returns to the museum where his sister was abducted years earlier and is faced with a terrifying and murderous spirit in this chilling novel.
Curator of paleontology Dr. Simon Nealy never expected to return to his Pennsylvania hometown, let alone the Hawthorne Museum of Natural History. He was just a boy when his six-year-old sister, Morgan, was abducted from the museum under his watch, and the guilt has haunted Simon ever since. After a recent breakup and the death of the aunt who raised him, Simon feels drawn back to the place where Morgan vanished, in search of the bones they never found.
But from the moment he arrives, things aren’t what he expected. The Hawthorne is a crumbling ruin, still closed amid the ongoing pandemic, and plummeting toward financial catastrophe. Worse, Simon begins seeing and hearing things he can’t explain. Strange animal sounds. Bloody footprints that no living creature could have left. A prehistoric killer looming in the shadows of the museum.
Terrified he’s losing his grasp on reality, Simon turns to the handwritten research diaries of his predecessor and uncovers a blood-soaked mystery 150 million years in the making that could be the answer to everything.
My thoughts
Natural history museums are surprisingly underused settings in horror and thrillers. Filled with the fossil skeletons of long-extinct creatures, the glass-eyed stares of taxidermized animals, and the pilfered artifacts of lost cultures, museums would seem the perfect homes for ghosts, ghouls, and ancient curses, but they don’t turn up much in fiction. One of the few exceptions, and perhaps the best-known example, is the 1995 novel Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, which is set in New York’s American Museum of Natural History (the 1997 film adaptation changed the setting to Chicago’s Field Museum). The Paleontologist by Luke Dumas is set in a fictional natural history museum in Pennsylvania and fully embraces the haunted house vibes of the setting. That said, the hauntings are few and far between, and the novel feels overlong for the story it seeks to tell.
The paleontologist of the title is Simon Nealy. When the story opens, Simon has accepted a new job at the museum in his hometown during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum has seen better days, with decades of incompetent management and dwindling ticket sales leaving it on the brink of financial ruin. Unknown to his new bosses, Simon has an ulterior motive for taking the job: When he was a boy, Simon’s younger sister accompanied him to the museum and vanished within its halls. That tragedy has haunted Simon throughout his life and the lingering guilt recently cost him a relationship. Simon hopes to use his time at the museum to figure out what happened to his sister. He soon learns that far more ancient mysteries are haunting the museum grounds. As the janitor cryptically warns Simon on his first day: “You hear something in the dark, don’t go looking for it.”
The Paleontologist has some scary moments and deals with grisly themes, but I would hesitate to label it horror. It is much more of a character study of a man haunted by a childhood tragedy and his quest to finally find peace. We spend almost the entire novel following Simon, with the author’s decision to set the plot during the pandemic’s height a clever touch as it physically recreates the sense of isolation that Simon is experiencing emotionally. My main problem is too often the author relies on telling readers about Simon’s past or emotional state rather than showing it through narrative. For example, we are given what is essentially a long essay about a relationship that Simon has developed with a fellow researcher and how it came to an end, but we are not given any lengthy dialogue or glimpses of their lives together to understand why the break-up was such a blow. The author does a better job with Simon’s relationships with his sister and his mess of a mother, providing flashbacks from his early childhood that, while grim, give the plot some emotional heft.
As for the prehistoric creatures, they’re there and Simon’s encounters with them are spooky, but they are ultimately not the focus of the novel. Readers diving into The Paleontologist for a story about ghostly prehistoric monsters terrorizing museumgoers will be disappointed. Most of the novel is about Simon’s hunt for answers about his sister. The first half of the novel drags as this mystery is explored at a leisurely pace, but it picks up in the second half as the clues come at a fast clip. A good 50 or so pages probably could have been trimmed without losing much. Also, the mystery ends in a surprisingly anticlimactic fashion—in fact, one could say it happens “off-screen” with Simon having little to no agency in its resolution. That is admittedly a bold choice by the author, but not necessarily a satisfying one for readers.
The Paleontologist left me with mixed feelings. I admired what the author attempted with the novel but felt he didn’t pull it off. And to be honest, I was hoping for more of a funhouse thrill ride with ghost dinosaurs chomping down on flesh-and-blood human beings. Still, that was my expectation and not the author’s intention. If you are looking for a character study and mystery with some supernatural elements, then you may enjoy The Paleontologist more than I did.
Trivia
- The author’s page is LukeDumas.com.
Prehistoric Pulp 
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