Cover blurb
For a thousand years, they waged bloody battles to conquer Urth. Now, a common enemy has conquered them. And the bloodiest battle of all awaits…
The wars known as the Primal Rage have ended. The great dino-gods have been magically imprisoned. And Necrosan, an evil creature of fearsome power, lays waste to Urth with his undead armies. In his way stand the Avatars — eight supreme fighters who can free their dino-god masters from the spell that binds them. Shaman of Blizzard and sorceress of Vertigo, minion of Diablo and paladin of Armadon, they must put aside their differences… to defeat the menace that threatens them all — or watch as vile Necrosan conquers Urth…
My thoughts
What killed the dinosaurs?
Wizards.
At least that is the dinosaur extinction theory put forward by the video game Primal Rage, an arcade brawler in the style of Mortal Kombat. Mostly forgotten today, Primal Rage enjoyed a brief moment of popularity in the mid-90s, thanks to a marketing campaign that sought to exploit the surge of interest in dinosaurs resulting from the release of Jurassic Park in 1993. In the game, players fought as stop-motion dinosaur and ape “gods” in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic Earth (called “Urth”). It was notable for its grossness: One of the finishing moves had a giant ape piss acid on its defeated foes, melting away their flesh and leaving only skeletons.
Primal Rage: The Avatars is a sequel to the original video game and an adaptation of a second video game that was canceled while in mid-production. The novel begins at the end of the Cretaceous Period with Blizzard, the good god of the Yetis, leading his forces against the evil dino-gods, led by the T. rex Diablo. Their battle is interrupted by a human wizard from another dimension who warns that the violence of the dinosaur wars threatens all existence. He casts a spell that imprisons the dino-gods in various locations across the Earth and moon while creating an explosion so powerful it wipes out the rest of the dinosaurs, causing the K-Pg extinction. Sixty-six million years later, a meteor strikes the Earth. The impact rearranges the continents, destroys human civilization and unleashes the dino-gods from their imprisonment.
Once all that backstory is out of the way, the novel’s plot begins in earnest. A thousand years after the cataclysm, the dino-gods have resumed their wars and recruited humans as worshippers and snacks. Blizzard’s human priest Kaze notices a dark cloud on the horizon, and he and the dino-gods race to the source only to find that the meteor that destroyed civilization was actually an egg. Out hatches the evil god Necrosan, who looks like a cross between a dragon and Lord Zedd from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Necrosan thanks the dino-gods “for attending my coming-out party,” declares he is going to conquer Urth, then starts gobbling up humans and excreting them as zombies. Other shenanigans follow and the dino-gods are once again imprisoned, but this time they have a loophole: They can imbue their human priests with their powers, turning them into “avatars” who can transform into their gods for a short time every day. With their new powers, the avatars team up to take down Necrosan.
Primal Rage: The Avatars is a weird book. If it were not for the occasional reference to sex – one villain is a priestess who sleeps with and then kills virgin males – I would say it’s a kids’ book. But it’s a kids’ book that reads like it was written by a kid. The dialogue is straight out of an episode of the aforementioned Power Rangers but spiced up here and there with “adult” content. Take this scene early in the novel, describing the end of human civilization:
“Aaah,” screamed an attractive woman in a Volkswagen beside him. She jumped out of her car, looked around, and began pressing her voluptuous lips against the windshields of nearby cars. “I want a man before I die!”
I mean, I laughed, and maybe that is what the author intended. He was contracted to write a cartoon and that was he was delivered. Unfortunately there is little fun to be had in its pages. The plot is unfocused, the characters shallow even for cartoons, and there is a surprising lack of the central element of the game: One-on-one fight scenes between giant prehistoric beasts. The few fight scenes that exist are described almost off-handedly, usually taking place in the background so the narrative can focus on less interesting action involving the human protagonists. I know it is a strange complaint, but an adaptation of a fighting game should have more fighting.
I wish I could at least recommend Primal Rage: The Avatars as a “so bad it’s fun” read. The truth is it’s a slog to get through.
Trivia
- John Vornholt is a journalist and author who has written many tie-in novels of famous media properties, particularly Star Trek.
- As previously mentioned, Primal Rage: The Avatars is an adaptation of an unreleased sequel to the original game. The sequel was never finished but gameplay footage exists. You can learn more on the Primal Rage wiki.
- The book features one “dino-god” that was cut from the original game: Slashfang, which is modeled after a Smilodon.
Reviews
- None.
Prehistoric Pulp 