Cover blurb
During the height of the Vietnam War, a search and rescue team known as Vulture Squad is sent to an isolated jungle valley to uncover the fate of a missing Green Beret platoon. As they hunt through the primordial depths of the valley, they discover ancient horrors that not only threaten to unravel their minds, but to end their lives as well. When the casualties mount, the men of Vulture Squad must abandon their human nature and give in to their savage instincts in order to survive… the Primitive War.
My thoughts
War is hell, especially when there are dinosaurs.
Primitive War is a self-published novel that began as a Jurassic Park-inspired work of online fiction. Those writings were later refined into a novel that has proven very successful for the author, leading to a sequel, two story collections, two tabletop games in development, and a movie adaptation scheduled for release in 2025. Set during the Vietnam War, the book leans heavily into the horror of the setting and is filled with graphic descriptions of human-on-human and dinosaur-on-human violence.
Primitive War takes place in 1968 and, at a very basic level, its plot is similar to the first Predator film. Vulture Squad is a Special Forces unit that specializes in freeing American prisoners of war from enemy camps. The squad is led by Ryan Baker, who wears a mask to hide the hideous facial scarring he received earlier in the war. The other squad members are mostly war movie stereotypes: There’s a rookie, a loudmouth, a religious type, a tracker with Native American heritage, etc. After a bloody raid on a POW camp, Vulture Squad is ordered to locate a missing Green Beret platoon in a remote jungle valley, with the military command cagey about what the platoon was doing there. Needless to say, Vulture Squad finds more than Viet Cong, although the humans turn out to be just as deadly as the dinosaurs.
Most readers will delve into Primitive War for the action and there is no shortage of it. The plot really doesn’t matter as the book is mostly just a series of battle and chase scenes with character beats wedged in between. The action can be thrilling despite Pettus’s habit of switching viewpoints between characters every few sentences, which is sometimes disorienting. As for the characters themselves, I wouldn’t call them complex but Pettus puts more effort into fleshing out their personalities than I expected. The real problem is Primitive War plays its B-movie premise too straight. There is little humor in the novel and when people are not getting graphically torn apart by dinosaurs, they’re torturing or killing other people or having flashbacks of when they tortured or killed other people. The Vietnam War is a difficult subject to tackle and I give credit to Pettus for not sugarcoating its horrors. But a novel about soldiers fighting dinosaurs doesn’t have to be Apocalypse Now, and the relentless brooding and dark subject matter wore me down. As I was reading the book, I kept thinking of Carnosaur, a 1984 dinosaur horror novel that is more of a spiritual predecessor to Pettus’s book than Jurassic Park. Carnosaur is also filled with graphic dinosaur violence and disturbing scenes, but there is a playfulness and winking sense of humor to its writing that Primitive War desperately needs.
As for the dinosaurs, Pettus gets credit for fully embracing feathers and thumbing his nose at the “feathered dinosaurs aren’t scary” crowd. Other than that, they are just video game monsters, existing only to kill everything in sight and seemingly impervious to bullets. Pettus also decided to allow his characters to recognize the dinosaurs by species, even if the species hadn’t been scientifically described at the time of the story. It would have been more interesting if the characters went into battle with the popular view of the dinosaurs at the time – slow, scaly, and tail-dragging – and instead found themselves outmatched by speedy murder birds.
Primitive War has a big following so it doesn’t need my endorsement, which I can’t give. If Pettus had eased off the dour tone just a tad and made his dinosaurs more than video game bullet sponges, I would have enjoyed the book more than I did. But if you like your grimdark, well, grim and dark, then this is the novel for you.
Trivia
- Primitive War is not the first work of fiction to pit the U.S. military against dinosaurs. Since World War II, authors have been spinning tales of GIs fighting tyrannosaurs and other prehistoric terrors. Most of those tales are set during that conflict, with DC Comics’ The War That Time Forgot being one of the more popular incarnations of the theme.
- Primitive War has a website with news about the novels and related media.
- An early trailer of the film is available although it mainly consists of behind-the-scenes footage about the making of the movie. The movie also has an official website.
Prehistoric Pulp 