Cover blurb
A young family of Hypacrosaurus search for a future in a valley riddled with uncertainty. A Troodon in his prime wrestles with a bloodthirsty alpha male for control of his pack. Now these dinosaurs will be thrown together in a valley upended by drought, wildfires, and hungry tyrannosaurs in this stunning novel set in the Late Cretaceous.
Created by paleontologist Jack Horner and dinosaur-writer Julian Michael Carver, experience a forgotten moment in Earth’s prehistory like you’ve never seen it before!
My thoughts
Dinosaur Valley is a self-published novel that popped up out of nowhere for me. I discovered it on a recommendation list on Amazon, and what piqued my interest was the involvement of Jack Horner. Now retired and not as visible as he once was, Horner was at one point the most famous paleontologist in the world. He is best known for his co-discovery of nesting sites belonging to the hadrosaur Maiasaura, which helped revolutionize what we know about dinosaur behavior. He was also the inspiration for the character of Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park novels – the book version is a dead ringer for him – and was the science consultant for the first three Jurassic Park films. Horner is dyslexic so I’m guessing much of the credit for writing the book goes to co-author Julian Michael Carver. Whatever Horner’s level of involvement, this is only the second work of fiction with his name on the cover, with the first being the children’s book Lily and Maia.
Dinosaur Valley is set 75 million years in the past and is told through the point of view of its dinosaur protagonists. Talos is a male Troodon whose pack lives in the aforementioned valley. Vela is a female Hypacrosaurus who wanders into the valley in search of food and water with her mate and three young. A prolonged drought has parched the countryside and one of the few remaining sources of open water is a lake in the valley’s center. Tensions rise as various groups of herbivores jockey for control of the lake, with Vela and her family finding their access to the water blocked by a herd of territorial Styracosaurus. Meanwhile, Talos and his pack must deal with a dwindling food supply and a psychotic pack leader. The situation turns more dire when a pair of Daspletosaurs arrive and begin to prey on the other dinosaurs. Leaving the valley would likely mean death from dehydration, but staying likely means becoming food for the tyrannosaurs. Then there are the patches of dead, blackened forest, which hint at a greater threat.
A decision authors must make when writing stories about animals is how much to anthropomorphize their characters. One option is to go the Watership Down route – or, more appropriate for this blog, Silverhair by Stephen Baxter – in which the characters have culture and can converse with one another but otherwise behave like actual animals. Another is to be as realistic as possible, so no talking or higher thought processes, although the characters’ actions and emotional states are still described in human-like terms so readers can empathize with what’s happening on page. An example of this type of fiction comes from the work of another famous paleontologist, Robert Bakker in the 1995 novel Raptor Red. The protagonists in Dinosaur Valley don’t talk or have anything resembling a culture, but they’re still much smarter than normal animals. Their thoughts are communicated through italic text, with Vela’s inner voice delivered in fully formed sentences and Talos’s in rapid bursts of sentence fragments. Some readers may find these snippets break the immersion of what is otherwise a realistic depiction of the Late Cretaceous world, but this is a work of fiction. Since we spend the entire novel with these two characters, the decision to give them an inner voice provides an emotional hook that would otherwise be missing from the story.
With animals as your protagonists, there is not going to be much in the way of plot twists or character development, and I guessed early on how the dinosaurs would get out of their predicament. But just because Dinosaur Valley is a straightforward adventure doesn’t mean it’s not a fun one. Horner and Carver keep the story moving at a good pace, with the chapters alternating between Vela’s and Talos’s stories. And I was surprised by how tense the novel was at times with well-written moments of horror, most of which involved the Daspletosaurs. The book does a good job of reminding you that its protagonists are nowhere near the top of the food chain.
I do have nitpicks. I wish the Cretaceous environment was described in more detail. We meet a few species of dinosaurs and a pterosaur, but the authors don’t say much about the broader world they live in, from its flora to its non-dinosaurian fauna. Also, there are many typos, which is something that readers of this blog know I’m bad at spotting, so it says something when I do. Those complaints aside, I enjoyed Dinosaur Valley and would recommend it to any dinosaur fan.
Trivia
- Carver is the author of several works of fiction, many featuring dinosaurs. Among his works is Primeval New World: The Ascent, a tie-in novel for the short-lived Canadian spin-off of the U.K. TV series Primeval. His website is https://julianmichaelcarver.home.blog.
- Troodon was an interesting choice of protagonist as troodontids are generally believed to have been among the most intelligent dinosaurs. In the 1980s, paleontologist Dale Russell proposed that had dinosaurs not gone extinct, troodontids could have evolved into “dinosauroids” that combined dinosaurian and humanoid features. Most paleontologists remain very skeptical of the idea.
Reviews
- None
Prehistoric Pulp 