Being smitten by the first book wanted to check out his other works and ended up with "Pines". The start was somewhat similar to how "Dark matter" began with Edmund Burke, stumbling into a hospital from a car accident, without any ID or his personal belongings. The nurse and doctor at the remote village of Wayward Pines, seems to be aware of his situation and not at the same time. They give him some medicine but somehow Burke gets a creepy feeling about the whole setup and manages to escape the facility, same as how it happened in Dark Matter. Feels like Crouch has something against hospitals!! And his heroes are all haunted by creepy ones at that!!
Burke manages to visit a hotel and convinces the receptionist to give him a room with the promise of paying back once he gets his wallet from the Sheriff's office. He visits a diner where a lady patronizes him with food, with a promise of being paid back later from him. She gives him her address to contact and the next day when Burke visits that place, he could see his colleague and fellow secret service agent, whom he was searching for beaten and bludgeoned to death. But the decaying corpse seems to be several days old as compared to his accident which happened hardly hours back. He gets back to the hospital, courtesy his injuries and the creepy staff tries to put him to sleep. He again manages to escape and somehow finds the mystery lady who vanished from the diner where he had his food. The rest of the story is about whether he managed to escape Wayward pines? what is the reason he is not allowed to step outside and why he was even allowed to enter in first place? what is there outside the town/village that is so dangerous that the entire border of the place is fortified with high voltage electric fence? what are those creatures that attacked Burke when he was trying to break out? The answers for all these questions form the rest of the book and again a super fast racy thriller from Crouch which is borderline horror similar to Dark Matter as well. He seems to be adept in mixing, sci-fi, horror, thriller and emotions into a racy story telling style.
What happens when human beings continue to evolve or rather devolve? Should evolution always mean becoming something better or sharper, like how it is believed from primates to prime destroyer of earth's ecology? what will happen when nature plots its revenge by breaking the genes and set the humans on a path of self destruction beyond redemption, like the proverbial axing the very branch where you are seated, by punishing the humans for all the crimes they commit in the name of development? What happens when a mad or genial scientists foresees this and decide to take it upon himself to save the last bit of "human" human with "regular" gene setup as compared to what nature has in its plans? All this and more seems to be coming up in the other 2 parts of this supposedly trilogy. I am already off to the next book in the series and if the second part is half as scary as first, this one would be right up there. The whole thought process of interstellar crunched into 300 pages and in earth itself, makes an interesting reading especially with no scientific mumbo-jumbo. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
Apparently, there is already a drama series in OTT based on this book series it seems. And unfortunately, it is not available in India. Hoping to finish the book set and eagerly looking forward to the story on screen.
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