Okay, I heard about these Dark Horse Press books a little while ago and the idea of it instantly appealed to me. The books in this range are sequels to the old monster movies of the 1930s to 1950s. Well when I was a kid I must have watched dozens of these films as they were often shown on UK TV. In fact I would go as far as saying that it was between these kinds of movies and Star Trek are to blame for my lifelong love of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

So the book had the benefit of appealing to my childhood appreciation of old movies, but does it as book have anything going for it. I had to admit I did not go into this book with high hopes of top quality science fiction. As a media tie-in novel I was looking for a little bit of escapist fun but little more.

However as soon as I saw that Paul Di Filippo was the author I thought maybe this could be a little more. It was. In place of a very typical B-Movie style plot this is an intelligent sf novel. Moving the action from the 1950s to the early part of the 21st Century, just a few years into our future – into a world most definitely suffering from the effects of global warming.

Brice Chalefant is a marine biologist at Boston University's Cope Cod facility. Through his position at the University he encounters Professor Tarquin Hasselrude, an elderly man who, as a youth, was part of the original expedition that found the Creature from the Black Lagoon (as in the film). Due to the disastrous events detailed in the film, the whole expedition was hushed up and Hasslerude forced to keep the secret his whole career.

Now though he chooses Brice to pass on the information to, and to continue the work Hasselrude had done in secret his whole life. Brice though has an advantage as his old school friend, a brilliant physicist named Webley Stemm, who just happens to have invented a time machine that could transport Brice back to the Devonian era, the period to which Hasselrude's fossils of the creatures were dated.

This book impressed me a great deal. I was expecting a simple romp of a novel, relying on all the clichéed monster-movie type ingredients – essentially a story that you would believe to be a 1950s scare-of-the-week drive-in movie. This was more than that, and for that Paul Di Filippo should be applauded.

Synopsis
In 1954, an expedition found what seemed to be a missing link in the evolutionary chain: an ancient, immensely powerful amphibian creature. Scientists tried to tame it, break its will, and even change its very being with surgery and torture, but the beast rebelled, killing nearly all in its way. But was the creature truly a throwback, a freak survivor of some prehistoric era — or was it something more? Six decades later, one scientist attempts to find out, using a time machine to journey into the past. What he finds not only shatters his vision of what the Creature might be, but could change the history of the human race forever. Paul Di Filippo reinvents the Creature with a tale of time travel, horror, and mystery that blends Cold War science fiction with today's cutting edge cyberpunk.