Creepers

So I finally got my hands on something written by the guy who created Rambo. Having expertise in firearms, executive protection, hostage negotiation and various other action skills and still suffering the death of his own child from blood cancer, Morrell is gifted when it comes to coming up with a good story and he has everything he needs to back up the action and the pain that fills his novels.

Creepers is a dark thriller, full of suspense and casualties. When a group of action loves who love to infiltrate old buildings in search of the past makes the mistake of picking the wrong place at the wrong time. Past and future collides as the group gets trapped in an Aztec temple style Paragon Hotel, deserted and about to be bulldozed. Amidst the rats, ruins and secret hotels rooms awaits something that is not dead, something that will turn their lives inside out and splash the walls with fresh blood. The team consists of a college professor Robert Conklin, his two students Rick and Cora, friend Vincent and a new comer with mysterious past, Frank Balenger, well trained in survival and perhaps their only chance of getting out alive.

Blinded by the dark, walking on rotten floors they climb higher and higher stirring the past with their discoveries. The original owner of the hotel was not an average person, but a peeping tom with secrets of his own. As the stumble into his domain they enter a trap as if they entered a portal to hell and what awaits them has no intention of letting anyone escape its clutches.

Fast paced and very entertaining, it certainly kept me glued to the pages and the story went from creepy to bizarre but I loved the main concept and what was really lurking for them in the dark. It was almost a mystery book mixed in with a healthy dose of terror and suspense. I am looking forward to "Scavenger" which picks up with the main hero of this story.

- Kasia S.

I actually remember when Creepers was first released - the art of infiltration or "urban hacking" was something I had read about, and a stand-alone thriller from the author of The Fraternity of the Stone on the topic sounded pretty awesome. For some reason or another, I never picked up a copy. Now, unfortunately, I have.

Creepers tells the story of a small group of university students and professors who "infiltrate" abandoned buildings and do some exploring. The book is told from the point of view of Frank Balenger, a journalist who is tagging along for this particular expedition - a visit to the abandoned Paragon Hotel.

The first few chapters are blatantly expository. The dialogue between Frank and the others, supposedly character-building, is actually just an awkward Q&A, punctuated by Frank's detailed explanatory survey of the equipment.

The scary thing? This is the best part of the book.

Although Frank is the only character actually memorable enough (not entirely a good thing) to have a name, the rest of the group is composed of the obligatory fat professor, the fat professor's sidekick, the hot grad student and the hot grad student's boyfriend.

After watching Frank gush over their state-of-the-art mining helmets and pee bottles, the NPCs accept him as one of the crowd and, without further ado, go trooping off to the abandoned Paragon Hotel.

Upon entering the Paragon, the book abruptly shifts from The Infilitration Manifesto into My First Thriller, by Davy Morrell, Age 8 and 1/2. Plot twists come down like a rain of frogs - inexplicable and repulsive. To add to the absurdity, Morrell persists in using times as chapter headings, kind of like 24, only, you know, bad.

Trying to explain the full depth of the absurdity is impossible without spoilers, but, really, you should never read this book.

Couldn't agree more with critic J. Laudermilch, who might have taken the words right off of my keyboard. I, too, wanted to throw this book at the wall numerous times. I also agree with Laudermilch that the author's note at the end is not only more interesting than the novel but much better written.

The plot of Creepers is silly enough but I can forgive almost anything if it's well written; this book is not well written. Aggravated to the point of distraction, I began to underline the number of times the hero "rushed" from one point to another. He also has to be one of the most talkative heroes ever created, telling far more than he needs to, which is a clumsy writer's way of imparting information which the reader needs to know about the hero's experiences, background, and motive, not to mention setting up a number of "surprises."

Possible spoilers ahead......
The author sets his readers up for a delightfully creepy time with a once grand but long abandoned hotel on the beach, tunnels filled with deformed rats and cats and something moving in the stagnant water of a century old swimming pool (never explained) only to take an abrupt left turn into treasure seeking bad guys and one credibility-straining action set piece after another. Think Die Hard to the 10th power, though not as well done. And no Bruce Willis to help it along either.

Morrell is said to be known as the father of the action novel, but Alistair MacLean was doing it much earlier and better, too. Or if you want an ex-military type, try the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child. Even without a toothbrush, he's more convincing that anything in Creepers.

I was very excited going into this novel. First, the premise and synopsis sounded intruigingly interesting. Then it went and won the 2005 Stoker award for best novel. The first two chapters even managed to grip me to the point that I was recommending the book to others the day after I started it. But, sadly, it all fell apart there.

If you're expecting a horror novel, you might do best to look elsewhere. Sure, I'd go so far as to call this book a thriller, but I expected something much more horrifying than this.

The author started with a great premise - urban spelunking - and let that premise carry the first few chapters of the book, as the group of explorers makes their way into a long-abandoned hotel, designed by an agorophobic hemopheliac who used the building to hide from society. This is a great backdrop for a story. My problem is that once the building is penetrated, it's easy to forget that these characters are even spelunkers. They quickly become an argumentative group of people, stuck in a building, who are quickly figuring out that nothing is as it seems, and no one is who they claim to be. This story element is overused to the point that, by the end, it becomes disgustingly predictable.

Yes, there is violence here, and the story has a psychological element to it that could have been quite interesting. Above all, however, it feels as if the author tried to take the story in too many directions using too few pages, creating a work that is ultimately predictable and unsatisfying.

Urban Exploration.
People who break into closed or abandoned buildings and creep around in the dark.
Sounds like the making of a great book, right? Especially in the capable hands of a master like David Morrell...i mean, this guy created John Freaking Rambo, for crying out loud!!!!!

CREEPERS is a pretty lean book.....It starts off running, as Reporter Frank Balenger meets up with a quartet of Creepers who are preparing to break into the long-abandoned Paragon Hotel, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Before long, the group are in over their heads, with mutant rats, five-legged cats, secret passages, collapsing staircases, and long-buried secrets that should have stayed buried. Then, at about the 120 page mark, Morrell must have been having a bout of insomnia and surfed over to TBS and caught the old Ice Cube/Ice T Urban Explorer thriller TRESPASS, because Morrell changes the focus from determined-group-of-amateurs-in-over-their-heads to HOLY-CRAP, CRAZY-MURDEROUS-THUGS-ARE-HERE-TO STEAL-THE-HIDDEN-TREASURE, and it really took the book from fresh and new to utterly predictable, at least for me. Then, just as you start wondering "How the hell is he going to drag this out for another hundred pages??", Morrell takes yet another twist, this time for the better, by adding still another murderous psycho to the mix. (He also crafts one of the creepiest scenes I've ever read, as a character is silently decapitated, while the others are mere feet away, totally unaware. Brrrr......)

The book is well-written, without a doubt, but gets harder and harder to swallow as it goes on. Coincidence piles upon coincidence until credibility isn't just stretched, it's snapped and left lying there in pieces. The hero is a reporter. But then again, he's also a Gulf War veteran. But wait, he's also a former Detective!!! And if you order now, he'll also be searching for his long-missing wife, whose corpse just happens to be in the hotel, along with the man who killed her!
It's all a little much to ask a reader to swallow.

CREEPERS is a fun read, kind of like Richard Laymon when he was really running on all cylinders, but my throat still hurts from everything Mr. Morrell asked me to swallow.

This was the absolute worst piece of dreck I have ever read. The book definitely had promise and for the first 70 or so pages, I was hooked. It seemed, however, that Morrell couldn't decide if he was writing a ghost/haunted house story, or an actual believable narrative. He threw in things like a five legged cat and one eyed rats to make one believe that a bigger force was possibly at work. No such luck.

Instead his protanonist is a cross between Macgyver and Rambo. There isn't a situation the guy can't get out of, and even though he's never been on an urban exploration before, he seemed to know more than the people who were hosting it.

HUGE holes in the overall story:

1. Much is made of a bottle of morphine that is from 1971 being too dangerous to take because it might be deadly, yet approximately ten pages later, the morphine is used without a thought (or a consequence).

2. A storm begins at roughly 11 at night and lasts until the early hours of the morning (even storms at the beach don't last that long).

The list goes on, but just in case you really want to frustrate yourself by actually reading this dreck, I'll keep the spoilers with issues to myself. I wanted to throw this book at the wall numerous times and will never read another book by this author again.

The only thing worth noting is the author's note at the end. That made a much better story than the one he decided to tell.

Stephen King, whose endorsement prominently graces the cover of this book, once described himself as a writer of "plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonalds." I find that quote ironic after re-reading Creepers, as it applies much more aptly to author David Morrell than it does to King himself. Make no mistake -- this is an "airport book". This is something you read waiting on a flight, or in a doctor's office, or really just whenever you have a few hours to kill. The prose is not great - in the last 60 pages especially, Morrell kicks the adjectives into overdrive, clearly powering his way through the conclusion before writer's fatigue sets in. That said, this isn't a BAD book -- it's just a mediocre one. And while I normally would have scored this three stars, it turned out to be an airport book in a very specific time in my life when I needed an airport book badly. So for that lingering nostalgia, Creepers gets an extra star. It's certainly no worse than any other book to grace the New York Times bestseller list, and if you find yourself needing an airport book, you could certainly do worse. Give it a shot if you get the chance.

Creepers is not haute literature - nor does it aspire to be. This novel is a written in a taut, thrill-a-minute style reminiscent of a Spielberg film (Jurassic Park, for instance, or Raiders of the Lost Ark) in which the characters are constantly flung into one impossible situation after another - the perfect escapist beach read for summer or those quite winter nights by the fire. However, despite these positives, Creepers is not without its faults.

Creepers finds a group of characters - a professor, three former students, and a reporter with a past - all venturing into Ashbury Park, New Jersey, to explore the forbidding, abandoned Paragon Hotel. The professor and students are creepers - urban explorers to explore abandoned buildings like spelunkers explore caves. The reporter, named Baleanger, is along for the ride, writing a story on these "creepers," as they're known, for the New York times. The building, forbidding as it is, is full of strange wonders, and tantalizing, horrifying discoveries with each level they explore. However, the group soon finds that they are not alone, as fortune hunters, and someone even more deadly, interrupt their explorations. It soon becomes a grim death march of survival for our intrepid band as they are thrust from one adventure to another in hopes of escaping the Paragon alive.

First, the Good - Morrell has an uncanny knack of drawing you into his writing - on numerous times, I told myself I would stop at a certain page, only to discover, to my great surprise, that I had kept reading. Morrell writes a fantastically effective page-turned, and this work I found particularly addicting. Creepers is also a fast read - though 350+ pages, a steady reader can finish this book within a week quite easily. Morrell also is exceptionally realistic in his portrayal of action and he is very careful in his descriptions of emotions - one certainly feels as though they feel the trails and travails of the characters.

Now, the Bad - Morrell, unfortunately, becomes very wrapped up in errata; he is, in other words, oftentimes too precise in his descriptions and is constantly telling the reader more than they might want to know on a particular subject - the reason that one particular piece of gear is better than another, the physics of a particular situation, etc. This is not to say that this makes the work boring, just a bit tiresome at times. Additionally, this book is so wrapped up in trying to surprise us it makes suspension of disbelief quite difficult - in this book, nearly every character has some kind of hidden past, some trauma, etc., that eventually surfaces, even the Paragon Hotel itself, and it becomes difficult to keep track, and maintain credulity. Also, the one-thing-after-another style of plot gets a bit thin after awhile, and Morrell seems to be trying very hard to keep things fresh.

Overall, however, this is a fun read for a summer trip or winter getaway. Enjoy!

Another gripping thriller from the author of First Blood, this is a great value paperback.

Morrell has always been great at ramping up the tension with concise descriptive prose, writing in such a way with terse sentences and short chapters that the very reading seems to force your breathing and heartbeat to go faster - and this book does not disappoint. The difference here is that his usual setup is a little different - instead of a lone vigilante or assassin (the usual Morrel protagonist), we are in a group of `creepers', the nickname for those who break in to deserted buildings without any intention of damaging or stealing, but merely for curiosity's sake to see history preserved as it was at the time the building closed. The past time has clearly been well researched by Morrel, making the motives and characters believable. The setting for this particular foray is the fictional Paragon Hotel, an Art Deco sealed building which was the sanctuary of a reclusive millionaire. The book takes place over one night, and I very nearly read the book in real time, as gripping as it was... The team enter the building only to find that all is definitely not as it seems, and a cat and mouse game starts with surprises and revealed identities along the way, with the decaying hotel providing a perfect claustrophobic atmosphere for tension to mount and the hairs on the back of your necks stand up.

While this does not necessarily rise to the heights of Morrel's best (The Trilogy of `Brotherhood of the Rose', `Fraternity of the Stone' and `The League of Night and Fog' still rate as his best in my opinion), it is frighteningly well written, with hardly a wasted word. The sentences are short and rapid fire, yet nonetheless convey a full picture of both the setting and the characters. You might not have time to become so involved as to feel real loss when something untoward happens to some of them, but you will feel the unbearable tension in the way it unfolds - you won't look at sealed abandoned buildings the same way again...

There's a long-abandoned mental hospital a few miles from my home, and I've always had a hankering to go in there some time with a flashlight and camera. Some people - "urban explorers" aka "creepers" - do just that, no matter that it's trespassing, dangerous, and illegal. Looking for some vicarious wish fulfillment, I eagerly picked up Creepers (2005), a novel about a band of amateurs who "infiltrate" a decaying hotel at Asbury Park, NJ. But several of these amateurs have ulterior motives, which emerge as the story progresses. Nearly all of the action takes place in the dark, on rickety staircases and in creepy deserted guest rooms. While there are no ghosts, there are other eerie things, such as mutated animals and dessicated corpses. And it turns out that our creepers are not alone.

Morrell had produced an incredibly rich setting for this book; you can practically smell the mildew and rats and fungus. But he must have invested all of his skills on that feature, because the characters are cardboard, the thunder storm lasts about six hours, and the action is predictable. Perhaps it would be scary for a twelve year old. Probably it would make a good movie. I slogged my way through each chapter, and have zero interest in reading the sequel. Nor do I care very much any more about "infiltrating" that asylum a few miles from my home.