I stayed up late to watch the movie of Dean Koontz' Phantoms on Saturday night. I remember thinking the book was okay and being mildly interested in the movie but I guess it never came onto Stars or HBO because it was on some regular channel (Fox maybe?).
I had forgotten the similarities between it and, well, IT by Stephen King. Cyclical monsters in the drain and all that.
So the premise behind Phantoms is that this immortal proto-plasmic creature who has been around since the dinosaurs (and is what caused them to go extinct; an illogical premise until the Ancient Enemy was a LOT bigger back than) periodically comes up from its subterranean lair (sewers--did you know that Diplodocus had plumbing?) and eats everything in sight.
One of the characters is an old geezer who writes for the equivalent of The Weekly World News and who actually has a theory about this creature who he calls The Ancient Enemy. He claims the Ancient Enemy killed Roanoke, the ancient Maya (we'll ignore the fact that there's more Maya alive now than there ever has been), the dinosaurs, the people on the Mary Celeste, etc. Anyplace a bunch of people have all vanished at once--that's the AE. Apparently most of the time the AE gets hungry, it comes up in the oceans or an uninhabited (by humans) place so no one notices. Only once in a while does it munch on humans. Then, like a ground-up flatworm, the knowledge of the dead people is kept alive in the AE's brain.
Then it all devolves into religion and is the AE actually Satan. Blah, blah, blah.
This stuff is the best part of fiction. Find some things that are true and link them together with fiction and truth-stretching. This is what the DaVinci Code was. Do you think I honestly believe there's a massive goo-creature in the sewer which has in its head (nucleus?) all the knowledge of the ancient Maya....?
Oh, wait. I kinda like that. How can I talk to this creature without being consumed by it!?
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