It Looks Like Us

There are a lot of reasons John Carpenter's The Thing is a great film, like the incredible special effects that brought the creative and terrifying creature designs to life, but the truly scary aspects are the isolation, the dread, the paranoia. And while that is touched upon in this novel, it never reaches the heights of its inspiration. There's a bit of paranoia - and I liked how it tied in with Riley's history of panic attacks, how she couldn't trust her own mind - and the scenes where they're braving the Antarctic storms were effective, but it never fully came together.

Normally I would try not to directly compare the movie and the book so closely, but the book's story follows the plot of the movie so much that it's hard not to. I think the book could have done more to make it unique, like focus on the environmental/climate change aspect or flesh out the characters and make it more character-driven, but it was too short and too action-focused for that to happen. Also, a minor complaint but the pop-culture references also seemed more suited to millennials and older, which obviously works for me because I'm in that age range, but might be off-putting to the target YA audience?

Overall, I didn't hate this, and there were things I did like (especially that the billionaire tech weirdo is named Anton Rusk and is still somehow less cartoonishly evil than his real-life counterpart). I wouldn't hesitate to hand it to a teen looking for a fast-paced horror read, but this Elder Librarian would rather watch the cinematic masterpiece that inspired it. 2.5 Animorphs references out of 5, rounded up.