‘Predator: Concrete Jungle’ – Nathan Archer (Millennium)

So last week I was in the process of hitting a big reading slump and tackled that by picking up some comfort reading, albeit comfort reading that I’d never read before (If that makes any sense? You know what I mean). You’ve already seen my review for ‘They Came And Ate Us’, which ended up being just the book that I needed last week, and now we’re onto the next book on that list…

I love ‘Predator’ movies (yep, even that one, I love them all) but have never dug too deeply into the ‘book tie-in’ side of the franchise; I did read ‘South China Sea’ a long time ago but that’s about it really. When I saw ‘Concrete Jungle’ in the Brockley bookshop, I figured ‘why not?’ and promptly made it a ‘comfort reading goal’.

I finished ‘Concrete Jungle’ last night and, well… Let me tell you all about it.

With record-breaking heat come frayed nerves and a rising crime rate. New York City detectives Rasche and Schaefer are assigned to look into the most brutal murders they’ve ever seen – flayed bodies hung like curing meat on a rack – and they can’t believe that just an over-heated temper tantrum is the cause.

When Schaefer has a close encounter with one of the murderers, he realises that he’s run into something much bigger than the police suspect. The creature leaves him with an alien device implanted in his neck and a strong feeling that this fight is a personal thing…

‘Concrete Jungle’ is a fairly straightforward read that doesn’t ask too much of its reader (a big plus point for me at the moment) and in that respect, it’s very much like the films. Predators are on the hunt and it’s up to an alpha male, or alpha males, to stand up and fight back. That’s the whole focus of the book and Archer handles things pretty well. The ‘Predator kills’ are pretty heavily signposted, it has to be said. If a random character is suddenly given a bit of back story and is holding a weapon… Well, they won’t be around in a couple of pages. But that’s half the fun of it, knowing that someone unpalatable is about to become a hunting trophy and waiting for it to happen. There are also some decent ‘set piece’ battles that give the plot fresh impetus just when it looks like things are starting to slow down. If the aim is to get the book as much like a ‘Predator’ movie as possible (and you’d think that it would be) then I think that Archer has pretty much got it spot on.

What I really got a lot out of though was the work that Archer puts into this adaptation (adapted from the comic book of the same name) to make ‘Concrete Jungle’ a bridging novel between the first two ‘Predator’ movies, making the appearance of the Predator in LA a natural progression of events rather than a marketing decision on how to make a sequel work. I like that, it really makes you feel like you’re in a setting that is just starting to grow.

‘Concrete Jungle’ isn’t going to change your life but then, neither were the films if we’re being honest 😉 No, what we’ve got here is a book that doesn’t do anything particularly new but does the essentials well enough to hold its head high in the company of the movies. And at the end of the day, that’s all you really need from a tie-in novel, isn’t it?