The In-Laws Are Coming! The In-Laws Are Coming! Oh, And A Review Of Scott Sigler's Ancestor

It’s been a busy weekend in McAfee Land. Tomorrow afternoon a plane carrying my wife’s folks will arrive here in Knoxville, and yours truly will be there to pick them up. Now, I get along very well with both of them, they are the kind of folks who get along with just about everyone. Great bunch o’ folks. But unfortunately, a visit from the in-laws means clean, clean, clean. That’s all we did this weekend; clean. Yech! It’s amazing how dirty a house can get when you aren’t looking. Sheesh. I never thought of myself or my wife as pigs, but….Oink!

Anyway, y’all don’t wanna hear about that. So, as promised, here is my review of Ancestor, by Scott Sigler.

First, this is a well thought out book. The story is good, and the plot moves along quite well. From a great opening (it’s also a very creepy opening) to the conclusion, the pacing of this novel is excellent. I can’t think of a single thing in the book that felt like an afterthought, or something that was simply inserted to fill up pages. Make no mistake; Scott Sigler is a good writer.

The science (for me) seemed a little fuzzy, and the explanations lacked the level of detail that, say, Michael Crichton would insert. This hurt the believability only a little, as it really isn’t that important to the plot IMO. I’m not as concerned with how the creatures got there as I am with the simple fact that they ARE there. And hungry. My God, those things could eat…but I get ahead of myself.

There really wasn’t a lot of character development, but you don’t really expect that in a book like this anyway. Thrillers, traditionally, are thin on character development and thick on plot. And Ancestor is no exception, although Sigler does a good job of making some characters likeable, and others not. Some of the character traits seemed a bit weird (one character had a strange habit of stabbing himself with a Ka Bar to clear his head), and Sigler liked to write the accents of a couple of them. I found this a little distracting but it might not bother anyone else. I’m kinda odd like that.

While I found the book very good, and will certainly recommend it, I think it could have benefited from a little more editing. The reason I say this is because there are several places where it seems a thesaurus would have been helpful. Repeated words (especially in the same paragraph) have a tendency to stand out to me, and there were a few such places in this book.

Now, on to the best part; The Critters. The “ancestors” are extremely well imagined and quite scary. To me, this is the reason I picked up Ancestor in the first place; to read about the critters, and this is where Scott Sigler excels. His concept is obviously alive and well inside his head, and he does an excellent job of bringing the things to life in print. I’ve already told y’all about the certain scene that gave me nightmares, and while that was the only scene that did, there’s still plenty of creep-factor left in this book. If you are the kind of person for whom the idea of being torn to bits by a bunch of hungry… er… somethings… is enough to keep you up at night, then do yourself a favor and read this one with the lights on.