260 pages
Published 1995
Read from November 8 to November 9
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
For an embarrassingly long time — from late 1996 until maybe the close of 1998, which felt like a geological era to a teen living in a car — this was my favorite book.
I first read it in stolen chapters, a 13 year old engrossed in the paperback aisle at Kroger or Meijer. It had a chokehold on my adolescent imagination. Bakker was already a childhood hero of mine; Raptor Red made me fantasize about collaborating with him on sequels, spin-offs, an extended dino fic universe. The very first story I sent to a professional sci-fi magazine, which I mailed with SASE to Asimov’s Science Fiction in the summer of 1998, was original-character fanfic of Raptor Red. Even when I was 18, long after Dinosaur Summer and other books had supplanted Raptor Red as my official “favorite,” I was active in Raptor Red roleplay groups on Yahoo. (For that matter, my Yahoo email address — which I used for everything email related until I was 25 or so — was a reference to this book.)
I don’t think I’ve reread it since I was 16 or 17. My tastes changed; I grew up. I always carried fondness for Red, but I likely always suspected a revisit could never live up to the memory. I’ve tried to get into it a handful of times over the last couple years, but the first chapter — awkward, amateurish, preciously titled “Raptor Attack!” — always made me cringe and put the book aside.
As befits a novel written by a scientist, Raptor Red doesn’t know what it wants to be. The prose would be at home in a children's chapter book, but the story is soaked in gore and revolves around mating; the book was marketed under an adult imprint to cash in on Jurassic mania. Parts of it read like Bakker was channeling a nature documentary, others like he was penning anthropomorphic action stars. His dinos tend to be more science fiction than science. Jurassic Park’s raptors were inspired by Bakker’s outspokenly “heretical” interpretation of theropods (with an assist from Gregory Paul, who lumped Deinonychus into the genus Velociraptor), so it’s no surprise that Red and her kin are implausibly brainy, slasher-flick-efficient pack hunters.
It’s a reminder that, even as a scientist, Bakker’s main skill has always been capturing the imagination of the public. The narrative, especially in the early going, constantly teeters between Red's adventures and Bakker's pocket sketches of then-current scientific concepts. The text is crammed with Discovery Channel-ready sound bites: “Darwinian blitzkrieg,” “Ginsu-knife claws,” “claws like Gurkha daggers,” “Darwinian Lizzie Bordens.”
And then there is the onomatopoeia. My god, so much onomatopoeia: “Ghurk-snurg-GULP.” “Sssnnnrrhht!” “GrrrrRRRRRRRRR — OOOP!” “HsssscreeeeEEEEEEECH!!!!”
Ah, the 1990s. Truly, this book would never have seen the light of day in any other decade.
Once I persevered through the opening cringe, the mix of childish and grisly became more endearing. Or, at any rate, my nostalgia neurons muffled my inner critic with vague fondness. I don’t think anyone would ever say, in retrospect, that this book is good. But we’ll probably never get a better-informed dinosaur novel. Bakker’s Early Cretaceous is evocative and detailed, even if the descriptions get a bit clunky. The chapters along the beach and in the snowy mountains, in particular, have been lodged in my imagination for almost three decades, percolating through my own dino stories. I'm happy I finally revisited Red and her pack.
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