Las Vegas Weekly

Been there, destroyed that

The primary impact from Preston’s latest thriller is, unfortunately, déjà vu

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: An otherworldly comet-like flash lights up the sky one night on the Maine seacoast. A college dropout, convinced she saw a meteor crash, drags her best girlfriend on a hunt for the wreckage, knowing anything meteor-related goes for big bucks on eBay. Over in California, a young scientist at the National Propulsion Facility receives a hard drive from his recently murdered mentor, only he can’t make sense of its strange data, much less the corporate complacency of his higher-uppers. Meanwhile, a CIA operative receives orders from the White House to go to Cambodia and get the skinny on America’s weirdest new contraband—radioactive gems (or “honeys,” as they’re known on the street)—which presidential advisors fear may be utilized by terrorists. But these little rocks come from Mars, where they’ve activated a combustible crater that will destroy the Earth in two-and-a-half days. As Madonna and Justin Timberlake might say, “We’ve only got 60 hours to save the world!”

So goes the setup of Douglas Preston’s latest bestseller, Impact, which is not to be confused with the 1998 film Deep Impact or Armageddon, that year’s other killer-comet blockbuster, nor movies-of-the-week such as Comet Impact or Super Comet: After the Impact. In other words, yes, you have heard all of this before. If not, you’ve clearly taken an oath of highbrow cultural pursuits and the avoidance of anything created by Roland Emmerich.

Okay, the Emmerich reference isn’t really fair. Preston’s no Hollywood hack but a smart, well-researched author who walks the walk before writing about or discussing it in great length. For his nonfiction book Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest, he rode a thousand miles on horseback (!!) in order to retrace the path Francisco Vasquez de Coronado took in 1541 during his unsuccessful search for gold. He’s marched with soldiers deep into the Cambodian jungle, walked inside lost Angkor temples, opened Egyptian tombs that have been sealed for 3,000 years. The dude’s, like, a real-life Indiana Jones.

The Details

Impact

Douglas Preston.

Forge Books, $26

Amazon: Impact

And yet, while Preston’s obviously skilled when it comes to structuring an engaging narrative, he still seems like he could benefit from a night class or two on plot nuance and character development. Two of Impact’s interconnected storylines announced their arcs a little too immediately. We’ve only known Mark Corso, the young scientist, for a paragraph before learning of his mentor’s “freakish murder” and then—boom!—here comes that mysterious hard drive. Wyman Ford, the CIA operative (and recurring Preston character), goes from turning down the Cambodia assignment to asking “what’s my cover?” in less than half a page. Thanks to the concern of the president’s science advisor (“It does not do service to your wife’s memory to keep running from your past”), we also know Ford must defuse the ticking bomb in his conscience as well as the one on Mars.

The tale of Abbey, the college dropout, is more engaging, since Preston takes a little more time introducing her (two short chapters!) before setting her story in motion. Still, her dramatic DNA is repeatedly emphasized with bright, flashing lights. In response to her father grousing about her aborted college education (“When are you going to pull yourself together?”), Abbey wonders, “Why had she been adopted by white people in Maine, the whitest state in the union, in a town where everyone was white?” Just before the meteor touches down, Abbey’s friend Jackie ponders the stars (“Think there’s life up there?”), and just when you think the two are like Thelma and Louise, someone says, “Well lookee here. If it ain’t Thelma and Louise.”

As the stories progress, the narrative flits from chapter to chapter, character to character so fast and frequently you can almost hear the time and location type across the corner of the screen like in so many Hollywood thrillers, and while Preston does have a knack for presenting scientific matters that sound neither hokey nor showy, some action scenes are a wee bit far-fetched, and the ending definitely works best if read from a “suspension of disbelief” perspective.

Impact debuted at No. 4 on the New York Times bestseller list on January 15, two days after the earthquake in Haiti. The whole “something huge is zooming through space and it’s headed straight for us” story still has mass appeal, but the concept of an outside force causing one big boom is starting to sound like a nice alternative to what the Earth has been doing to itself lately.