REVIEW: Kronos

Author: Jeremy Robinson

Variance Publishing, 2009

Best ebook deal: Kindle only (free audiobook version available from Podiobooks)

I took a rather arduous journey to Virginia earlier in the month (my first and last experience with Greyhound), and decided on a whim to read a couple of cheap mass-markets on the way. Kronos was one of those selections. I chose it because its cover has a big sea monster with huge teeth about to chomp a scuba diver–see for yourself, above right.

So right away (after an odd almost-rape scene that had nothing to do with the rest of the book and took place, supposedly, in a parking garage I know well in Portsmouth, NH) when protagonist and Navy SEAL turned oceanographer Dr. Atticus Young and his distant teenaged daughter decide to bond through scuba diving, I was pretty psyched for some carnage. Instead, this big vicious spear-toothed sea monster gulps her whole. Atticus obviously assumes her dead, but Robinson does a pretty poor job of playing his hand close to his chest.

Hell-bent on revenge, Atticus goes from Steve Irwin to Stephen Segal in a mere few pages. He teams up with Trevor Manfred “the fifth richest man in the world” who wants to hunt the beast. Trevor is an effeminate weirdo whose two passions in life are drinking Sam Adams at noon and collecting priceless artifacts such as a moai statue, which he keeps in his high-tech yacht vault. Trevor’s yacht also has torpedoes, chain guns, and even a thermo-nuclear device (yeah) and he wants the creature’s head for a trophy; Atticus wants revenge. It makes Live Free or Die Hard look creative.

Things really get ugly when Robinson tries to introduce a religious component. I could explain what he does, but I’ll make it as easy as Robinson did to get the angle: Atticus’s daughter, who was swallowed whole by the giant sea creature, was named Gionna (pronounced, I presume, like Jonah). Want to guess now if she’s still alive?

All this would be permissible within the realm of schlocky fiction except for one glaring and unforgivable fault. The sea creature isn’t really the bad guy. Kind of like when the Godzilla movies transitioned from wanton destruction by a rampaging atomic abomination to space battles on Mars over the fate of the Earth held between monsters and alien robots, the whole premise is pretty lame. Who knows why the creature has those big teeth when his entire point of its existence is to keep a human in his belly for a certain period of time before releasing that person and renewing man’s faith in God?

He should eat people, violently, like a great white the size of a blue whale. Or he should be Leviathan rather than Kronos. Robinson takes the time to describe the two creatures, but why he chose the sissy one I cannot fathom. Atticus and Manfred both commit a lot of killing while the creature swims around peacefully with a girl in its gullet, making them each bigger monsters than the sea monster. Maybe that’s what Robinson’s point was. However books like this should have mayhem, not moral agendas. Do yourself a favor and don’t read this garbage.

Other books: I really don’t have much experience with genre books, but read Moby Dick (Melville) because it too takes place on a ship chasing a sea beast and it too mixes some adventure with a whole punch of preachiness. Melville’s book however is brilliant and far more entertaining. Also, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Verne) is a much cooler sea monster story.