{ "item_title" : "The Cryptic Reflex", "item_author" : [" P. K. Garrison "], "item_description" : "A John Huston noir in which Indiana Jones finds himself in Jurassic Park. Irresistible. - Curtis White, author of The Science Delusion and We Robots Juxtapositions of the ancient and modern move the reader through time and space in the manner of a ripping good yarn - Eckhard Gerdes, author of The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot and The Land of Lost Simulacra Venture into an exotic realm of impossible chimeras, alien terrains and eccentric characters in this mythical quest for the legendary Savage of Socotra, a terrifying 55-foot, 3,000-pound cobra; bigger even than the prehistoric Titanoboa, the snake is rumored capable of bringing down a large goat or even a man with its hypnotic stare and hyper-toxic venom before devouring its prey whole. Recent biology grad Kendall Freegard and a team of cryptozoologists travel to the remote isle of Socotra for the adventure of a lifetime, scouring gloomy caves, limestone citadels, ocean reefs and treacherous mountains in search of bizarre creatures as well as their own lost souls. Along the way, during a journey filled largely with false starts, misidentifications and red herrings, Professor Roop, the team's leader, regales the group with fabulous stories of sentient viruses, living dinosaurs, alien mummies and shape-shifting spirits, causing Kendall to question the professor's veracity. Her growing uneasiness-her sense that nothing is quite as it seems-generates a nagging internal conflict that also helps create a second, imaginary Socotra under which the real island breathes with an almost intolerable gravity. Determined at all costs to discover his prized cryptid, however, Professor Roop leads his ragtag crew, inch by remarkable inch, toward a climax that proves anything but expected. A little earthquake of a novel whose aftershocks reverberate long after the last word is registered, Garrison's homage to the great adventure writers (Verne, Doyle, Wells, et al.), unlike the postmodern epics of Pynchon, DeLillo and Wallace, carves out a smaller, metamodern niche from the raw material of his literary predecessors. The Cryptic Reflex reveals its true magnitude as an encyclopedic sci-fi in the vein of Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires, with its puzzle of speculative science, shifting zeitgeists and mystifying phenomena.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/899/348/9798993486208_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "25.00", "online_price" : "25.00", "our_price" : "25.00", "club_price" : "25.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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