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I dream about monsters even out here. I guess I'll always dream of monsters now. Until I'm too dead to dream.
I've always had bizarre and incoherent childhood fantasies. I had my dinosaur phase like every other kid, but my daydreams were more like Super Adventure Island meets G.I Joe than your typical Jurassic Park-fueled visions. I don't know what to make of them, really. They just existed at some point in my life and now live in a dark and quiet part of my memory. I like to think my childhood doesn't define me. My early dinosaur fantasies washed ashore last week though after I read Nicholas Day's bizarro novella NECROSAURUS REX. That damned dinosaur story gave me existential nightmares for a couple nights and had me reevaluating the meaning of every detail of my upbringing.
What can I say? I get emotional at all the wrong things.
It's simple. Martin is a janitor at a hi-tech scientific facility working on time travel technology. An unwanted child, Martin grew up all crooked and prey to the cruelty of privileged kids and it didn't change once he became an adult. He should've never been sent back to the past. Martin's a weirdo, but he's pretty smart though and requested to be sent back to two intoxicated scientists during a celebration at the facility. They didn't yet have control of their technology, didn't know what they were exactly doing with it, yet Martin got his wish and was sent back the time of dinosaurs and what came back transcends any notion of reality as we know it. Martin became all sorts of things, but he mostly became a scary motherfucker.
I'm not exactly sure what NECROSAURUS REX is about, to tell you the truth. There's a part that's about human nature not catching up to progress. The unwitting speculation of author Nicholas Day here is that the apocalypse will be created by human incompetency and irresponsibility, and not war. That Peter's principle will cause the end of the world, if you will. The other part of NECROSAURUS REX, about Martin's transformation into a millenial monster, is a lot more cryptic albeit tremendously well-written. It's sort of an animal apocrypha about the concept of alienation in the time-space continuum. I'm sure it doesn't make any sense reading about it like this, but think about it like a man reconnecting with his true inner self, which is 14 million years in the past.
NECROSAURUS REX is a bold one-sitting read that eschews the conventions of traditional storytelling, especially in the pulp-ish paradigm within which it operates. Think of it as if David Lynch directed a season of Lost, co-written by Damon Lindelof, Soren Kierkegaard and Don Pendleton. It's really weird, but it's cohesive and it doesn't overstay its welcome. It shines a whole new light on my dinosaur wars childhood fantasies. Were they fueled by rabid sessions of Super Mario gaming too early in life or was I cheated by space-time continuum out of inventing the greatest video game ever made? Am I alienated or simply an anachronism? NECROSAURUS REX is a pleasant narrative oddity and an existential nightmare meant only for those who wish to challenge themselves.