Museum was such a hit—surely its author shared some of the feelings I did with regard to natural history museums. And so we come to the great novel of animated monsters of lost eras. No, not Jurassic Park, wonderful and thrilling though it was. I refer to the great novel of an animated monster loose in the American Museum of Natural History, Relic. Relic (1995) was the first novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, their first major best-seller in a long series of similarly gripping adventures that feature a nicely weird protagonist, FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast. The plots combine a bit of Indiana Jones with a lot of Michael Crichton. They are genuinely scary pageturners, well-written though without literary pretense, and intelligent enough to keep you interested. Relic is a dark thriller set inside New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where Preston once worked. Preston publishes both fiction and non-fiction (his first book, Dinosaurs in the Attic, was about life inside the Natural History Museum), and has worked as a scientist for many years, coming to the realm of best-selling thrillers rather late in his career. The Natural History Museum is such a lush, shadowy place to set a thriller-cum-horror novel (especially for a reader like me) that Preston and Child could hardly have gone wrong, and they did not. They produced a faultless novel, every bit as good as Jurassic Park, which gained more traction largely because it was made into a top-level movie, whereas the film version of Relic is very different from the book, and pales in comparison to it. In Relic, an expedition to South America disappears, but not before a crate containing items collected in the wild jungles is sent back to the Natural History Museum. There it sits, in storage, forgotten and uncatalogued. Fast forward to a horrific murder inside the museum, one that baffles police. The museum is locked down, and the other-worldly staff of scientists (many based on real people) are interviewed as possible suspects, or future victims. The museum tries to stay open in anticipation of a big, money-making exhibit, and more murders follow. It gives nothing away that the book covers do not to say that the villain turns out to be related to a relic sent back by the lost expedition. A living monster roaming the dark halls of the museum, weaving in and out of the dead, skeletal, and stuffed creatures displayed there, provides a perfect union of genre and setting. I’ve re-read Relic many times, enjoying the creepiness inherent in each pass through this wonderful, unpretentious, wildly effective book. It is a master class in how to interweave place and plot, a union which we don’t often consider, as few books are so location-bound, like a set for a play. Aside from an opening scene in the Amazon, Relic barely strays from the noose-tight walls of the Natural History Museum. It does not need to. It taps into my childhood nightmares in a way that makes it feel as though it were written just for me. But I have a feeling that my dark museum visions are shared by a good many others, drawn to glassed-in creatures with a combination of fear and fascination. Now writing my own trapped horror novel, I find that I refer back to Relic constantly. It was a particular thrill, therefore, to interview Douglas Preston for a series I edit for The Daily Beast, called “How I Write.” Every week I interview a different fellow writer about the writing life.
34