Review of "Tulsa Triassic" by Ethan Richards

Score: 92/100 (9.2 out of 10)

Tulsa Triassic is a wildly entertaining science-fiction creature thriller by Ethan Richards, the modern maestro of literary creature features!

Par for the course with an Ethan Richards novel, Tulsa Triassic takes an idea that could very easily have become pure B-movie madness, throws a pack of prehistoric predators onto Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain, arms a group of police officers, and then does something we weren’t entirely expecting: it gives the whole thing a heart.

Yes, there are velociraptors. There is a Dimetrodon. There is an enormous Allosaurus that essentially becomes the tyrannosaur king of a temporal nightmare. People are bitten, crushed, dismembered, impaled, dissolved in dinosaur vomit, and generally subjected to the kind of workday that probably isn’t covered during orientation at the Tulsa Police Academy. But beneath all that blood, gunfire, prehistoric vegetation, tactical terminology, and glorious creature-feature insanity is a surprisingly sincere story about duty, fear, leadership, sacrifice, and what it actually means to serve another human being. That is where Tulsa Triassic becomes much more interesting than its premise suggests.

There is also this wonderfully strange tonal dissonance running through the novel. Richards is describing genuinely horrible things: mutilated bodies, severed tongues, fatal head wounds, people being crushed and eaten, and police officers watching their friends die. Yet all of this carnage begins on a place called Turkey Mountain, with a prehistoric predator that initially looks enough like an ordinary turkey that the first victim mistakes it for one. It is not even some gigantic Jurassic Park-sized raptor. It is basically a turkey-sized prehistoric nightmare with feathers, a scaled tail, a crocodilian-looking snout, and one very large killing claw.
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That creates a bizarre clash between the seriousness of what is happening and how ridiculous parts of it sound when described out loud. A police officer is brutally killed. His trainee is traumatized. Other officers desperately perform CPR. Tactical units are called. A murder scene is being processed. Yet, underneath all of that horror, there is the unavoidable realization that this all started because of the weirdest turkey anyone has ever seen on Turkey Mountain. Richards somehow gets both reactions out of us at once. We understand why the characters are horrified while also recognizing how completely absurd the situation sounds from the outside. That strange balance between sincerity and silliness becomes one of the defining features of the book.

The story begins on Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain, where paleontologist Dr. Benjamin Haze encounters what initially appears to be that very strange turkey. Strange becomes alarming when the bird has a scaled tail. Alarming becomes considerably worse when it possesses a crocodilian snout, dagger-like claws, and a rather unfriendly interest in eating him.

Haze’s death brings rookie Tulsa police officer Edwin Rudyard and his Field Training Officer, Val McMallen, to Turkey Mountain. Edwin is nearing the end of field training, and he is tired of it. He is impatient, cynical, eager to operate independently, and not particularly receptive to Val’s insistence that law enforcement is ultimately about service. Edwin believes bad people need to be punished, while Val offers something harder: people can be bad, but officers still have a duty to help them. Edwin rejects that idea, and the rest of the novel gradually forces him to understand it. That is probably the most successful part of Richards’s story.

The initial investigation quickly becomes catastrophic. Val is killed by the strange raptor-like creature, and Edwin discovers a scientist operating an impossible device on Turkey Mountain. The man, later identified as Saul Malkor, subscribes to an extreme environmental ideology that has metastasized into outright hatred of humanity. Rather than simply believing that mankind damages nature, he has come to see mankind itself as the contamination. His machine tears open time, and Edwin and members of Tulsa PD’s Special Operations Team suddenly find themselves trapped inside an altered Turkey Mountain filled with prehistoric plants and animals.

The handling of Val’s death is a good example of why the tonal dissonance works rather than simply making the book feel like a parody. The circumstances are absurd. The creature that kills him looks vaguely like a horrifying turkey. The setting is literally Turkey Mountain. Yet Richards treats Val’s death as emotionally real, and it remains important to Edwin long after the initial attack. The premise is goofy, but the consequences are not. That distinction allows Richards to have his B-movie fun without completely sacrificing emotional stakes.

Now, before dinosaur enthusiasts start sharpening their fossil picks and typing angry emails, Richards knows that these creatures did not all live together during the Triassic Period. That actually becomes part of the mystery. The characters gradually realize that they have not simply traveled backward into one specific prehistoric era. Different periods appear to have been pulled together into one enormous temporal disaster, allowing animals and plants separated by millions upon millions of years to suddenly occupy the same environment. In other words, Richards gets to raid practically the entire prehistoric toy box without pretending that a Velociraptor, Dimetrodon, Allosaurus, and everything else naturally lived side by side. Honestly, we respect the hustle.

This is also where Tulsa Triassic becomes especially interesting within Ethan Richards’s larger body of work. We have read a lot of Richards’s books over the years, and his greatest strength has always been fairly obvious: the man knows how to make a creature feature fun. He loves big monsters, guns, tactical teams, prehistoric creatures, strange conspiracies, and putting apparently capable human beings into situations that absolutely no amount of training could reasonably prepare them for. Some of his earlier books struggled to control all of those ingredients, particularly when enormous casts and multiple plot threads competed for attention, but his more recent work has shown a noticeable improvement in focus, characterization, atmosphere, and emotional investment.

Tulsa Triassic continues that progression because Edwin gives the story a strong center of gravity. He is not simply the unlucky police officer who happens to be standing closest to the dinosaurs when everything goes wrong. His relationship with Val matters, his attitude toward police work matters, his mistakes matter, and the people dying around him increasingly matter as well. Richards has always been willing to kill characters with the enthusiasm of a horror-movie director who just discovered that the special-effects budget got doubled, but there is a major difference between watching anonymous monster food disappear and understanding what a death means to the people left behind.

One of the smartest decisions in the novel comes when the officers discover what appears to be a way back to normal Tulsa. They could leave the temporal nightmare and save themselves, but they realize civilians might still be trapped somewhere on Turkey Mountain. Instead of escaping, they turn around and go looking for them. That decision tells us almost everything we need to know about the heart of the book. These characters are frightened, their technology is failing, they do not understand the environment around them, enormous prehistoric animals are roaming nearby, and one of their own has already been brutally killed. None of that changes the fact that somebody might need help.

Eventually, the officers find a young girl named Joddie Ross, and her presence gives the second half of the novel a much more personal sense of urgency. The mission is no longer about some vague concept of rescuing civilians. There is a child standing right in front of them, depending on these people to get her home. That makes everything that follows more effective, especially when characters begin sacrificing themselves to protect her.

Jeremy Spencers’s death is one of the clearest examples. Richards does not need an enormous philosophical speech about courage or sacrifice when Jeremy physically puts himself between Joddie and an Allosaurus. The action already tells us who he is and what he values. That is something Richards has improved at considerably over time, and we think he is strongest when he trusts scenes like this enough to let them speak for themselves.

We made a similar observation while reviewing Maryland Sasquatch Massacre. That book showed tremendous improvement in characterization, but there were still scenes where the emotion felt slightly overplayed, almost like adding extra-sad violin music to something that was already sad enough on its own. Tulsa Triassic occasionally has the same tendency to explain or reiterate an emotion after the scene has already communicated it. Richards does not always need to remind us repeatedly that the characters are scared or that the situation is impossible. There is an Allosaurus outside. We figured out the scary part.

Speaking of the Allosaurus, the creature itself is one of the best things in the book. Richards has become surprisingly good at remembering that prehistoric animals are exactly that: animals. They are not demons or supernatural serial killers. They eat, hunt, defend territory, react to threats, and exist according to biological drives that have absolutely nothing to do with whether the nearby humans consider themselves the protagonists.

This was one of the strongest aspects of Terror in Big Bend, where the Gorgon behaved less like a traditional movie monster and more like a living predator with recognizable instincts, habits, and even an attachment to its mate. Richards has continued developing that approach, and the Allosaurus in Tulsa Triassic may be one of his better examples. The novel establishes the animal’s power before constantly throwing it into combat. Other creatures react to it, the environment seems to change around it, and the characters discover evidence of its presence long before every encounter turns into a gunfight.

One of our favorite choices is that when the officers finally confront the Allosaurus, it does not immediately attack them. It watches them, assesses them, and leaves. That simple restraint is considerably more effective than another immediate roaring, biting, crashing monster sequence because it establishes the animal’s dominance without forcing it to constantly prove how dangerous it is. This creature knows where it stands in the food chain.

Another surprisingly thoughtful element involves the way the officers mentally process what they are seeing. At one point, they are forced to stop treating the Allosaurus like some indescribable horror and actually identify it. They give the thing a name and put it into a category their minds can understand. Richards explored something very similar in Jurassic Swamp, where characters continued calling Rougarou an “alligator” because people naturally reach for familiar labels when confronted with something unfamiliar.

Tulsa Triassic pushes that idea a little further. Naming the monster does not make it smaller or less dangerous, but it gives the characters something mentally concrete to work with. They are no longer dealing with some unknowable evil from beyond reality; they are dealing with an Allosaurus. Granted, it is still an Allosaurus capable of biting them in half, but progress is progress.

That idea also complements the book’s police-procedural structure. Tulsa Triassic is divided using emergency-response terminology involving concepts like detection, incident recognition, response operations, and contingency operations. The entire novel is essentially about trained professionals trying to impose procedure on something that makes procedure almost meaningless. Police officers know how to secure a scene, communicate over the radio, establish fields of fire, administer first aid, search terrain, track suspects, and identify threats. Nobody covered Dimetrodons at the academy.

That gives the story a distinctive flavor compared with a standard group of tourists getting chased through the jungle. These characters constantly observe, adapt, communicate, and attempt to apply whatever parts of their training remain useful. Sometimes the result is serious and surprisingly technical. Other times, it becomes exactly the sort of ridiculous creature-feature spectacle we have come to expect from Ethan Richards, and thankfully the book never completely loses that side of itself.

There has always been a line somewhere between genuine horror and a Syfy Channel movie playing at 1:00 in the morning, and Richards has spent years joyfully driving back and forth across it. Tulsa Triassic is more emotionally grounded than some of his earlier work, but it still contains plenty of guns, prehistoric monsters, gruesome injuries, tactical conversations about fighting animals that have been extinct for millions of years, and one death involving the digestive system of an Allosaurus that made us realize we had apparently never spent enough time considering the offensive capabilities of dinosaur vomit. Thank you for that, Ethan. We could have happily gone our entire lives without thinking about it.

Something else that deserves particular attention is Richards’s writing itself, because the prose contributes significantly to the tension and urgency of the story. Tulsa Triassic is frequently written in short, sharp bursts. Richards uses brief sentences, fragments, abrupt transitions, repeated words, and sudden interruptions to mimic the way Edwin processes danger under extreme stress. When something incomprehensible happens, Edwin does not sit around composing a beautiful paragraph about it. His thoughts fracture. He notices one thing, then another, then something worse. Before confronting Malkor, for example, his assessment of the situation collapses into the blunt realization that there is no perimeter, no backup, and no time. Elsewhere, when objects begin behaving impossibly around the temporal device, the prose becomes similarly stripped down and immediate.

That style works extremely well for a book like this. The clipped rhythm creates speed and abruptness, particularly during attacks, discoveries, and moments when Edwin has only seconds to understand what he is seeing. It also suits Edwin’s perspective as a police officer trained to observe, identify, and respond. He often thinks in pieces because he is receiving information in pieces, and Richards’s prose reflects that. Even when the language is simple, there is a kinetic quality to it that keeps the book moving and gives many scenes a genuine sense of immediacy.

And, wow, this writing is lightyears better than what we encountered in some of Richards’s earliest books. When we reviewed The Dark Elf of Oklahoma, we noted that Richards could occasionally produce colorful, sophisticated writing, but the story was frequently distracted by excessive detail, a scattered structure, and too many characters and locations competing for the reader’s attention. The difference here is enormous. Richards is much better at directing our attention toward what matters in a scene, controlling the pace, and using the rhythm of the prose to support the action rather than allowing the writing to wander all over Oklahoma along with the plot.

Unfortunately, Richards sometimes leans so heavily on that short, abrupt style that one of the book’s greatest strengths becomes a weakness. When nearly every frightening or dramatic moment is communicated through fragments, repetition, physical reactions, dramatic pauses, and sudden corrections, the technique gradually loses some of its force. If everything is urgent, eventually nothing feels uniquely urgent. The effect can become a little cloying, especially when an emotion or reaction has already been made perfectly obvious by what is happening in the scene.

The most conspicuous example is the phrase “I shuddered.” Richards really, really likes making poor Edwin shudder. We counted the exact phrase seven times, and that does not include variations involving trembling, shaking, quaking, tightening, or other physical reactions. The funniest instance comes relatively early, when Edwin looks at Haze’s mutilated body, shudders at the sight of his severed tongue, and then, almost immediately afterward, we get another standalone “I shuddered.” After a while, we started thinking: Edwin, buddy, you’re going to shudder yourself right off Turkey Mountain.

That is far from the only repeated construction. Edwin’s stomach tightens at least six times, while Richards also repeatedly returns to trembling hands, shaking knees, staring in disbelief, pounding or hammering hearts and pulses, tightening throats, and variations of “I felt” to communicate Edwin’s emotional state. None of those descriptions is bad individually, and several are quite effective. The problem is accumulation. We already understand that Edwin is terrified when he is standing near a prehistoric predator that could remove half his body with one bite. His stomach does not necessarily need to tighten again to convince us.

This is probably where the next stage of Richards’s development as a writer lies: trusting his own scenes more. He has become considerably better at creating suspense, controlling action, establishing atmosphere, and giving his characters emotional consequences. That means he can afford to pull back occasionally. If an Allosaurus emerges from the trees, Richards has already done the difficult work. We know what the animal can do, we care about the people standing in front of it, and we understand the danger. Edwin’s knees do not also have to shake while his stomach tightens and his pulse pounds before he shudders.

A stricter line edit could remove a noticeable amount of that repetition and probably make the novel more intense rather than less intense. The short, sharp prose itself is not the problem. In fact, it is one of the reasons Tulsa Triassic moves as well as it does. Richards simply reaches for the same effective tools too often. Used selectively, those fragments and abrupt sentences hit like punches. Used constantly, the reader eventually starts bracing for the next one.

There is also quite a bit of exposition. Earp Latrell in particular occasionally becomes something of a walking encyclopedia, and although we appreciate giving different members of the team different areas of expertise, there are moments when his explanations become long enough that we found ourselves thinking, “Earp, buddy, we appreciate the science lesson, but there is a dinosaur over there.” Thankfully, the book occasionally seems aware of this tendency and lets the other characters react accordingly.

Saul Malkor is another area where we wanted slightly more. His philosophy works well as a thematic counterweight to the officers because his environmentalism has curdled into hatred of humanity itself. Saul thinks in terms of mankind as a species and condemns humanity collectively, while the officers repeatedly think in terms of individual people who need help. Saul sees humanity and judges it; the officers see Joddie. That contrast gives the conflict more substance than a conventional evil-scientist story.

At the same time, Saul occasionally feels more like a philosophy wearing a lab coat than a fully developed human being. We understand what he believes and what he wants, but we would have liked to understand more about the person who became this man. Giving Saul a little more psychological specificity could have made the ideological conflict even stronger.
The supporting cast can also become crowded at times. Richards has improved enormously in this area since his earlier books, but old habits occasionally poke their heads out when several tactical characters enter the story in relatively quick succession. It takes some time to distinguish everyone. The difference is that most of them eventually develop identifiable personalities and relationships, which is a substantial improvement over some of the more interchangeable ensembles in Richards’s earlier work.

Colt Skinner is probably our favorite. He is experienced, capable, religious, philosophical, occasionally funny, and stubbornly committed to doing what he believes an officer is supposed to do. More importantly, he becomes another mentor figure for Edwin after Val’s death. Colt does not simply explain duty to Edwin; he demonstrates it through his actions, which is why his eventual death hurts.

By the climax, nearly every experienced officer around Edwin has taught him something through sacrifice. Jeremy dies protecting Joddie. Earp keeps fighting despite the horror around him. Colt continues leading when escaping would be easier. Edwin, who began the novel impatient to finish field training and operate independently, eventually becomes the person willing to stand between Joddie and the monster himself. That progression gives the novel a real character arc rather than merely a sequence of increasingly elaborate creature attacks.

The final confrontation with the Allosaurus is appropriately brutal. Edwin loses his left hand, yet the creature keeps attacking and Edwin keeps fighting. He eventually manages to kill it at extremely close range, but even that does not end the disaster. Saul kills Colt, Edwin kills Saul, the temporal machinery begins collapsing, and modern Tulsa starts returning around Edwin and Joddie.

Richards could easily have ended the story there. Edwin is mutilated, exhausted, traumatized, surrounded by dead friends, and probably entitled to several lifetimes of paid administrative leave. Instead, Richards decides that what this poor man really needs is one more prehistoric monster. A gigantic Quetzalcoatlus appears over modern Tulsa carrying a screaming woman. Of course it does.

What makes the ending work is Edwin’s reaction. He picks up the shotgun again because somebody needs help, and that brings the story all the way back to Val McMallen. The Edwin Rudyard at the beginning of Tulsa Triassic thinks police work is primarily about catching and punishing bad people. The Edwin Rudyard at the end understands something much harder: sometimes somebody needs help, so you go. You go when you are frightened, exhausted, injured, and completely outmatched because that responsibility does not disappear merely because answering it is difficult. His shift is not over, and that is the heart hiding underneath all the dinosaurs.

We have watched Ethan Richards grow tremendously as a writer over the years. Kaw Lake showed how incredibly fun his monster stories could be. Maryland Sasquatch Massacre demonstrated a major improvement in characterization. Beast of Eufaula Lake showed how much stronger his prose, atmosphere, and suspense had become, while Jurassic Swamp continued developing the more grounded and human side of Richards’s creature-feature formula.

Tulsa Triassic feels like another step in that continuing evolution. It is not Richards’s most polished book, and we still think the prose could be tighter, some exposition could be trimmed, repeated physical reactions could be substantially reduced, and certain emotional or thematic ideas could be trusted to speak for themselves rather than being repeatedly emphasized. Still, comparing the writing here with some of Richards’s earliest work is almost like comparing two different authors. The sharpness, pacing, control, characterization, and confidence are all considerably stronger, even when Richards occasionally becomes a victim of his own stylistic habits.

Ultimately, this may be one of Richards’s better examples of combining the two sides of his writing: the Ethan Richards who loves dinosaurs, shotguns, gore, tactical jargon, and unabashed B-movie insanity, and the increasingly confident storyteller who understands that none of those things mean very much unless readers care about the poor people desperately trying not to get eaten. Ethan Richards has always known how to make monsters fun. What has become increasingly apparent over the years is that he has gotten much better at making the people running from them matter too, and Tulsa Triassic is another strong example of that growth.

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