Book review: The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2017 was The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston.  Preston (with his frequent collaborator Lincoln Child) writes fictional thrillers; unfortunately, this book is, as the subtitle proclaims, a true story, which means that most of the author's talent at building excitement and suspense ultimately falls flat. 

Preston was invited along as a journalist on a team of scientists searching for the legendary White City in Honduras, a rumored lost city of treasures in the Honduran jungle.  Like all the best lost cities, this one has a curse: that anyone who finds it will never return, or, depending on which version of the legend you hear, that anyone who enters impiously will fall ill and die.  Various explorers had searched for it over the years since the Spanish conquistadors arrived in central America; one American even claimed to have found it, to great publicity and acclaim, although it turned out to be a hoax.

Despite the long failure to uncover the city, Preston's group hoped to use new technology to locate the ruin.  The dangers they faced in doing so were straight out of one of Preston's books: deadly snakes, wild animals, and inhospitable terrain.  Yet, unlike any good thriller, the team doesn't die one by one.  And, unlike Howard Carter's expedition, the curse can't even be said to claim any of them.  Many of them do come down with an infectious disease from insect bites, but modern medicine is a match for it.

The book suffers from false advertising.  The marketing is full of danger and curses, but this is, in the end, not a thriller.  It is, perhaps, a demythologization of a thriller: explaining signs and symptoms that, in the past, would have been interpreted as a terrible curse but which modern science merely shrugs at.  If Preston had approached the story in a less hyperbolic manner, it could have been an interesting read about the discovery of a long-lost pre-Columbian city, but set up so breathlessly as a thriller, it necessarily falls flat.