Carnosaur

by Harry Adam Knight

A series of unexplained deaths in a rural English community prompts Pascal and Jenny, two local reporters, to investigate the possibility that a living dinosaur was responsible

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Dinosaurs, Fiction, Thriller, Fantasy, Pulp

210 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Pseudonym of John Brosnan

John Raymond Brosnan was an Australian writer of both fiction and non-fiction works based around the fantasy and science fiction genres. He was born in Perth, Western Australia, and died in South Harrow, London, from acute pancreatitis. He sometimes published under the pseudonyms Harry Adam Knight, Simon Ian Childer (both sometimes used together with Leroy Kettle), James Blackstone (used together with John Baxter), and John Raymond. Three not very successful movies were based on his novels–Beyond Bedlam (aka Nightscare), Proteus (based on Slimer), and Carnosaur. In addition to science fiction, he also wrote a number of books about cinema and was a regular columnist with the popular UK magazine Starburst.

Reviews

[Grady Hendrix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jurassic Park for people who like to drink beer.

[Char · Rating 4 out of 5]

A creature feature from the 80’s, before Jurassic Park. With Carnosaur you CAN judge the book by its cover.
It’s a bunch of fun with a bunch of horrible people and they all get what’s coming to them. (With a bit of 80’s chauvinism typical of the time.) Lots of gore and action and dino chomping. Fun!
🦖🦖🦖🦖

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly run-of-the-mill creature feature-type book, for the most part, although I really liked the mad scientist who “planned to let his dinosaurs loose across the world. In the Australian outback, Africa, places like that, so they’ll be ready to take over the planet again after the Third World War.” Yeah. That was a fun little dude. I only wish there had been a bit more CARN-age.

[Plagued by Visions · Rating 3 out of 5]

BIG DINO GO CHOMP.

[Lizz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t write reviews.

And I didn’t know until quite recently that Harry Adam Knight (or HAK, love it!) was really Josh Brosnan. This pseudonym usually indicated Bronsan paired with Leroy Kettle, however Carnosaur was a solo effort. To read, it was no effort at all; quite the contrary, it was sheer delight.

Did I mention that this book has everything? It has everything. Brosnan nailed the characters, especially the ones he killed off in a few paragraphs. There’s gore and insanity, carnage and narcissism, death and secrets, horror and women drivers. Everything.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ferocious predators, which should have long been extinct, break free from their confines and go on the hunt in search of prey. No human, caged chicken, or family pet is safe! No, this isn’t a Jurassic Park inspired spin-off, Carnosaur (1984) by Aussie author John Brosnan (writing as Harry Adam Knight), is on a different level of pulp-tastic horror.

Published some six years prior to Michael Crichton’s well known Dino-blood splatter romp, Carnosaur explores the test tube dino element much like Jurassic Park did, however the science is generally left to the footnotes as this story is all about killing off characters in the most gruesome way possible with little care for plausibility – it’s all part of the fun.

David Pascal, a journalist at a small town rag is the lead character who sniffs a good story from the smell permeating from the massacred chicken inside their demolished coup and smushed human bodies. He comes across as a bit of a wimp and has a tendency to whinge about everything in life, namely his ex with whom he ended the relationship with because she was destined to be more successful than him and he couldn’t possible stand that! Not to let his whinging ways deter him, David can sense that there’s something not right about the death and destruction and uses his powers of deduction to weasel his way into the secure compound of the resident bad guy, thanks mostly to catching the eye of the cougar nympho wife of said bay guy.

From that point forward, it’s all about survival of the fittest (or survival of those with the biggest guns) as the inevitable dinosaur escape ensures rendered then modern dominant species a little less dominant…

Carnosaur is a blast, chock block full of fun and inventive scenes of destruction which leave nothing to the imagination and with just enough tension to make you think for a split second the characters actually stand a chance against the supposedly extinct reptiles. The only downside to Carnosaur is that a sequel wasn’t published – there’s certainly more room for mayhem; sadly with the author having passed away sometime, the story starts and ends here.

[Jon Von · Rating 3 out of 5]

What can be said about Carnosaur? It's the story of a complete f-king creep of a journalist who investigates the "private zoo" of a local eccentric millionaire after a mysterious animal gets loose and kills a couple of people, leading to an action-filled dinosaur massacre. It's a silly pulp horror novel, that's well-executed in a lot of ways. It's weirdly prescient of Jurassic Park and an influence on the dino horror zeitgeist. But it's also about a huge jerk who treats women like dirt, and it's sort of a comedy about what an asshole he is. It's trashy, but dang it if it doesn't deliver bloody (not) velociraptor action!

[Seanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an unsung classic of the dinosaur horror genre, and I find it tragic that more people don't know who Harry Knight is. Especially considering the plagiarism case against Michael Crichton for the similarities to Jurassic Park. And no, the book has nothing to do with the movie.

[Will Errickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is pulp animal-attack horror done right: mean, nasty, brutish, and short. Gentle reader, you won't be disappointed. Mad scientist loves having his homemade dinosaurs in his private zoo, but when they get loose in an English village, look out: CARNOSAUR serves up the dino-grue that satisfies. Behold: Tarbosaurus, a T. Rex in everything but name, wreaks delightful havoc wherever it goes; Deinonychus, with its scythe-clawed foot that it uses like a prehistoric exponent of Kung-Fu, guts hapless farmers and other locals from neck to groin; and a plesiosaur joins a boating party that none of the invitees will soon forget. Did Michael Crichton read this and get an idea? Because the two are weirdly similar. Recommended!

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me so long because the middle dragged on and it was hard to pick up again. If Michael Crichton was inspired by this early novel, well, he did a much much better job. This dinosaur book was okay but had too much sex and human drama for me.

[James Steele · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is about a man who clones dinosaurs from preserved genetic material, raises them in a zoo and plans to repopulate the world. No, it’s not a rip-off of Jurassic Park. This book was published in the 1980's, nearly ten years prior to Crichton’s book! It’s as if Crichton read it, recognized the potential for the concept, and wrote a better version with updated science, which ensured this book vanished into obscurity.

Not that Carnosaur deserves remembering. It reads like a b-movie. The characters are shallow, the dialogue is bad, and the dinosaurs, as well as all other animals, are portrayed as mindless monsters that just run around killing people. The only plot element is that unsuspecting bystanders get eaten left and right.

This makes the book very easy to put down, because monster movies all end the same: the heroes survive and have sex, the monsters are defeated but there’s always one or two that survive and the nightmare will live again! Jurassic Park at least feels more like science, even though it’s a standard monster movie at its core as well.

You gotta respect Carnosaur for being the original, but that’s all it deserves.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the dinosaurs. They made me happy.
If only they could get rid of the main character.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first book by Knight was Slimer, which I loved, and I was hoping for another killer read here. Carnosaur is a delightfully pulpy read, but not on par with Slimer. The big backstory on this concerns how it was published years before Jurassic Park and has a very similar theme-- dinosaurs 'resurrected' via DNA cloning that get out of control. From what I remember of Jurassic Park however, this is far pulpier and to be honest, even more fun.

Our main protagonist, Pascal, works as a reporter for a small rag in Warchester, near Cambridge. Nothing happens in Warchester and he is dying to move on to a bigger paper. One day, however, something gets loose from the private zoo of rich and eccentric Sir Darren Penward and kills several people and Pascal happens upon the scene along with the local cops. Penward issues a statement shortly have they recaptured the beast (supposedly a tiger) and uses his influence to hush up the matter. Nonetheless, a little boy, the only survivor of one household, tells Pascal that the beast was actually a dinosaur.

Pascal smells a big story here, but has trouble getting any information about Penward and his zoo. Hence, we follow along in his trials and tribulations, including an affair with Penward's wife, until his curiosity is finally satisfied. Maybe he should not have been so curious! Sir Penward makes a great villain; amoral to say the least and uses his money to get what he wants. His dream is to give the planet back to the dinosaurs and he has a plan! Will Pascal, along with some help from his ex-girlfriend Jenny be able to stop his mad scheme? Carnosaur has some pacing issues and Pascal is a bit of a cad, making him hard to root for (never call your girlfriend a 'stupid bitch'!). When the foo goes down this is lots of fun, but it takes some going to get there. 3.5 toothy stars!!

[Dan Readerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars may seem like quite a high rating for this book. But allow me to explain:

It gets three stars just for fulfilling a very specific craving of mine: modern day dinosaur horror, a frightfully underdeveloped genre.

In that regard I expected this book to be comparable to trashy fast food, bad but satisfying a specific desire. Yet, to my surprise, it was much better than that. I have not read any other books by the author, but he is certainly not a total hack. Carnosaur is competently crafted, well structured, very well paced and fun. For that the rating gets raised to four stars.

Lastly, it was ahead of its time and deserves some respect for that. I do not know if Michael Crichton read this book before writing Jurassic Park, but there are definite similarities, both in terms of general concepts as well as specific details. Carnosaur was surprisingly well research and ahead of its time.

That is why it gets 5 stars from me.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Psychotic billionaires. Horny dinosaurs. Female drivers. Yep, this book brings the horrors.

[Ruby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This OG book shows exactly what would happen if dinosaurs were found roaming through your friendly neighborhood. Two reporters accidentally find out what really been going on with that super rich asshole man over the hill with his personal zoo. Fun, gory, and lots of deaths. Unlike in Jurassic Park, people of all kinds actually die in this one.

[Mark Bonnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's only one way I can describe Carnosaur, and it goes like this: this book is far better than it has any right to be. I went into it expecting a cheap rip-off of Jurassic Park (in spite of Carnosaur being written and published well before Crichton's novel), but the simple fact is that I was blown away by how much I enjoyed it.

But then, I am obsessed with dinosaurs...

Now fair enough, Jurassic Park is the more famous of the two (and with good reason; it's the better of the two because, come on, it's Jurassic Park ), but what I love about Carnosaur is the way it plonks down its thunder lizards in the middle of sleepy, rural England. The novel has a different vibe, because of that; it's like the difference between seeing a lion in the zoo, and seeing one sneaking out of your shed.

So yes. A brilliant little book, with a nice, almost Wyndham-esque feel to it.

Also, it's nice to see a T. rex that's not a T. rex; tarbosaurus needs more airtime...

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fricking dinosaurs biting the fricking heads off of fricking English country folk. Terrible dialogue and a weak plot are cushioned and padded out by the handful of extraneous victims that pepper the book, but I can't complain about McDonalds selling more than one type of sandwich.

Definitely four stars from thirteen year old me, it's cool but empty.

[Jordan Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

No doubt Jurassic Park was a much more complete and believable novel about the dangers of messing with nature’s perfect predators, but if Carnosaur hadn’t been written nearly a decade before, I have no doubt Crichton’s masterpiece would not have happened.

Yes, Knight’s Carnosaur walked so that Jurassic Park could run.

Carnosaur is short in both page length and science, but it’s still a fun time. I mean, it’s genetically engineered dinos against a newspaper reporter and a town that is totally helpless. With the requisite amount of bloodshed and sex, this one just fits for fans of both horror and creature feature.

[Alex Wolfgang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of fun brutal dinosaur kills that kept me entertained throughout. This is probably what you're looking for from this and it delivers. My only complaint is that the main character really, really sucks. He's both a total idiot and a complete asshole to everyone he encounters. Also, the entire situation is kind of his fault. I was rooting for him to be brutally murdered by dinos the entire time. Still though, read this when you're too drunk for Jurassic park.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a ripoff of Jurassic Park, since it came out six years earlier. Also quite a bit less sentimental--cute kids get eaten fairly often, and not just randy teens who are the standard horror fare (ha, hilarious pun). Unfortunately, just as sexist as Crichton, in whose novel the little boy does everything to help solve dino mayhem while his useless sister shrieks.

Did Crichton rip this off? There are certainly scenes that remind me of beats in the novel and movie, but it also occurred to me when reading that probably everyone would come up with these--dinosaur crashes through picture window, dinosaur v. lion, dinosaur chases car. I did enjoy the bit with a plesiosaur terrorizing a boat party straight out of Wodehouse. Would I read Jeeves v. a dinosaur? Yes, yes I would. Jeeves would handle it. I know the whole classic-English-novel-plus-monsters trend died a quick and deserving death, but this novel needs to exist. Or story. I'm not picky.

[Kit Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Crichton could never.

[Hugh Boyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pre-Jurassic Park book about dinos on the loose and with obnoxious sex and violence. Ahead of its time and a fun easy read.

[Fatima · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

jurassic park for men and without all the science

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 1984, six years before the publication of Jurassic Park, Carnisour unleashed dinosaurs brought back from extinction on the world. Due to that premise, this book is frequently compared closely with, and questioned whether it influenced, Michael Crichton. For the most part, I think it's really only the science that the two really share in common. For the first half of the book I barely felt anything happened remotely close to JP. And then. The science comes into play, and ideas of how to clone a dinosaur from long dormant cells mixed with DNA from modern day animals felt very on target. Yet, there are details about the dinosaurs, the scientific belief that they are the ancestors to modern birds, which wasn't all that commonly known in the mid-80s, but years later accepted pretty much as fact, as well as some other depictors and facts about the dinosaurs that even Crichton didn't include in his first novel. Had I not known this book was written first, I would have believed it ripped of JP, but instead had ahead of its time accurate information about dinosaurs that took years to become known in the mainstream.
For the rest of the plot, it's not really that similar. JP had a greedy old man (kindly one in the movie) utilize modern biological techniques to being dinosaurs back in hopes of profiting off them as an attraction. In Carnosaur, a wealthy British Lord who has a penchant for big game animals and has an extensive zoo on his grounds brings dinosaurs back for his own purposes, not for the public to gawk at. The chaos that follows when the creatures finally break loose is more akin to the Jurassic World movies that the original JP books or movies.
I'm not sure Crichton did get his ideas from this book, especially since it was anything but a blockbuster like JP was. I think two authors at some point in the 1980s read about cloning advances and new dinosaur discoveries and had slightly similar yet still very much different ideas.
Carnosaur was an action-pack, gruesome ride, which unfortunately suffered the awkward sex scenes prevalent in 80s horror books of this type, but overall was quite entertaining.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of unexplained deaths in the small Cambridgeshire town of Warchester prompts Pascal and Jenny, two local reporters, to investigate the possibility that a living dinosaur was responsible.
First published in 1984, this is good pulpy fun, made all the better for being in the English countryside (and Kettering, a town local to me, also gets a mention, which doesn’t happen often). The basic plot sees a very rich landowner, Lord Darren Penward, uses his estate and fortune to build dinosaurs using DNA from fossils implanted into chicken cells. It reads well, probably doesn’t stand up to any scientific probing and makes as much sense as the central concept of “Jurassic Park”. After an incident where several locals are killed, local reporters David Pascal and Jenny Stamper, team up to try and find out the truth. This was published years before the aforementioned JP and only has loose connections (I wonder what Mr Brosnan thought of the book and film?) but one of the sequels, “Fallen Kingdom” from 2018, appears to have a lot of similarities. That’s a shame, because this is much more entertaining than that film was.
The kind of pulpy horror adventure I adore, this is well written and whips along at a cracking pace, with decent characterisation, plenty of action and suspense and a nice level gore (there’s even some sex as well). I found it great fun and would very much recommend it.

[JD · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn’t. There were parts that I did like a lot, so not a one star, but the things I didn’t like I REALLY did not like at all. Some of my reasons for disliking this book are incredibly petty and stupid, and I will admit that. The characters came off as super flat to me, the dialogue very often did not sound remotely like anything an actual human being would say, and more than once I found myself agreeing with the villain. The climax pretty much ruined the entire experience for me. Specifically, the scene with the Scolosaurus pissed me right off, and if the rest of the ride had not been so weirdly amusing I would have rated this book one star based entirely on that scene.

[Rory · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a trip, goes all sorts of places. Reads very much like early King or James Herbert but with an added dose of schlock.

The last act is somewhat anticlimactic from what came before but it but it's a fun novel, written six years before Jurassic Park it's unfortunate that its popularity is largely overshadowed by its disastrous cinematic creature feature, thus relegating it into bargain bin territory from which it has never escaped. The book is more insane and leans into that B-movie tone that made it a more rewarding experience.

[Mikepottz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crazy, dinosaur obsessed rich prick loves exotic dangerous animals and through his money and dedication clones a bunch of dinosaurs that go on a rampage and people will be sliced from neck to groin and insides will ooze out and be greedily devoured by these fantastical creatures. Dinosaurs walking the earth again would be equally scary and sensational.

[Leonardo La Terza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of amazing this was written just six years before Jurassic Park and the method of cloning that brings the dinosaurs to life is essentially the same. In fact, a lot of this book looks like a (bloodier) first draft of the book Michael Crichton would eventually write.

Had a lot of fun with this one, even if every character was a little rude to one another. Laughed at the chauvinistic tones because it's so absurd.