Jurassic Park, written by Micheal Crichton and published in late 1990, is a phenomenal book. It’s a gripping horror-thriller, written with the help of experts from a variety of fields, artfully looking at the themes of human greed and ignorance. Unlike the film based on the book, the story is dark, filled with gruesome deaths, and a sense of dread that the movie failed to fully capture. 

First and foremost, yes, the book is rather nerdy. Many of the characters presented are scientists, or experts in computers or engineering. This could be off-putting for some, as there are some segments of the story that go into deep technical detail. I, however, take great delight in them. While some of them are obsolete by now (I hear computers have advanced some way since the eighties), I really appreciate the great detail. It’s interesting to hear about lysine, proteins, gizzard stones, enzymes, white rabbits, Othnielia, and Procompsognathus. The book does a really good job of showing off their passions and crafts, and incorporating their professions into their personalities and actions. 

At the time of its release, Jurassic Park was using the leading edge of Paleontology. Portraying the (inflated) intelligence of Velociraptors, the brutal might of the Tyrannosaurus, the savagery of the Compys. Part of the draw of the story was how it showed a reimagined dinosaur. As detailed in the book, dinosaurs used to be shown as slow, dimwitted lizards, who went extinct due to the sheer ineptitude of their kind. Jurassic Park changed that. With advice from experts from his time, Crichton painted the dinosaurs in their primal glory. As predators, as intelligent, as something near-monstrous.

On that note, the horror of Jurassic Park is just fantastic. I cannot stress that enough. 

Spoilers to follow. 

The only film that came near it was the second, with its darker tone. The book is brutal. A baby is eaten alive within the first 30 pages. The story doesn’t pull punches. While the film is a fun romp for the whole family, and we can be fairly confident that none of our main cast will be harmed, in the novel that is not the case. 

The book doesn’t wait to show us this reality with the infant. When Tim or Lex come face to face with raptors or the T-Rex, we aren’t certain they’ll live. There are detailed, medical descriptions of people being torn apart, being eaten alive, being toyed with while being killed. In some ways, these carried forward to the films—Tim is properly thrashed in both the film and the book, and the Velociraptors torture Udesky —but they’ve never truly captured the raw horror of being assaulted by pre-historic predators. 

The horror of the book isn’t just the physical either. While yes, being locked into a giant dome with Pterodactyls would be terrifying, it doesn’t quite convey the lingering tension of the story. For me, part of the lasting terror was how the characters behaved, both before and after the disaster. While I appreciate in a comedic sense, the cavalier and intoxicated Muldoon chasing down a T-Rex with a tranquilizer gun, a jeep, a lawyer, the real terror is their attitudes—as Dr. Ian Malcolm noted. 

Unlike the film, the initial disaster is mitigated. They manage to undo Nedry’s sabotaging, and get the park up and going again. They begin repairing island infrastructure, and go back to planning the opening. 

In the book, John Hammond is a far less likeable character. He doesn’t have the charming naivety of the film adaptation. As a display of the genius of his employees, he would tote around a cat sized elephant, which he promised to one day mass produce to be a household pet. He had plans on copywriting dinosaurs as living beings. He’s a greedy, ignorant enabler, who handwaves the many serious threats to not only his business, not to only his island, but the outside world.

The cataclysm of the book, unlike the film, is not the unfortunate coinciding of Nedry’s theft and the storm. In the book, the cataclysm was something that could have been mitigated. They find out the dinosaurs had been breeding, and that they had gotten out of their enclosures, and were sneaking off the island on the supply ships. Then the power goes out. After getting the island going again, nobody noticed that they were running on auxiliary power, and the generators had just run out of power. In Frankenstein fashion, the antagonist of the story isn’t the dinosaurs, but the arrogance of humans who created them, believing they could bring back the past. 

This point is hinted at from the very beginning. The park was using ancient poisonous fauna as a decoration, because they thought it was pretty. Many of the larger dinosaurs on the island have breathing problems, because there is less oxygen in our air than there was millions of years ago. The Velociraptors are so aggressive because of their captivity. In many ways, the story of Jurassic Park could be interpreted as a searing indictment of our modern zoos. 

The park is shown to be doomed from the start. From their dinosaur breeding, to their over reliance on cutting edge technology, ignorantly applied—in their greed—to use as commercial assets. As Malcolm said in the film, “Genetic power’s the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid who’s found his dad’s gun.” 

Read the book. It’s marvellous, groundbreaking, and entertaining. Even if the portrayal of dinosaurs is now dated, Crichton delivers on his unique concept, and the world at large knows him because of it. 

If you’re a fan of the films, or become a fan of the films, you can see the many small ways that content was brought over to the films as they progressed. You can also read his sequel, The Lost World, which retcons Malcolm’s death and puts him on site B, Isla Sorna, alongside the corporate goon Dodgson, seen in the film briefly as the man who gives Nedry the can of Barbasol to steal the dinosaur embryos. 

My Jurassic Park obsession bloomed from reading the books while recovering from a concussion (Yes, I know you’re not supposed to do that), and culminated in buying the series in ultra-HD 4k, in grade 11 watching them back-to-back 8 times in the period of a semester, and racking up upwards of 70 hours on Jurassic World Evolution at the same time.

I don’t think that will happen to you, but I can only hope.