dinosaurs

Chuck’s Dinosaur Tinglers: Volume 1 by Chuck Tingle

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Volume One of Chuck’s Dinosaur Tinglers compiles three previously available stories; My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass, Gay T-Rex Law Firm: Executive Boner, and Space Raptor Butt Invasion. If you’re unfamiliar with the brilliant Chuck Tingle and his plethora of tinglers, I’m not sure how you’re accessing this review from the space beneath the rock you’ve been living under for however long.
In the first of these three tinglers, Jeremy receives a call out of the blue from Oliver, his former pet triceratops, now an exotic dancer who made billions from sports betting. An evening of expensive dinner instead becomes a gay, erotic encounter in Jeremy’s New York apartment.
The second tale tells us of Donny’s first day at the T-Rex law firm, where he’d just gotten hired as a secretary. Seeking prestige and a better paycheck, Donny soon gets more than he signed up for as he learns just what sort of animals he’s working for when an indecent proposal crosses his desk.
The final tale introduces us to Lance, an astronaut, just as he begins his solo, year-long mission on an alien planet undergoing terraforming to provide humans with a new home and salvation from a dying Earth. Little does he know that a velociraptor astronaut from Earth 2 is also on a similar mission. A friendship borne of mutual loneliness soon becomes a steamy affair, as Lance and Orion discover a new way to pass the time that has nothing to do with playing ping-pong.
In true Tingle fashion, these three stories are short, sweet, and smutty. The erotic elements are graphic in detail and ridiculous in content, which is precisely what Dr. Chuck Tingle excels at bringing to the table. In his life’s mission of showing his readers and fans that love is real, he often goes to extremes that guarantee one will not soon forget the experience of joining him on a tingling journey.

This paperback edition was a Father’s Day present for me from my girlfriend in 2020. Additionally, I was gifted two more Tinglers in paperback at the same time. Only someone who knows me well would have considered these to be just the sort of things I would want in my library.

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Jurassichrist by Michael Allen Rose

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It all starts when Jesus Christ botches his second coming most spectacularly in Michael Allen Rose’s new book, Jurassichrist.
It’s time, the designated hour and day has reached us. J.C. leaps into the stream of spacetime to arrive just when humanity needs his return, full of confidence and righteousness. He does not stick the landing. Instead of arriving two millennia after his departure, he arrives on Earth a few hundred million years before he’d been born. Time is tricky like that. He can’t really be blamed, though, can he? We’re all guilty of being attracted to shiny things…he did see a bright blue pulsing light and he aimed for it.
Muddy, disoriented, and chagrined, J.C. finds himself in the age of thunder lizards, unsure how he’s supposed to get crucified for a return trip home and a fresh start. Utilizing his knowledge of 1980s action movies and his divine power to materialize firearms, Jesus doesn’t sit idly by to become dinosaur chow. Soon enough, he’s covered in as much blood as mud as he cautiously approaches the source of the blue light that shouldn’t exist in this place and time.
He’s soon forced to face the fact that what he thought he knew about dinosaurs is entirely wrong. More disturbing than that, the mammals (barely more than rodents) appear to be addicted to “As Seen On TV” trinkets, and they’re evolving quite alarmingly in response.
That’s when things get weird.
This book is packed with so many absurdities and so much drama it’s almost too much to describe. It’s a mystery that leads J.C. through various planes of existence and points in time. It’s an adventure story, complete with dungeons and traps. It’s a story of friendship emerging under the strangest of circumstances. It’s Band of Brothers, but with dinosaurs…and saviors…and time travel…
Ok…so it’s not really Band of Brothers at all.
What it is, is fantastic and hilarious, sacrilegious and utter lunacy…it’s a must-read.

Extinction Peak by Lucas Mangum

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Lucas Mangum’s Extinction Peak borrows heavily from themes familiar to fans of Jurassic Park/World franchise, Dino Crisis, and Land Of The Lost while painting a dizzying portrait of an apocalypse no one could have seen coming (except for those who made it happen, but that’s a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll leave it at that).
We’re first introduced to Deandra and her brother, Johnny, as they plan to leave the basement they’ve been sheltering in as the world outside descends into a carnage-filled nightmare Michael Crichton wouldn’t have dared explore, even in writing. Children of a deceased drug lord, neither Deandra nor Johnny are well adjusted or particularly sympathetic characters, particularly Johnny. I found myself wanting both of them to be devoured by dinosaurs almost immediately but knowing there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell if that were how it played out.
As we follow those two (and other characters we encounter along the way, many of them equally flawed and broken), we see far more detail of just how terrible and dangerous the world has become as these beasts emerged, seemingly from Hell, through the sinkholes around the world. As with most monster-themed horror, we soon find that the worst monsters aren’t the obvious ones, that it’s other people we really need to worry about. Fueled by greed, contempt derived from old world biases, and sadistic impulses that shouldn’t surprise any of us (but somehow always do), the story continues its fast-paced and character-driven journey through an increasingly unreal end to the world as we know it.
In all honesty, I would love to see Mangum explore this particular apocalypse in greater depth and detail, through the struggles of other people in other places, but this book is so detailed as to make it simple to close our eyes and imagine precisely what it might be like for others, even ourselves when the holes in the Earth begin opening up.
This book is filled with graphic violence, gruesome deaths, and subject matter that absolutely nudges it into splatterpunk territory…be warned that this is not a book for your dinosaur-loving children…unless you parent the way I would…and did.

Extinction Peak