Title: The Kraken Wakes
Author: John Wyndham
Type: Fiction
Page Count: 240
Rating: 3/5
John Wyndham is arguably most well-known as the author of The Day of the Triffids, a sort of post-apocalyptic biological novel. Here, he’s turned his attention to monsters from beneath the sea, and while I’ve never been a particular fan of stories about the sea and the ocean, I think it worked pretty well here.
What’s funny about this one, though, is that while there’s some alien stuff going on in the story, it’s not really the point of the book. It’s much more about the cold war and the feeling of paranoia that was pervasive at the time. In fact, it was pretty good to see how the political landscape of the time affected the story itself, so for example when a ship sank, the Americans blamed the Russians and the Russians blamed the Americans. In many ways, not much has changed.
Unfortunately, while the ideas were pretty good, there wasn’t a whole lot of action to help the story to keep on moving. That meant that it’s all well and good to think about, but it didn’t particularly entertain me, and by the time that I got to the end, I was feeling pretty bored with it. Perhaps that’s the reason why Kraken isn’t as iconic as Triffids, although both were pretty cool. So yeah.
