#amy garvey

[arinzeture]

[nondualreality]

Love doesn’t break easily, I found. But people do.

Amy Garvey, Cold Kiss

[donttemptmeiknowyourmother]

“Love doesn’t break easily, I found. But people do.”

-Amy Garvey

[arinzeture]

[arinzeture]

[schmoopboop]

[arinzeture]

[lesserjoke]

Book #331 of 2021:

The Experiment by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #28)

“In the annals of stupid, screwed-up, pointless missions that was the stupidest, most pointless of them all,” says Marco at the end of this title, and it’s hard to really argue with him. 32 books into my decades-later reread of this series (including the Chronicles and Megamorphs volumes), and it’s the first entry that I’m feeling no better than lukewarm about on the whole. Our third ghostwritten story, this one is by newcomer Amy Garvey, who does not appear to have subsequently contributed again. And to her credit she basically nails the goofy humor aspect of the franchise, but the plot is so riddled with illogical decision-making on everyone’s part that I’ve found it an exercise in frustration to read.

We start with Erek the android risking a hologram of a truck rather than his regular appearance for no particular reason, all to give the Animorphs the vaguest of hints that the Yeerks are doing something with an animal-testing site and meatpacking facility. To infiltrate the former, the team breaks into the vehicle delivering a group of chimpanzees, a Fast and Furious stunt in full view of other drivers that culminates in releasing the animals out the back while stopped at a traffic light so that the teens can take their place. (As someone who used to volunteer at a chimp sanctuary, let me just say that that would be incredibly dangerous for the human and nonhuman apes in the area alike.) Later to bypass a Gleet Bio-Filter and enter the slaughterhouse, Tobias and Ax morph into bulls — they thought they were acquiring steers, forgetting that castration isn’t included in the DNA — with their friends as flies carried deep inside their nostrils. Also the Andalite accidentally acquires a cow at first, a bizarre mistake given the emphasis on their needing to replace specific tagged individuals.

Both missions rely on our heroes making foolish choices that almost get them killed, when they could easily instead use strategies that have worked for them in the past and wouldn’t involve being put in a cage. Like… everyone could have morphed insects to occupy some random creature’s nose, for instance. And I don’t mind fallible protagonists, but these incidents are never called out, and so read more like an oversight of the author(s) than the characters to me. The villains are at their most ridiculously deranged too, feverishly trying to find a way to chemically block free will and falsifying reports of success to Visser Three so that he doesn’t kill them in his displeasure. Earlier in the text, the squad fends off that vicious enemy general by flinging poop at his face in chimp form, because sigh, of course they do. It’s honestly a shock when the final battle turns suddenly into a bloody and legitimately life-threatening affair, after how unserious a romp the preceding events have seemed.

If you’re into Animorphs primarily for the laughs, you’ll probably enjoy this installment better than I have. As usual for an Aximili book, his off-kilter perspective on humanity is a great source of comedy, especially since the alien youth has a TV set now and is hooked on soap operas like The Young and the Restless as well as commercials, which he adorably calls These Messages. And there is some interesting debate over animal rights, with Cassie predictably pushing the morality of the issue harder than anyone else. But on balance too much simply doesn’t work for me here, suggesting that perhaps K. A. Applegate needed to be more hands-on to keep the quality up to its typical levels. Hopefully this is a one-off aberration and not a sign of what I should expect for the novels yet ahead.

[Content warning for cannibalism, gore, and body horror.]

★★☆☆☆

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