The Creature Walks Again
Creature from the Black Lagoon: Time's Black Lagoon is a 2006 novel by Paul Di Filippo. It is part of Dark Horse's mid-2000s line of tie-in novels to the popular Universal Horror franchise and is a distant sequel to the original three films.In 1954, an expedition found what seemed to be a missing link in the evolutionary chain: an ancient, immensely powerful amphibian creature. Scientists tried to tame it, break its will, and even change its very being with surgery and torture, but the beast rebelled, killing nearly all in its way. But was the creature truly a throwback, a freak survivor of some prehistoric era-or was it something more?
Six decades later, one scientist attempts to find out, using a time machine to journey into the past. What he finds not only shatters his vision of what the Creature might be, but could change the history of the human race forever.
This work contains examples of;
- Adaptational Species Change: Gill-Man was always implied to be a prehistoric creature of the Earth, while still true here it's revealed his species ultimate origin is that of aliens who came to Earth in the Devonian period and were mutated by archaebacteria in Earth's oceans.
- All of the Other Reindeer: Tarquin Hasselrude endured this early in his career for trying to pursue research on Gill-Man, keeping his research to himself for the remainder of his career.
- Climate Change: A driving motivation for Brice, believing learning of Gil-Man's nature and origins will allow for humanity to deal with future climate change disasters.
- The Conspiracy: The events of the original films have been covered up to the point where Gill-Man is only talked about on conspiracy or cryptozoology websites.
- Distant Sequel: The events of the original three films happened back in the 50s, with the events of the book starting out in the then-future year of 2015.
- Genre Shift: The original Gill-Man films were fairly standard Creature Feature films with Gill-Man being the most extraordinary thing in them. The book here moves the story far more firmly into science-fiction territory with time travel, virtual reality simulators, and aliens.
