Get ready for action on a gigantic scale.
The Great Zoo of China is a 2014 novel by Matthew Reilly. Dr. Cassandra Jane "CJ" Cameron, a herpetologist and veterinarian, is invited to a brand new zoo in China as part of a group of foreign journalists, only for events at the zoo to rapidly spiral out of control when the animals contained within—dragons, revived after millions of years of hibernation—start to fight back.
The Great Zoo Of China contains examples of:
- Ambition Is Evil: Hu Tang is determined to vault over the bodies of the witnesses to the Presidency of China using the dragon zoo.
- Badass Bookworm: CJ is a reptile expert, not a trained soldier. By novel's end she's pretty much single-handedly saved the day and gone toe-to-toe with actual fire-breathing dragons and won.
- Breath Weapon: The dragons are confirmed by their Chinese captors to be unable to do this, dismissing it as a myth—until fairly late in the book where it turns out each dragon subspecies has a dominant superking and superemperor that can breath fire.
- Chekhov M.I.A.: CJ leaves Johnson wounded in a dumbwaiter, telling him to wait there until she returns. When she does come back, there's no sign of him, but none of a struggle either. He shows up in the climax to hijack one of the bombs in the zoo.
- Dark Is Evil: The black dragons are the ringleaders of the dragon revolt, and as the final confrontation with the superking and superemperor shows, they're the only dragon subspecies to be actively malicious towards humans instead of just predators following their instincts.
- Dragons Are Dinosaurs: Quite literally. They're a dinosaur species that were hibernating deep underground during the extinction, which have been checking now and again to see if the world has become hot enough for them all to come out, which is the reason that so many ancient cultures had dragon myths despite being isolated from each other.
- Eye Scream: An eye surgery scene is described in quite nauseating detail.
- Facial Horror:
- CJ has a relatively minor example of this as her face was mauled by an alligator while saving a child a couple of years ago. Her fiancé left her after seeing the damage, but by the time she visits the zoo her face has been reconstructed and she only has small scars alongside her eye.
- CJ’s primary dragon adversary becomes known as ‘Melted Face’ as she hit him in the face with an improvised flamethrower in their first clash.
- Feed It a Bomb: How CJ ultimately deals with Red Face, lobbing a grenade down its throat. The results are described graphically.
- Genre Savvy:
- Hamish notes that the Great Zoo and its dragons are great...as long as you haven't seen Jurassic Park, wondering (accurately) what'll happen when the dragons get out and turn on the humans. Sure enough...
- Amusingly, the Chinese think they're this, even telling Hamish they've seen the film too—but as there and the later Jurassic World, they don't do much better when the animals escape and start killing everybody.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The red-and-black superking's own fire breath sets it on fire, with a little assist from the fuel from CJ's flamethrower.
- Interspecies Friendship: Human CJ Cameron forms a close bond with Lucky the Dragon.
- It Can Think: The dragons are FAR smarter than their Chinese zookeepers realise, even having a complex language to communicate with.
- Kill It with Fire: CJ kind of falls into using this as her primary weapon once she gets hold of a flamethrower. Which is handy given she has to face actual fire-breathing dragons, one the size of a bus, the other bigger than a jumbo jet.
- Laser-Guided Karma: A positive example. Early on, CJ first protects a hapless worker from the wrath of his supervisor, then saves Lucky the dragon when she's surrounded by black dragons. Both come back to help her later in the book.
- Leave No Witnesses: When disaster inevitably strikes, management takes anyone who witnesses it out to the "emergency evacuation area", where they are Fed to the Beast.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile:
- Part of CJ's backstory is how she was mauled by a bull alligator after saving a child from it.
- The zoo keeps huge saltwater crocodiles around, ostensibly so the dragons have some familiar wildlife around them. Naturally the protagonists run afoul of them.
- Nice to the Waiter: Early on, CJ intervenes when she sees a worker who made a mistake in front of the Western guests being physically chastised by his boss. She helps him clean up his stuff then threatens to have the foreman fired if he tries anything.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: The most dangerous dragons are the red-bellied blacks, named after a venomous Australian snake.
- Running Gag: Every time the Chinese unveil something spectacular about the park—the architecture, bullet trains bringing people in, the menu—they then spoil the effect by revealing it to be have been designed/created by a foreigner originally. Even the bombs that annihilate the park at the end turn out to have been bought from the Russians.
- Super-Persistent Predator:
- The dragon known as Melted Face spends almost the whole novel tracking down and trying to kill CJ in retaliation for her burning its face. More justified than most in that dragons are shown to be frighteningly intelligent, and this one was really pissed off about what happened to its face.
- Melted Face's pack leader, Red Face, proves to be even more persistent, appearing almost every time the red-bellies show up and identified by CJ as recognising her, and also being the final dragon she faces off with.
- Tear Off Your Face: Happens to Hu, who is interrupted during a monologue by the dragon Red Face popping up and biting his face off. Horrifically, he survives long enough to get a Mercy Kill from his allies.
- Token Good Teammate:
- CJ’s old friend Go-Go is an employee of the Great Dragon Zoo. When the zoo staff plan to kill the visitors to stop them talking about what happened, Go-Go is sentenced along with them because the staff knew of his history with CJ and are concerned he would talk, with Go-Go making it clear that he would have told others what had happened rather than trying to deny it to save his life.
- Of the six types of dragons, the yellow dragons are the ones most clearly on the humans’ side; red dragons are more actively hostile towards humans, while the others don’t particularly show concern one way or the other, although the red dragons kill the primary emperors of the other five breeds.
- Whole-Plot Reference: While it incorporates plenty of Reilly's signature fast-paced action, in addition to having some very critical commentary on the Chinese Communist Party, The Great Zoo of China is essentially Jurassic Park at its core—not helped by being released just as the hype train for Jurassic World was getting into full swing.
- Interestingly, it also has shades of that latter film as well (despite being released months beforehand) as both have the park higher-ups losing control after certain animals - the Indominus Rex there, the dragons here - turn out to be far, far smarter and determined to escape than anyone realises.
- The Worf Effect: Enormous predatory saltwater crocodiles are taken down by even larger, nastier apex predators—dragons—to show how serious things are getting.
- You No Take Candle: Although the dragons are shown to be capable of communication, the translation program that allows them to talk with humans has its limitations. As a result, the dragons come across as this when talking with humans through specially programmed earpieces, and have trouble understanding some of the humans’ more complex sentences in turn, although this may be due to limitations in the translation rather than the dragons being “stupid”.
