⭐⭐⭐
When I first read The Lost World years ago, I remember absolutely tearing through it. I loved it almost as much as Jurassic Park, which is no small thing. At the time, it felt like a worthy continuation: more dinosaurs, more danger, more of that Crichton techno-thriller momentum that made his work so addictive. It was fast, exciting, and felt smart enough to justify its own existence rather than just coasting on the name.
Coming back to it now, though, the cracks are a lot more obvious — and harder to ignore.
The biggest issue for me on this reread is the writing style itself. I don’t remember it bothering me at all back then, but now the constant repetition really grates. Full names are used over and over again in places where a simple “he” or “she” would have flowed naturally. Character names get repeated within the same paragraph, sometimes within the same sentence, and once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop seeing it. It gives the prose a strangely mechanical feel, like it’s constantly resetting itself instead of trusting the reader to keep up.
Then there’s the sentence structure. There are so many clipped, abrupt sentences. Short. Punchy. Dramatic. In theory. In practice, they pile up and completely wreck the rhythm. Instead of creating tension, they often pull me out of the moment. It starts to feel less like suspense and more like someone repeatedly tapping the brakes just as the story is getting going.
I was also surprised by how often characters’ thoughts just… trail off. A lot of internal moments feel half-finished, cut short purely to jump into action. I get what Crichton was aiming for — urgency, momentum, the sense that danger interrupts everything — but it happens so frequently that it starts to feel lazy rather than effective. Those interior beats never quite land, and as a result, the characters themselves feel thinner than I remembered.
That’s probably the most disappointing part overall. The ideas are still fun, the set pieces still work on a surface level, but the characters don’t really hold up under scrutiny. They mostly exist to react, to move from one problem to the next, without much depth to make me care beyond basic survival instincts. When I was younger, that was enough. Now, I want a bit more substance.
All that said, I can’t pretend I hated rereading it. There’s a lot of nostalgia doing heavy lifting here. I wanted to like it. I remembered liking it. And there are still flashes of what made Crichton such a compelling writer in the first place: the pacing, the big concepts, the sheer readability.
But if I’m being honest with myself, I think I’m giving this a three-star rating almost entirely on nostalgia. If I’d picked this up today with no prior attachment, I’d probably land closer to two stars at most. It’s not awful, but it feels dated, uneven, and far less sharp than I remembered.
A fun relic of its time; just not the near-equal to Jurassic Park that my memory insisted it was.
Gareth Ellis - Author 