First off, it's great seeing a new review. And I do appreciate your dedication to the project knowing full well that you're in job search mode. I liked your intro to this one which heralded the coming of the ghostwritten era as it told me a lot of things I didn't know about a writer I admired.
When I first got this book, something else came into my life. It was the year my mother got me a Nintendo 64 for my birthday. And the day I brought this book home I had also finally purchased my own copy of Golden Eye. I played that game well into the wee hours of the morning but I didn't want to go to sleep without finishing The Extreme.
The first snow level of 007, the one just outside the actual bunker itself with all of the snow and the trees, etc, was stuck in my head the entire time as I was reading this book. I kept visualizing the Venber as the Russian guards who approached and shot at me with their AK47's.
Anyway, I wanted to say a couple of things in defense of the story itself. The first one was of Visser Three's collection.
The collection of torture items really doesn't surprise me all that much. In Salem, Mass there used to be a store called Life and Death that was essentially death memorobillia. Embalming tools, coffin nails, fake vials of fromhaldehyde, etc. That shop lasted for a quite a while so obviously someone was buying the stuff.
And we've all ready seen from the Applegate written books that Visser Three is a guy who collects things he can use to harm others. Most specifically are the animals he kept as pets in Andalte Chronicles and the Veleek respectively. As a Yeerk grub he obsessed over the ability to control a new host and just the small taste of an Andalite and everything such a host had to offer occupied his thougts so much that he became the very first Andalite Controller, basically starting his collection with the tail blade and the morphing power itself.
As for Derek's belief that the Animorphs were spirits and your comments about people believing in such things in the 90's, I remind you that I live not far from Salem. This is a place that is known world wide for it's annual month long Psychic Fair every October and this has been going strong since 1950.
There have been and still are quite a few people who would see an Animorph and jump to the conclusions that Derek came to. It's one of the reasons why I think the Yeerks would have been smart to branch out from simply using The Sharing and exploit other religions for purposes of infestation.
Anyway, thanks again for the review.
