For those who were behaving too sensibly in the mid-1990s to know, Primal Rage (as opposed, we must guess, to Urbane Rage) was a video game by the makers of the wildly popular Mortal Kombat franchise. It worked on the same basic setup: You picked a character, and then you had that character engage in hand-to-hand combat with other characters, which were controlled by the computer or another player. You would do this over and over again, until your character was defeated, or you lost consciousness. Or interest. Primal Rage’s hook, though, was that all the characters were dinosaurs! Or giant apes! Fighting each other! So awesome! This idea proved reasonably, if not staggeringly popular, enough so to produce a line of action figures, and also a book. Literature. A novel: Primal Rage: The Avatars, by John Vornholt, published by Boulevard in 1997.

I loved the Primal Rage game, and still do. Fighting dinosaurs are certain entertainment, and I won’t let anyone tell me different. So it was partially for this reason that, when I saw its novelization available used for $2.50 at a local bookstore, my hand fairly darted out toward it. The other reason was sheer wonderment. Here were hundreds of pages of story about a B-list video game (a Primal Rage 2 was planned, but scrapped) that was like Mortal Kombat, only sillier. The book was doomed to fail, of course – the translation of video game narratives to other media has yet to be handled with intelligence or grace in our culture, and moreover, this time the idea really was absurd. Take, say, Resident Evil and make it into a movie, then you have yourself a horror movie, or ought to. Take the fightin’ dinosaur game and turn it into a text, and what could you possibly have? It was low culture, but more than that, it was low, weird culture.

So: Primal Rage: The Avatars.

It is a thousand years in the future, or something to that effect. The planet Earth, now called – check this out – “Urth,” is ruled by eight giant “gods,” in the form of dinosaurs, apes, saber-toothed tigers, and that sort of thing. Each god controls a section of the Earth (ahem: Urth), and is served by semi-primitive humans, whom most of the gods frequently devour. The gods are served faithfully nevertheless, and each has a telepathic link with a single high priest. Then the asteroid that had crashed to Earth a thousand years previous, turning the planet into Urth, cracks open, and a new monster-god emerges: Necrosan. Necrosan is a dragon with no skin, and he is more powerful than any of the other gods, and he can turn humans into zombies. He imprisons the gods in various lost places of the Urth using the sorcerous Bonds of Forbidding! So, do the various high priests have to put aside their differences to free their gods and defeat their common enemy? You had better goddamned well believe it.

And that is basically that. You get about fifty pages of this setup, then another two hundred of the high priests running around, and turning into their monster-gods and having monster-god-fights. See, when the gods are imprisoned, the priests gain the ability to exchange places with them, for an hour a day, hence becoming their titular avatars. We get to have our cake and eat it too: giant monster fights, but with our main characters remaining human, and hence more potentially sympathetic to the reader. Let us emphasize the word “potentially,” here. Regrettably, it is easy to imagine a tyrannosaurus, for example, portrayed with more sophisticated motivations and subtle emotions than anybody gets in this book. The hero of the story is Kaze, the samurai/shaman of the yeti-ish Blizzard; the thing to know about Kaze is that he is good. Good. The only character who gets more than an alignment rating is Malyssa, the human villain, an evil sorceress in the service of Vertigo, a sort of cobra-velociraptor hybrid. Her character note is this: Malyssa is a scantily-clad nymphomaniac. Our man Vornholt pours this on with a maniac glee that’s almost impressive; Malyssa is seemingly incapable of the simplest of actions without being an over-the-top comic-book seductress about it. She delivers one line with “a seductive shrug,” and another with “a flirtatious bow.” I do not know what these things would look like. Perhaps most significantly, Malyssa is especially interested in deflowering young male virgins. I will leave it to the current readership to puzzle out the purpose of that idea, in a book such as this.

I will go ahead and mention, though, that this sort of thing does provide one of the book’s messages: Female sexuality is evil. Simple enough, really. Also, there’s that bit mentioned previously about putting aside differences and working together and all that. There’s actually a potentially interesting angle on this message, in that the turning of the priests into “avatars” leads to a greater understanding between man and god. But there’s that word “potentially” again – if this sounds like an interesting theme to you, too bad; it is mentioned, but not actually explored at all. How does this understanding manifest? What exactly were the differences that led to the lack of it in the first place? Well, never mind. The idea of humans worshipping monsters that eat them is another one that could go in a number of interesting directions, and instead settles on none.

This sort of wasted opportunity is really the watchword of Primal Rage: The Avatars. Reading it is like watching maybe a dozen episodes of He-Man in a row; diverting enough, but much, much stupider than it has to be. The plot does actually hang together, and clips along at a decent pace. And there are plenty of monster fights. But that’s it. That’s all. Poor characterization, lack of engagement with its own themes, and cloying, amateurish writing ¹ more than counterbalance what merit is to be found.

That such a book was ever produced is remarkable. That it condescends to its readership is, regrettably, much less so. Surely a large part of the problem with video game adaptations has been a patronizing attitude toward the source material. These games are widely considered to be childish and absurd; why should their offshoots be any different? And even if this book is taken, not unreasonably in this particular case, simply as children’s literature,² there’s no call for idiocy. That entertainment aimed at the young can be smart and insightful has been proven time and again – Pixar springs to mind; The Hobbit still holds up; and I don’t seem to remember Betsy Byars or John Fitzgerald insulting my intelligence. But this, of course, takes effort, and there was clearly no motive for such here. At risk of stating the obvious, this was a cash-in, pure and simple.

The evening after I read this book, I was chatting online with a friend of mine. “Guess what book I read today!” I wrote. “What?” he replied. Rather than answer him directly, I sent him the link to the Amazon page for the book. And in so doing, I viewed said page for the first time myself. Primal Rage: The Avatars is, unsurprisingly, no longer in print, but it is available via the Amazon Marketplace Sellers, that site’s sprawling secondary market. And so, on the book’s page, there was a link to such sellers, with the legend, “3 Used & new from $278.98.”

Two hundred and seventy-eight dollars and ninety-eight cents.

There was another one available for about the same price. And then a third, for nearly six hundred dollars. E-bay was offering no copies of the book. Since then, a few new vendors have arrived on both the Amazon and E-bay scenes, and have driven the price down to the irresistible bargain of about $38, after a brief stop at $65. This plummet is probably a sign of the times, what with the economic crisis and so forth. But still, consider it: $38 for a paperback book from ten years ago about a video game about fighting dinosaurs. After the recession factors in.

Now, it is likely that this book only ever saw one printing. It is also likely that many of the copies of it were casually disposed of, or perhaps set afire in frustration with its contents. Which all would make it thin on the ground these days. But that only covers the “supply” end of supply and demand. If people are asking these sorts of sums for this book, either each and every one of these vendors is profoundly deluded, or somebody out there is, in fact, paying such prices.

Let he who has never spent good money on items of no utility cast the first stone, to be sure. I certainly won’t be that caster. But the mind boggles at this. I spent the cost of a small soda at the movies on this, because I thought it would be good for a laugh. And out of nostalgia. I always did love Primal Rage. Perhaps this, then, is the key. Nostalgia is fine, basically, but it’s rarely the most rational of emotions, and it is easy enough to imagine people getting a bit…carried away with it. Where quality fails, nostalgia picks up the slack.

Next month on “Low and Outside”: The Calamari Wrestler: A Japanese cinematic festival of crazy.