Anaconda Among Us / Al Newman
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Æ IT LURKS IN THE UNDERGROWTH Å
Are you ready for a story about an eighty-eight foot, seven thousand pound anaconda? Wait! Please! Don’t shred this yet. Be a Brazilian literary agent or film producer for a moment. Tales of anacondas almost twice the size of this albino constrictor appear in Brazilian newspapers with sobering regularity. Websites are devoted to the sucuriju – the off-the-charts anaconda. A 49-foot reticulated python has recently been reported in Indonesia.
Anaconda Among Us, 172,600 words long, is the story of such a leviathan. It is heavy on dialogue, much of it profane and obscene, as befits the prototypical American drifter, devoid of hope, who ends up in a remote, foreign seaport with scant resources, an appalling personal history, and few moral compunctions.
The five misfits in Anaconda Among Us, four of them Bosnian conflict veterans, are coerced by a pretentious and corrupt Belizean police superintendent into mounting a secret expedition to capture a gigantic snake that is not even indigenous to Belize. The Americans conspire to cut the official out of the deal and keep the snake for themselves. They enlist a jungle-wise American woman – who makes her living dealing in illicit Mayan artifacts – to serve as their guide. One of the Americans gets drunk and tells a Belizean con artist about the safari. The con artist, in turn, recruits a group of Guatemalan renegades to follow the Americans, kill them, and smuggle the snake into Guatemala. The police official, mistrustful of his American hunters, has three Belizean criminals released prematurely from prison to follow the Americans and dispatch them once they have contained the anaconda. The Americans, not having the funds or contacts to transport the snake out of Belize once they capture it, form a partnership with a Mafia-connected, exotic animal dealer who lives in Costa Rica. The five plan to double-cross him, as well. Mistrustful of the Americans, the Mafioso comes to Belize with confederates to protect his interests. Much of the story deals with conditions and perils in the jungle as the safari tracks the anaconda. Several people fall victim to the anaconda. There is much, much more in the way of bizarre characters, intrigue, murder, disease, bloodshed, and treachery piled on treachery than I will describe here. At the climax, the anaconda has the Americans trapped in a cave. Two of them die — one of snakebite and the other with necrotizing fasciitis. The police official arrives, intent upon killing the safari members, but is devoured by the anaconda.
As the story approaches its climax, a category 5 hurricane strikes Belize, exacerbating the agony, tension and hopelessness. The cyclone’s impact is described in painstaking detail.
In the epilog, the anaconda ends up bringing wealth to the surviving “good guys,” who have built a resort in the remote Venezuelan llanos where tourists can view the creature.
This meticulously researched story pushes accepted science up to — but not over — the edge. It is scientific fiction, not science fiction. I guarantee that my novel soars above the anaconda movies of a few years back. It does not follow the horror flick formula.
My credentials insofar as depicting the soldiers of fortune and the terrain in which the action takes place: I am an aging American male, but I know the language of the young. I am widely traveled and am actively multilingual. I lived in a squalid Guatemalan seaport town for four years in the company of drifters much like my primary characters, and am all too familiar with corrupt Central American officials. I have spent six months in Costa Rica in recent years, much of it studying the rain forest. I also spent almost two months crawling around Belize and the Guatemalan jungle so I’d know first-hand what I was talking about when I wrote Anaconda Among Us. I have personally experienced the anger, extortion, discrimination, fear and despair that my characters suffer.
I am unpublished. Let’s change that. By the way, watch your back as you take your first steps into a tropical rain forest – there are gigantic anacondas out there. You could be on their radar.
Al Newman