Drug of Choice

 

Drug of Choice – Michael Crichton

An early book written by one of the most famous authors of the 1990s which was actually one of several penned under the pseudonym John Lange.  Apparently Crichton was a young medical student when he wrote this one, and writing novels was more of a hobby as opposed to a serious profession.  It’s a bit of a shame since this is kind of obvious.  This a book with a pretty good premise but needed to be worked through with a bit more care.  This thing had potential.  It’s not that it was bad, it’s just that for a book with such serious ambitions of being taken somewhat seriously, it needed a lot more polishing.  In other words, you can tell it was written by a young medical student during his spare time.

The story centers around Dr. Roger Clark.  He’s on staff at a hospital, and in a fairly short time, there are a couple of mysterious cases involving patients brought in who are in a coma that also show a bizarre symptom of blue urine.  When the patients miraculously recover in a very short time with no residual side effects, Dr. Clark starts an independent investigation.  He uncovers what we would call the bizarre and the unlikely, but this really isn’t that uncommon for those who know the work of Michael Crichton. Remember that this is the author that convinced us that dinosaurs could be cloned and shown off in an amusement park due to their DNA being extracted from prehistoric mosquitoes.

Clark’s journey comes across as a bit silly and there were a few bizarre plot turns that seemed inconsistent with the characters in this inexplicable story, but I suppose most young people who were writing as a side gig when they were studying medicine probably wouldn’t be able to do much better.  My guess is that if he never published this book (under the name John Lange) he could have picked up his manuscript several years later after he learned the tricks of the trade and made this thing much more interesting.

In fact, this thing might (just might) make a good movie if the right director with an adequate budget attempted to transfer this story to a work of visual art. I’ve seen a lot of movies that were very good that were based on books that were less than spectacular, so such a thing could be possible in this case.  This book was a decent read, but the seams definitely show.  Fans of Michael Crichton would probably enjoy this more than others since it shows traces of his writing styles and ideas, but don’t expect anything as breathtaking as “Jurassic Park”, “Sphere” or “Congo”.