Years ago while still in college I spent one summer working as a nightwatchman for a popular kitchen stoneware company. Not much happened during my shift so I spent the majority of time listening to the radio and reading Harold Robbins novels. 

Even though I once saw an enormous rat chewing on a bone in the factory’s basement, nothing really scary ever happened at night. It was just me and a handful of hardworking ceramicists dutifully working the graveyard shift. 

Bruce Cooper, a prison guard in Sean P. Gibson’s new novel Prehistoric Nightmare: The Graveyard Shift, had a completely different experience than I did. He went to work one night and found himself face to face with a gaggle of aggressive (and hungry) dinosaurs.

But were they dinosaurs from 66 million years ago? Bruce wasn’t sure. More than likely they were not of this world. “They were spawns of the devil,” he told himself. 

The creatures were actually bio-tech monsters pumped full of DNA variants including, but not limited to, dinosaurs. Some were tall, some were short, some were red and some were green, but they all had teeth like knives and fingers like swords. 

One particularly nasty beast had two Tyrannosaurus rex-like heads sitting atop muscly necks like bowling trophies. Said the author: “Its claws were as sharp as a wolf’s cunning and teeth as deadly as a crocodile’s embrace.” So frightful was this monster that it had to be either Lucifer’s right-hand demon or the Dark Lord himself. 

Cooper needed help getting out of that prison ASAP. He couldn’t do it all by himself. His coworkers were dead and all of the prisoners had been slaughtered. He needed the police. He needed the army—he needed help from anyone he could find. Even if it was his ex-wife.

He and Myla were married for 16 years before they eventually divorced. Even though they were guards at the same prison, they were no longer on speaking terms, professionally or personally. Reuniting during a dinosaur apocalypse wasn’t something either of them anticipated. 

There was a bit of awkwardness between the two ex-spouses (as expected), but not enough to ruin the momentum of this fast-paced dino thriller. Kudos to the author for keeping his third act tight. 

The two former lovers actually made great partners. Through teamwork (and a lot of luck) they made it to the prison’s emergency access gate. They knew it was their only shot at survival. What they found at the gate, unfortunately, was a total shocker. 

I enjoyed Prehistoric Nightmare: The Graveyard Shift, but I have one negative comment. The novel concludes three weeks later in the hospital where Cooper reads a newspaper account of the dinosaur prison invasion. It’s a big chunk of exposition that explains the whole situation from top to bottom. Fair enough. But the news article is totally dappy. Any reporter with a J-School diploma hanging on the wall (like me) will wince at the weak attempt at journalese. 

[ Prehistoric Nightmare: The Graveyard Shift / By Sean P. Gibson / First Printing: January 2025 / ISBN: 9798303822214 ]