Chasing the Roswell Alien

By Stefan Isaksson

Chasing the Roswell Alien
Glenn Marcel
The Invisible College Press
279 pages
ISBN: 1931468257

Chasing the Roswell Alien is Glenn Marcel’s second book about tabloid journalist Melissa Vaughn, whom he introduced for the first time in his last book, Chasing Elvis. This time around the young journalist ends up in Roswell, New Mexico, where she starts digging deep into secrets and conspiracies regarding the famous crash of 1947. And what she finally finds is perhaps just as frightening as it’s fascinating.

However, obviously I won’t give away the ending. But what I will do is telling you a thing or two about the book. Glenn Marcel – who is related to Jesse Marcel, one of the key players in the real Roswell incident – has written a thriller/mystery novel about this the most famous of all cases in the history of ufology. Unfortunately though, the novel is actually quite sloppy, and I cannot give it a better grade than a C. Not very bad, nor very good. It’s not that there’s a lack of intrigues, sudden turns of events, and action. On the contrary, the story charges on at top speed, new characters come and go, and you won’t find many quiet moments throughout all the 279 pages of the book.

So why, then, is the final grade no more than a C? Well, again, it’s a sloppy piece of literature. The chapters are short and lacking of depth; they only contain what is ABSOLUTELY necessary for the story and definitely nothing else. The reader is never allowed to gain a deeper insight into what’s going on, and this total lack of mood and atmosphere results in the book completely lacking any absorbing elements whatsoever. I found the characters to be more like robots than people, none of them appear to have any sense of feelings, and this result in the whole shebang becoming one big illusory happening. It’s not because of the fact that extraterrestrials and parallel dimensions are brought into the story, it’s because of the sad fact that not a single character feels real. Here and there people learn of amazing secrets of the state and new and awesome facts that are sure to upset their entire worldview and turn their life upside down, and all they can do is shrug their shoulders and mutter something in the sense of “yeah, well, so what?”. And one scene that was especially irritating is when an airplane has crashed into a dangerous river. Water starts filling the cockpit, but the passengers are only able to joke about it and being sarcastic, even though their very lives are in danger.

Furthermore, the book is arranged in a weird way. Melissa Vaughn, the brave heroine, doesn’t appear until you reach page 121. This makes the preceding 120 pages seem extremely lengthy.

You can absolutely read Chasing the Roswell Alien even though you might not have ever heard of the Roswell Incident before, and if you do know something about it it might be fun to take part of a fictive story dealing with a real event. Still, the book is far from being as great as it could have been; if only Marcel had taken the time to make his characters seem a little more alive. And I wish he hadn’t been in such a hurry writing it. Perhaps he wasn’t, but that’s definitely the feeling you get from reading it.