Waypoint. A book review by Elliot Jackman
BY BEN HASKETT
Independent Author / Publisher
ASIN: B01M5GKBQM
Print Length: 159 pages
Print ISBN: ISBN-10: 0692794972, ISBN-13: 978-0692794975
Waypoint is written by Ben Haskett. Ben’s story is about an alien abduction. The story moves quickly, in the respect that not much time and effort is spent on building up the knowledge and background of the main protagonist, but introduces you to the character and then he is whisked away into a alien abduction scenario. The first thing that comes to mind to compare the story to is “Cujo”, where the background and motivations of the protagonist is not particularly important, but the scenario they are in is the focal point. The fact that he is abducted in the first few pages of the book bears this out.
The main Earth born character, Gil is introduced and seems to be a fairly average guy, maybe a little self centered/self-absorbed, but still fairly average. The abduction scenario leads you to believe that he is chosen at random, as a neighbor is pulled up as well, but falls back to Earth.
Gil finds himself in a location that he doesn’t know with alien beings staring down at him. He reacts like we’d might expect with severe panic. As the scenario plays out, Gil does his best to use observation and his knowledge, base solely on stories and movies about alien abductions, to help cope with the situation.
While he tries to communicate with the aliens, they don’t really acknowledge his attempts. Three of the aliens seem to have some compassion towards Gil, but one seems to harbor hostility towards him. Much of the story revolves around Gil’s attempts to understand why they took him and what their end goal is. In addition, certain actions don’t seem to make sense.
For instance, Gil thinks that they are going to probe and possibly torture him for knowledge about our species, but he soon realizes that there is more to the story. One of the aliens makes an amateur attempt to draw blood from Gil and then make a concoction that he injects into himself. This concoction kills the alien.
Gil comes to the conclusion that they are trying to figure something out, that maybe they are sick and trying to use him to find a cure.
Gil eventually figures out how to manipulate some of the control panels in the ship and gets out of the holding area he’s in. Wandering around the ship helps to enlighten him as to what is happening, along with the technology they are depending on to conduct their activities. The remainder of the conflict centers around the one alien that has seemingly innate hostility towards Gil.
The story revolves around Gil trying to figure out what is going on, as well as how he could possibly escape. His eventual communication with his nemesis on the ship only serves to re-enforce his theory that the aliens are sick and looking for a cure. The story he gets from the alien, however, only establish the fact that they are indeed monsters that have little regard for human life forms.
I really enjoyed reading this tale and found that I didn’t want to leave it for long, so that I could find out the ultimate goal of the aliens. I feel that you’ll find this a very interesting tale as well.