Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead

In my mind, Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead was released to coincide with the theatrical release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to reignite interest in the character across different kinds of media. However, now that I look at the dates, Crystal Skull hit cinemas in May 2008 and this novel came along in September 2009, well over a year later. Funny how the mind can work like that.

Another thought I’ve lived with for the past 15 years is the novel wasn’t going to be particularly good, hence why I hadn’t bothered reading it until now. That was my sense via people who had reviewed it as poor but probably more so by the fact that this didn’t bloom into a new and long-running series of novels like the ones I’ve reviewed on this site, from 1991s Peril at Delphi to 1999s Secret of the Sphinx.

Well, I’m happy to say I was wrong across the board on this and am reminded that there’s no substitute for actually reading something for yourself. I think this could be one of the best Indy novels out there.

Which is not to say this is a super traditional Indiana Jones adventure. And maybe that’s where it trips some people up. It largely takes place in a jungle – not too bad by Indy standards – but the discovery of the McGuffin is reasonably perfunctory and based on real-life archaeological practice. No figuring out tricky puzzles in an ancient tomb here. And we don’t get a crowd-pleasing sidekick like Sallah, but “Mac” McHale instead – you know, the guy from Crystal Skull who was a bit Marmite with the audience.

Throw in the way that the novel is set in Haiti during WW2 and utilises a heavy amount of voodoo – both to control living people and to reanimate dead people – and I can see where this might start to lose people, but I actually found it pretty fascinating. Indy, Mac, and the heroine of the story, Marie, getting pursued through a deadly jungle by zombies, while competing German and Japanese groups are also searching for the McGuffin – a giant black pearl called the Heart of Darkness – is pretty heady stuff.

The author, Steve Perry, is a very competent writer who I previously knew best for the Star Wars novel Shadows of the Empire and I genuinely spent a lot of the novel thinking, this is really good stuff… how on Earth did this not help kick-start a new series of novels? This is nowhere near a bad novel in my book.

Sure, there were things that bugged me from time to time. At one stage Indy makes a crack about wishing for a Sikorsky helicopter when helicopters were a very rare concept in 1943 and if I’m not mistaken, the one he’s wishing for wouldn’t even enter service for another year. I get that Perry is trying to shoehorn something ‘modern’ into the story to make this feel like a slightly different Indiana Jones character to the one we know from the 1930s in the original movies, but it overreached a little there.

To close, I reiterate that this slightly more grounded version of Indiana Jones (grounded if you don’t count zombies and godlike beings granting wishes to voodoo practitioners!), might not land properly for some readers. But that said, the reasonably broad dislike out there for the novel is something I just don’t understand at all. I really enjoyed reading about Indy and Mac being placed in some really tough situations and not having some ridiculous incidents or coincidences pull them through. Their whole time in the jungle feels suitably deadly. Even the Germans and Japanese on their tail aren’t cliche, chew-the-scenery, cookie-cutter types. They feel like real people with quite understandable motivations.

Yes, the more I think about it, the more I think this is one of the best Indy novels. No more, no less. 9/10.