History Literature / TheRelic

* CoolGuns: FBI agent Pendergast carries a [[RevolversAreJustBetter very non-standard-issue .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda revolver.]]

* WhatAnIdiot: In-universe. Agent Coffey intentionally causes a bottle neck when he leaves only one door out of the Hall of Heavens open and then refuses to let D'Agosta order a sweep of the exhibit because it's been "sealed" for dramatic reveal. [[spoiler: His actions directly lead to the discovery of a body in the exhibit by a packed crowd of people, which then panic and stampede out the bottleneck, killing at least a dozen people in the panic.]]
** It gets worse as the crisis escalates. Agent Coffey ignores all warnings from the (surviving) police officers about the Mbwun. ''Every single request for backup'' places a strong emphasis on high powered weapons being required; Coffey brushes them off. This directly leads to the SWAT team being wiped out, as they aren't expecting the Mbwun at all. [[spoiler: He's eventually relieved from his duty, but by then it's already too late for this to matter.]]
* WriteWhatYouKnow: Co-author Douglas Preston started his career as a science writer at the American Museum of Natural History, from which he draws his detailed knowledge of anthropology, biology, and scientific procedures. His experience at the AMNH also informs the setting: the novel's "New York Museum of Natural History" [[RealPlaceBackground is a ''very'' thinly disguised copy]] of the AMNH. Most of the descriptions of the Museum, including the shadowy back corridors full of cabinets and crates with unknown contents, are quite accurate, although the AMNH doesn't have any {{HumanoidAbomination}}s lurking in its depths. Probably.

* ShownTheirWork: As they're known for doing, the authors did a lot of research on anthropology and biology for the novel and scientific procedures are [[InfoDump explained in detail]].

* MainliningTheMonster: At the end, the monster-creating reovirus is used by one of the survivors to concoct a new street drug, Glaze. [[spoiler: It turns out to have some ''nasty'' side effects in the sequel, and its derivatives are even worse.]]

* CoolGuns: FBI agent Pendergast carries a [[RevolversAreJustBetter very non-standard-issue .45 caliber Colt Anaconda revolver.]]

* MisaimedMarketing: In-Universe, in the immediate aftermath of the story, there are attempts to profit from the Museum Beast Murders with everything from action figures to a Saturday morning cartoon show. [[RealityEnsues Predictably]], given that the subject is a horrific chimera monster with a taste for human brains, these cheap and tasteless cash-ins are all said to have failed rather quickly.

* InfantImmortality: Averted, as the first museum victims are two young boys who wander off in a closed area... who had their brains eaten. The movie turns and plays it straight though, changing the boys to the discoverers of the body and the victim becomes the [[BlackDudeDiesFirst old black security guard.]]

* ContrivedCoincidence: Dr. Frock is a scientist who creates a hypothesis where occasionally every sixty to seventy million years, evolution creates a grotesque, short-lived superpredator form as a result of a factor in its environment, an idea that others ridicule for lack of physical evidence. By incredible chance, the museum he works as is unknowingly the hunting ground of the sole living example of his theory, a creature that normally lives in South America to boot.

* TheUnpronounceable: Go ahead, try to say "Mbwun" without adding a vowel in there somewhere.

* ViralTransformation: [[spoiler: The reovirus creates monsters out of anything that ingests it]] by inserting saurian and reptilian DNA into host cells; but the victim needs a steady supply of specialized hormones to [[spoiler: retain its new form, the victim-turned-monster]]; in order to acquire these hormones, the victim must go right to the richest source available and ''[[HorrorHunger eat the hypothalamus]]'' of its victims or go mad from the pain of being unable to sustain [[spoiler: its new form]]. [[spoiler:Notably, it is completely possible to engineer the reovirus to become a simply watered down version by using animals that aren't dinosaurs and angry killing machines (in Kawakita's case, rabbits) and diluting the reovirus's existing genes with their genes. Kawakita makes a tidy profit in the end by keeping a sample of the reovirus and being a drug dealer known for pushing "Glaze", a drug with no ill effects.]].

''If you're looking for the film, go [[Film/TheRelic here.]]''

** It gets worse as the crisis escalates. Agent Coffey ignores all warnings from the (surviving) police officers about the Mbwun. ''Every single request for backup'' places a strong emphasis on high powered weapons being required; Coffey brushes them off. This directly leads to the SWAT team being wiped out, as they aren't expecting the Mbwun at all. [[spoiler: He's eventually relieved from his duty, but by then it's already too late for this to matter.]]

* GoMadFromTheRevelation [[spoiler: Cuthbert goes insane from being trapped with the monster.]]

* TheReveal: [[spolier: The monster isn't just some animal that was transformed by eating the Mbwun plant, but was in fact a human being (specifically the missing Julian Whittlesey) that was transformed by the Kothoga tribe and must kill to avoid going mad with pain]]

* MixAndMatchCritters: The Mbwun is part primate ([[spoiler:more specifically, human]]), and part reptile (heavily implied to be dinosaur).

* MixAndMatchCritters: The Mbwun is part primate ([[spoiler: more specifically, human]]), and part reptile (heavily implied to be dinosaur).

[[caption-width-right:299: ''Franchise/JurassicPark'' [[XMeetsY meets]] ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' set in the Museum of Natural History ]]

* TragicMonster: Mbwun, once its full origin is revealed.

* NonActionGuy: Bill Smithback, who is described as middle-aged, slightly balding and a BigEater, certainly not a {{Badass}} of any kind.

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: The main antagonist of the book is Mbwun, a man-eating reptilian monster [[spoiler:although it was formerly human.]] This is a stark contrast to all future books in the Pendergast series, where the antagonists sometimes have unnatural abilities, but are still always human criminals or villains.

* WhatAnIdiot: In-universe. Agent Coffey intentionally causes a bottle neck when he leaves only one door out of the Hall of Heavens open and then refuses to let D'Agosta order a sweep of the exhibit because it's been "sealed" for dramatic reveal. [[spoiler: His actions directly lead to the discovery of a body in the exhibit by a packed crowd of people, which then panic and stampede out the bottleneck, killing at least a dozen people in the panic.]]

* EldritchAbomination: The Mbwun.