Crichton Good For More Scares With Those Big Green People Eaters

“The Lost World” By Michael Crichton (Knopf, $25.95)

Gather round, children. Nice Mr. Crichton is going to give you a science lesson. It will get a little tedious, go on a bit long, but then nice Mr. Crichton is going to scare you near to death.

Won’t that be nice, kids?

You know it. If you’re reading this, the action-packed sequel to the action-packed “Jurassic Park,” it’s obvious you’ve longed for the pitter-patter of pre-historic feet looking for lunch. Preferably Homo sapiens, served rare.

In fact, Tyrannosaurus rex and his kind seem to so enjoy a good human, it makes you wonder what they ate when we weren’t around. But don’t ask Mr. Crichton. Please, don’t ask Mr. Crichton. He lives to explain. And he’ll keep explaining until everyone, including the kid slumped over his desk in the back row, gets it.

Which is the problem with the early chapters. He front-loads “The Lost World” with science, so that we understand it, so as to get it out of the way. Yes, it’s all integral to the story, and it’s worth the wait, but we long for something green and mean.

Like, say, a velociraptor. Oh, the rapture of raptors, a dinosaur so vicious you’re reminded that extinction isn’t always bad. Just knowing that Mr. Crichton is sure to have booked them for a return engagement makes you want to surf the science and get to it.

And when the wave crashes, it crashes.

Our story: Ian Malcolm (yes, he’s back) is forced to mount a rescue mission when an impetuous colleague, Richard Levine, goes missing on a small Costa Rican island. Levine has been lured south by several reports of the washed-up remains of creatures he’s convinced are dinosaurs.

Malcolm tells him he’s crazy. Malcolm tells him he’s wrong. Malcolm also fails to mention that interesting new theme park he visited in Costa Rica a few years back.

So, it’s Malcolm to the rescue. Malcolm and engineer Jack Thorne, his assistant Eddie, biologist Sarah Harding, as well as two stowaway children, 13-year-old Kelly and 11-year-old Arby. It is the way of books like this that as each character is introduced, you size up his likelihood of becoming dinosaur chow.

The island is stocked with the overrun of entrepreneur John Hammond’s product line. Hammond was the creator of Jurassic Park and the island is where he manufactured its attractions. Here the dinosaurs roam free.

Of course, this group of professionals - Levine is quickly found - would do nothing to disturb the ecology that is nurturing the natives. The humans exude respect and wish only to observe and record. But always, always there are bad guys. Lewis Dodgson and Jeff Rossiter come to the island with the evil intent of thieving dinosaur eggs so their company, Biosyn, can raise them domestically. American ingenuity at work again.

Yeah. Go ahead. Steal a baby-to-be from Tyrannosaurus rex and let’s see what happens. Why not poke a stick in his eye while you’re at it?

All heck breaks loose. And rex is good for a whole lot of heck. He doesn’t exactly charge about the island saying: “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a dumb A-mer-i-cun.” But close enough.

Unfortunately, though, T. rex, like some snotty Europeans, can’t tell the difference between a good American and an ugly one.

But Crichton has his people fighting to the last. In a glorious moment, when everything seems lost, the surviving party turns to the 13-year-old girl to execute a maneuver that might possibly save them. For that, if we were going to be big about it, we can almost forgive the author for “Disclosure.”

At any rate, “The Lost World” is sure scary and we like it like that.