‘CURSE OF THE MONKEY GOD’ Producers Help Promote Doug Preston’s New Book

Bill Benenson and Steve Elkins joined bestselling author Doug Preston at a book signing in Pasadena, CA, one of several stops on Preston’s book tour, to help promote the recently published THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD. Tracing a series of expeditions Elkins mounted beginning in 1994, the book chronicles the numerous obstacles the team, which included Preston, had to overcome as they surveyed the second largest rainforest in the Americas for signs of a lost city. The team’s efforts were rewarded when their airborne LIDAR-equipped plane identified manmade structures in a remote, unexplored valley in the Mosquitia jungle of Honduras. A ground truthing expedition confirmed the existence of pyramids, plazas, terracing, possibly a ball court, and, remarkably, a cache of dozens of carved stone artifacts peering out of the ground, apparently having been abandoned for hundreds of years. Their elation over the discoveries was overshadowed, however, when more than half the group was struck by a horrific parasite– perhaps the Curse of the Monkey God, indeed.