Sarah Gruen’s Water for Elephants, a modest but affecting novel about a travelling circus during the Great Depression, revealed an author with a dry wit and an elegant style. It left one hoping her next book would be as good (or better). Unfortunately, Ape House, Gruen’s followup, reveals a penchant for clunky similes, cartoonish-supporting characters and pat resolutions. It leaves one hoping, but not entirely confident, her next book won’t feature more of the same.

It’s hard to know why things went awry, but many of Ape House’s flaws stem from its greater likeness to a screenplay than a novel, whether or not this was deliberate. The first chapter, describing a meeting between Isabel Duncan, a scientist who’s taught a group of bonobo apes sign language, and a visiting reporter named John Thigpen, suggests an interesting story about an animal that’s most famous for its busy sex life but is also quite intelligent. But it’s not long before the book begins a series of outlandish twists and turns that might work in a Hollywood movie but feel out of place here. Ape House is no worse than the typical “literary” selections at a drugstore or an airport, but if Gruen had greater ambitions than this (and it seems she did), they’re not realized.

The melodrama begins when a mysterious gang of thugs sets off a bomb at the fictional Kansas research facility where the apes live, badly injuring Isabel and allowing the bonobos to fall into the hands of a sinister porn producer, Ken Faulks. He enlists them in a new TV show, also called Ape House, which Gruen later describes (as if her readers have all been living in a cave for the past decade), as part of “the phenomenon known as reality television.”

Gruen clearly has a passion for these apes, which are in fact far more interesting than many of her human characters. But the idea this show could become, as she writes, “the biggest phenomenon in the history of modern media” seems a bit of a stretch. The novel is set, after all, in an era of countless reality series which have never held that lofty perch, and Ape House, in which the bonobos get it on constantly but don’t do much else, hardly seems any different

But Gruen, while inspired by her visit to an actual bonobo colony in Iowa, doesn’t seem too concerned about realism here. Few of her supporting characters have much credibility, from a young lab assistant named Celia who strongly resembles a certain girl with a dragon tattoo, to Ken, who’s so relentlessly evil you half-expect him to be stroking a white cat. Isabel, who remains something of a cypher throughout, and John, who’s simply dull, are a bit more plausible but not especially compelling.

Gruen’s prose, which features such lines as “the mere smell launched contractions within his diaphragm that would have measured seven on the Richter scale” is often execrable. But her biggest failing is that for all the hijinks (another explosion, treacherous lovers, and plenty of other one-dimensional villains), there are few unexpected consequences. All the scoundrels get what’s coming to them, and all the good guys seem destined to live happily ever after. This makes for a pretty underwhelming ending, but for fans of sentimentality, it may be a redeeming feature.

For fans of Gruen, though (or at least of Water for Elephants), Ape House can only come as a disappointment. The subject could easily have made for a novel that is both gripping and realistic and suitable for reading as well as filming. But this isn’t.