The bugs are back — and they’ve learned how to reproduce — in CONTAGIOUS, Scott Sigler’s sequel to INFECTED. That novel told of the alien virus that manifests itself in human host bodies as little blue triangles, rewires their brains and forces them to kill. Here, a whole new batch has just fallen over the skies of Michigan.
In focus of the first novel was Perry Dawsey, a former football player who had the unfortunate luck to contract this outer-space malady, growing to a point of madness where he took chicken scissors to his junk. Now, Perry’s back — well, most of him, anyway — and he’s hunting down others like him so he can kill them, hopefully eradicating the world of the triangular threat.
This helps the government agencies in tracking the infected, but the biggest problem lies in the town of Gaylord, where a sweet little 7-year-old girl named Chelsea soon acquires 1,715 of the crawlers while making a snowman outside with her family. Before long, she’s hearing voices, and they’re telling her to do some very bad things.
Structured as a nine-day ordeal, CONTAGIOUS requires no settling into it, no gearing up — it just takes off and goes, making good on its action-packed promise. The least exciting part of it are the chapters that follow the military arm descending upon the hatchlings; although the bugs are described as pyramid-shaped monsters with vertical eyes and tentacled legs — slight shades of STARSHIP TROOPERS there — the novel’s juice all lay with the people who know not what they have become.
Although Sigler’s main intent is in building suspense, I like his bits of disarming humor, primarily in chapter headings like “Bitches Get Stitches” or “Inbred Trailer-Trash Hicks Watching Springer.” It also results in the occasional line of questionable tough-guy dialogue (“My ass is made of gold”), yet for every wrong-ringing instance like that, there’s one that truly is golden, such as his dead-on description of an Applebee’s: “Kitsch lined the walls. Some Top 40 shit played on the sound system. There were tables filled with fat men, fat women and fat kids.”
What Sigler lacks in style, he makes up for in speed. That said, he needs to hit the brakes a little earlier, as CONTAGIOUS is too long. It’s nearly 100 pages longer than its predecessor, and there are too many sequences that seem Xeroxed from earlier chapters — say, of how the virus does its bidding — and don’t add anything to what we’ve previously been told. Still, the story is fairly streamlined, delivering meaty chunks of sci-fi and horror, so you’re apt to get your money’s worth. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• ANCESTOR by Scott Sigler
• INFECTED by Scott Sigler
Related posts:
- Infected
- NEWSGASM >> 3.18.08
- The Morningstar Strain: Thunder and Ashes
- Public Enemy
- QUICKGASM >> 4.11.07
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
And I still think the cover looks like MY BLOODY VALENTINE got dressed up for Christmas.
What, the killers from MY BLOODY VALENTINE can’t enjoy the Holiday Season? Man, what a scrooge!
I checked out Infected based on the review here and before finishing that a few days ago picked up Contagious, now my current read. What fun! Equal blends of thriller, horror, sci-fi and “B” movie pulp, Infected (and, so far, Contagious) deliver on the hype (and what hype there has been).
Though cover blurbs are not always to be trusted, comparing the writing to early Stephen King (blue-collar feel worksmanship) or Michael Crichton (superscience)is apt.
Of course Sigler has his own voice, and it screams through quite clearly. I eagerly await Pandemic and look forward to getting some re-releases of earlier works. Kudos!
-Erik