Chimera

September 28, 2015
The intense final volume of Grant’s Parasitology trilogy (after Symbiont) explores the outer limits and devastating effects of pharmaceuticals. The SymboGen Corporation creates tapeworms that are embedded in human bodies to enhance physical capabilities. After years of dormancy, the tapeworms are waking up in their host bodies, wanting to assume their own identities. While some humans are left as zombie-like sleepwalkers, others become chimera, their tapeworms fully integrated with their host bodies. Such is the case with Sally Mitchell, whose tapeworm, assuming her identity, wrestles with questions of humanness and loyalty while attempting to stop her brother, Sherman, from claiming the rest of humanity for his own. Grant’s plot is a zombie apocalypse writ large; her prose is invigorating, and the world she creates is brutal and unforgiving. Her narrative style, with the tapeworm as the central character, is original and enjoyable. This mid-apocalyptic breath of fresh air keeps the reader engaged while undertaking a meaningful exploration of some deep, dark questions. Agent: Diana Fox, Fox Literary.

Starred review from June 4, 2012
The concluding volume of McCarthy’s Subterrene War near-future military-powered science fiction trilogy (after Germline and Exogene) is an impressively deep and profoundly moving character study. Stan Resnick is a Special Forces operative who specializes in tracking down and eliminating escaped genetically engineered soldiers. But as he excels in his military career, his personal life is unraveling. The horrors that Resnick has witnessed—and committed—have left him numb and disconnected form reality. His wife informs him that she is pregnant with another man’s child, and eventually leaves him. Rather than face his demons, Resnick turns to the bottle and immerses himself in a top-secret mission that involves a highly illegal genetic-engineering program and the first moves toward what could be a new world war. The highly detailed, brutal depiction of futuristic warfare brilliantly complements the intimate narrative, which examines the insanity of war and those personally affected by it. Breathtaking and heartrending, this is the future of military science fiction.

September 15, 2015
Grant's tapeworm trilogy concludes with an all-out war. In the two previous books (Parasite, 2013; Symbiont, 2014), readers were introduced to Sally Mitchell, a woman rendered brain dead in an accident and brought back to life by a sentient tapeworm created by Dr. Shanti Cale. A global company distributed the tapeworms as personal medical devices, designed to control insulin, blood pressure, and other health issues. But instead of simply acting as a control, the worms burrowed into the skulls of their hosts and took them over. Sal, the tapeworm, took over the body of Col. Mitchell's daughter Sally, and now the colonel is fighting the tapeworms while his other daughter, Joyce, is also brain dead. Sal hopes to save Joyce but also wants to get back to her fiance, Nathan, Dr. Cale's son, a normal human who knows the woman he loves is a chimera. When Dr. Mitchell has Sal relocated to a quarantine unit in Pleasanton, she and another woman, Carrie, escape and find their way back to Dr. Cale's lab, where Sal is reunited with the Mitchell family and Carrie is imprisoned. Eventually an evil chimera comes for them, and Dr. Cale's faction works to find a way to defeat him and make the world safe for tapeworms masquerading as people. This third volume comes in much too long and contains page upon page of mundanely written internal monologue as Sal whines about her situation, justifies her existence, and explains the twisted science that went into making her. Sal is legions away from a sympathetic heroine, and the constant self-reflection acts as filler for a wafer-thin story. Readers will feel brain-dead themselves after slogging through this deadly dull saga.

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October 15, 2015

The parasite known as Sal is fighting for her life and her family as the outbreak spreads in this final volume of Grant's trilogy (Parasite; Symbiont) in which tapeworms meant to be a medical miracle have turned their human hosts into zombie-like abominations.--MM

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