Crawlers

November 3, 2003
In Shirley's frightening new novel, he extends the smart work he did in Demons
(2002), investing a fierce genre tale with spiritual import. Here Shirley reaches back to the classic pulp scenario of a small town beset by an alien invasion. In this case, though the townspeople of Quiebra, Calif., initially assume that the capsule that crashes originated in space, it's actually a satellite put into orbit by a hush-hush military research outfit fearful of the out-of-control nanotechnology experiment it contains. The experiment involves nanoparticles that have evolved into a kind of group mind (as in Michael Crichton's Prey
), taking over human (and animal) hosts and, by incorporating pieces of hardware, refashioning those hosts into an amalgam of human and machine ("Deputy Sprague's neck was gone, replaced with a metal stalk..."). Humans differ as to their vulnerability to takeover, with some adults more resistant than others, and younger people quite resistant; this allows Shirley to use teenagers—a likely readership for the book—as the novel's heroes, and his understanding of teen ways and patterns of speech is deep and exact. This tack also allows for some profound emotion, as kids—particularly Adair and Waylon Leverton, whose father is the first person taken over in Quiebra—witness the soul-destruction and/or death of their parents. The novel's depiction of humans devolving into group-mind–controlled machines proves an excellent metaphor for Shirley's take here on the human condition, which posits that some of us are already machinelike and others more "awake"; but the narrative does slide slightly into didacticism as it elaborates these understandings. Overall, though, this is an exciting novel of ideas wrapped in red-hot pulp.

October 15, 2003
Three years after a government experiment goes dreadfully wrong, a small community receives an apparently unearthly visitation in the form of strange lights in the sky and the sudden impact of an airborne vehicle. Soon the town's population become the victims of an insidious force intent on transforming all life on Earth into something other than human-crawlers. The author of Demons and Wetbones crafts another visceral chiller that draws its impact from sympathetic characters caught in the grip of powers they cannot control. A good choice for most horror collections.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2003
Shirley's latest begins horrifyingly--a top-secret government lab is destroyed by nasty, experimental nanotechnology--and just gets creepier, though more subtly so for quite a while, with just flashes of strange things in the woods and odd behavior by the involved populace. The comfortable town of Quiebra is in deadly danger, but the government, afraid of what will happen if the outside world finds out what has been let loose, is playing its cards close to its chest. For the Quiebrans, however, their predicament seems at first only a streak of light in the night sky and a potentially profitable salvage operation for Adair Leverton's father. Shirley's characters are believably flawed and variable, while his nasty little nanocreatures are, well, nasty (also singleminded about spreading). Meanwhile, his prose is often quite wonderful, even when he is describing something stomach-turningly icky. This portrayal of the dangers of secret experimentation with the diabolically dangerous is unnerving, not least because it is frighteningly convincing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)