Sigler, Scott: Infected
Infected (2008)
Written by: Scott Sigler
Genre: Science Fiction Thriller
Pages: 339
I first discovered this book through John Scalzi's "The Big Idea" series over at Whatever. The premise sounded cool, the cover was also cool, so when we stumbled upon the book at Hastings, I convinced my husband to pick it up. He read it right away and enjoyed it enough to pick up the sequel.
I, however, am just now getting around to it.
The premise: yet another novel in the ever-popular genre of humans getting infected by alien/viruses/parasites, Infected follows the mystery of how seemingly benign Americans suddenly go psycho and start murdering everyone around them. It's a mystery that attracts the attention of the CIA and the CDC, and everyone's trying to find one of these victims ALIVE to figure out what's making them go loco. Enter in Perry Dawsey, former linebacker now desk-jockey, who wakes up with the rash from hell and soon discovers that he's got a battle of his own to fight, because whatever's growing in his body is determined to take over.
Vague spoilers.
At first, I was taken in with the fast pace and the voice of the narrative. The voice wore away pretty quickly, because it's obvious that despite the multiple third person POV's, the narrative voice is its own character, and it's the same voice no matter whose head we're in, man or woman or, in this case, virus. It's a bit snarky and condescending, especially it resorts to jibes such as, "believe it or not children." The chapter headings get really annoying, really fast, and then there is the fact we're following a handful of POV's through-out the novel, and unfortunately, I can never bring myself to care about any of those POV's.
Sigler apparently has a huge following, especially since he previously published his work as podcasts on his blog and had over 30,000 readers. I can see why he's popular: he's getting compared to writers like Palahniuk and Crichton, and hell, that was enough to get my attention, but his voice lacks the seduction of Palahniuk, and his thriller lacks the level of tension of a Crichton. Sure, Sigler READS fast, and he's gruesome and unrelenting on his detail, making the reader squirm as they wonder whether or not Sigler will actually GO there, and then cringing when he does. So I can see why people are making the comparisons. I can. Hell, there's a scene describing how one of the seeds didn't take, how it was located at Perry's eyebrow, and the description of that fucker had me squirming and wanting to pop and pull an imaginary zit that wasn't there.
So yeah, Sigler's got something going for him. Unfortunately for me, I start to get jaded really fast, because Perry does one more horrible thing to his body after another, just trying to get rid of the Triangles that are infecting him. And then there's the Triangles themselves: every time they "spoke," I kept hearing Andy Serkis's Gollum in my head. Not sure if Sigler wanted that, but at least I amused myself.
The thing that gets me is the premise I read on Scalzi's interview sounded REALLY cool. I'll quote Sigler himself: What would it be like if a tiny, sentient creature could terraform the human body, hijacking natural processes to change our bodies into an environment more suited to them?
Awesome, right? But the book doesn't read like that AT ALL. Let's face it, there are plenty of body-snatcher-esque stories out there, and while all of them are different, the basic premise is the same. And that's the problem: because it reads like such a story, it takes for-freaking-EVER for the book to really go anywhere. It's just one little scene of characters trying to figure stuff out after another, and really, the results just aren't fascinating because the reader KNOWS what the cause of the psychotic behavior really is, and the reader just wants to see where it'll all lead.
I don't know how many books Sigler plans for this overall story. I'm guessing it's at least a trilogy, but frankly, book one could've easily been reduced to fifty pages, just so we could've gotten the bigger story off the ground. Sure, then we would've lost all the character-building scenes we get with Perry and his personal battle with the Triangles (and the ghost of his father, oddly enough), but you know what? I DIDN'T LIKE PERRY. Never did. By the end of the book, I had no real inclination if I wanted him to survive or not, and that's just not good. He reads too much like a stereotype. An admittedly two-dimensional stereotype, but a type nonetheless. And I think part of the problem is taking a character that's borderline unsympathetic anyway and showing his descent into madness. Madness is hard to pull off anyway, and this just wasn't a good combination. I hated that he never tried to hold on to the good of himself, that in the end, it was his father's abusive lessons that saved Perry's ass. Do I really want to read another book featuring this guy? Or the female CDC officer suddenly in a hugely important position where her male counterparts keep having to remind her to grow a pair so people don't walk all over her? Or the veteran from Nam who's now in the CIA and is really too old for this shit? No, I don't. Lots of other people DO, and that's great for them, but frankly, this would entertain me much more if it were a movie. Or maybe a demented television series on the CHILLER channel on DirecTV.
My Rating
Wish I'd Borrowed It: this book reads like another one of those fast-paced, thriller SF novels for people who don't really read SF. Despite what the rave reviews are telling me, this is no mash of Chuck Palahniuk and Michael Crichton, at least, not a pleasing enough mash for me to really sit back and enjoy this novel. Sigler does great work with extraordinarily gruesome detail, I'll give him that, but I didn't care about the characters, and really the premise didn't pay off the slightest. It may be the first book in a larger trilogy/series, but I'm not reading any further.
Cover Commentary: you know, it's sad, because the image of the Triangle as the eye was really an alluring one, but it never pays off in the book. Sure, we get that image, but only as a kind of hallucination, not as a sure-fire way to tell who's been infected and who hasn't. That's a shame, but the cover does relate a certain creepiness that's definitely there in the novel, and if the cover freaks you out in any way, you should back away from this novel slowly, because Sigler WILL gross you out.
Next up:
Benighted by Kit Whitfield