Mira Grant, Symbiont (2014)

This, the second volume in Grant's "Parasitology" dyad, turns out actually to be the middle volume of an on-the-hoof refashioning of Grant's "Parasitology" series into a trilogy. Maybe vol 3 will turn into a two-part conclusion, which in turn will yield four instalments and so on. I don't know. At any rate, the premise here is that near-future humanity all have special 'SymboGen' tapeworms in their guts to enable them to combat disease, obesity and so on. The tapeworm in question is called 'The Intestinal Bodyguard', which I don't believe would get past the product development Beta Testing stage, name-wise. Personally, I'd have suggested 'Gut Lord', and licensed that Blur song for advertising purposes. Anyway, not to get distracted: the iron law of Frankensteinian Unintended Consequences means that these tapeworms malfunction, become self-aware, clamber up through their host's bodies, killing some people and turning hordes of others into zombies. The z-word is, naturally, never used: the afflicted are called 'sleepwalkers'. But don't let the terminology fool you. This is pure AFZN, an acronym which here stands for Another Fucking Zombie Novel.

Grant deserves credit for the sheer boldness and oddity of writing a tapeworm/human interspecies romance. The thing is, she doesn't take proper advantage of the weirdness of this conceit. Repeating the phrase 'a tapeworm in a human suit' is as far as the novel goes by way of flagging up the David-Cronenberg-ish yuk! potential. In the telling the fact that our narrator is 'a chimera of human and tapeworm, a dead body piloted through the world by an invertebrate' [359] is handled in a clean-as-clean-can-be fashion. The reader is given great wodges of talking, exposition, padding, running about, pseudo science and hand-waving: 'the science was all gibberish delivered by people wearing white coats and serious expressions. The fact that I was actually a tapeworm in a woman-suit made no more or less sense than anything else' [63].

Bottom line: the book stands or falls on how far it convinces you of the resonant pathos of its central conceit, viz. 'I would love him until the day I died and we would never be the same species' [367]. It's an emotional swipe that completely failed to land, for me. Your wormileage may vary. 'And don't forget I'm... I'm also just a parasitic flatworm of the genus Platyhelminthes Cestodea, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.' Without that emotional piquancy, I found reading this long narrative increasingly wearing. It's a book with the texture of cotton wadding, the dialogue is flat, the scenes where the characters are in peril from the zombies sleepwalkers are unexciting, there are various holes in the plot, and I was left with no desire to read volume 3. Thog might like it, though:

His affronted expression [was] melting into guilt. [30]

There was a hand on my shoulder. I didn't want to think about it. Thinking about it would have meant admitting that I had a shoulder. [49]

As with the gurney from before, I was strapped to the surface that I was on top of. [158]

I swallowed hard, trying to convince my salivary glands to do their job. [159]

Sherman's eyes raked dispassionately over the three men. [192]

Gunshots. They came quick and efficient, one after the other, like someone running a hand along a typewriter. [273]

Her bare skin [was] humping up into goosebumps as the air-conditioning rolled over it. [364]

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head until my hair whipped against my forehead like a hundred tiny, stinging lashes. [365]

The hot/cold slush in my belly was beginning to melt, becoming a warm, solid mass of resignation. [406]

I shook off the veil of disgust that had settled over me. [434]

My favourite of these is probably the Ernie Wise-ish one from p.158. And so ends the review what I wrote.