Prey

I just can't finish this book. The story seems interesting enough, but the author drags it along with too much medical/science talk. That alone is enough reason for me to place this book on my “abandoned” shelf. Perhaps I'll come back to it later, but right now I have too many other good books waiting to be read.

Infected is the story of Perry Dawsy, a former college football star who's left working in tech support after a knee injury leaves him unable to play. Perry's the kind of guy who's got a lot of anger stored up inside him, and when he gets infected with a new disease that threatens to drive him insane and take control of his body, that anger threatens to come out. At the same time, a group of scientists and special agents are trying to find out the links between several mass killings throughout the US, in which the killers keep babbling about triangles before they themselves die.

I really liked this story - Sigler has a great ability to tell an engaging story, and manages to do a good job of tying the personal story of Dawsy in with the larger reality that the scientists are dealing with. He also manages to tell a story that is gory, and full of horrific scenes, but in a way that provides added emphasis for what's happening to the characters, rather than just being horrific for the sake of being horrific.

Now, having said that, there are a couple of caveats I should add:
1) This is not a story for everyone. There are a lot of very violent scenes in it, and a few points that just freaked me out, so if you don't like that kind of thing, you might want to skip it.
2) If you listen to the ‘podiobook' version, be aware that there's a promo at the start of the very first episode that spoils the whole damn story. I can understand Sigler and the publishers wanting to promote his newest work, but it really annoyed me.
3) Also relevant to just the audio version: Sigler's not the best at doing accents. His ‘normal' voice is great for audio, but not so much when he has to do hispanic voices.
www.scottsigler.com

I've often credited this book for being the work that made me realize that I do like body horror a lot as long as it's in the context of the body doing/becoming the horror not the horror being visited upon the body via torture. So, I figured maybe I should reread it and see if it stood the test of time since I was very easily impressed back when I first read it.

The body horror held up as did the general plot, but the banter and how insufferable the characters were not so much. I understand Perry is supposed to be a hard to love but somehow sympathetic figure but with most of the other characters being in the same vein and with the inappropriate edginess that passed for witticism at the time (yes the late 2000s were an era of unrelenting cringiness) it just got tedious at some point.

Good, but not great. Entertaining, but predictable and cliche ridden. Vulgar and crass, in a somewhat amateurish way. Some characters made leaps of logic or understanding of which they shouldn't have been capable. Again, it was entertaining, and I did generally enjoy it, but I don't feel compelled to pick up the next book in the series.