Review: Parasite by Mira Grant

Finished reading the new Mira Grant book, Parasite, and… I’m currently a cross between my usual reaction to coming back to the real world after a Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant book:

and this:

because holy CRAP, it creeped me the hell out in the best possible way.

If you guys follow me anywhere on the web, you probably know that I’m madly in love with Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire’s writing.  She has a way of sucking me right into her beautifully constructed worlds with all of the gorgeously developed characters.  I’m like Pavlov’s dog when I hear a new book of hers is out, particularly an October Daye book; I start salivating and immediately buy it.  Well, Parasite was no different.

Set about fifteen years into the future, Parasite is bio-futuristic horror, not a genre I would normally find myself reading.  The book is told from Sally Mitchell’s point of view.  Like most people in the world of Parasite, she has an Intestinal Bodyguardâ„¢.  But even a bioengineered tapeworm can’t save you from a head-on collision with a bus, and the book begins with Sally slowly dying in an intensive care unit.

And then… she’s not.  She wakes up with no memory of the old Sally and has to relearn absolutely everything about being an adult, from fine motor control to the use of idiom in the English language.  We pick back up with Sal (she insists she is emphatically not Sally, not the person she was before she died and came back) six years after her accident, and she’s better.  She still has odd dreams and nightmares, still occasionally goes into anaphylactic shock for reasons unknown, but she’s better.  She works a part-time job at an animal shelter, has a boyfriend who’s a parasitologist, and wants to move back into the world after living with her parents for the past six years.

Of course, when things seem like they’re going okay, the ground always falls out from under you.

Strange things have been happening to people in San Francisco; they suddenly check out of their bodies, like they’re still alive but no one’s home, and when the sleepwalker incidents start turning violent, Sally and her boyfriend, Nathan, find themselves in the middle of a conspiracy that will affect everyone.

Here’s the thing that creeped me out the most about this book.  The other day, right when I’d started reading it, my husband turned to me in the car and out of the blue said, “I wonder if there’s a way for biologists to modify a tapeworm to help people with weight loss.”

He was a little surprised when I gave a full body shudder and practically shouted “NOPE” at him.  The concept of this novel is so effectively scary because it’s so damn realistic.  I have no idea if people are actually genetically engineering tapeworms to live happily in our guts, and sweet Jesus, I do not want to know.  But it’s an idea that’s been hanging around for a long time in the United States; people might have even ingested tapeworm cysts to maintain a girlish figure, and Ms. Grant plays on both the scientific excitement surrounding our increased capabilities to modify genetic code and the fear that goes along with such meddling (just look at the current freakouts over genetically modified food).

The novel’s plot moves along at a pace that steadily built my sense of dread to the point where I had to make myself stop reading five or six hours before bed last night so I wouldn’t have freaky nightmares about parasites.  A little past the halfway point in the book, I suddenly had a horrible revelation.  I can’t tell you what it is because it’s a major spoiler, but I ended up having to explain my theory in gross detail to Mr Fangirl over dinner just to get it out of my head.  The characters, even minor ones who show up once and never again, are well-rounded and are gracefully multi-ethnic.  There’s never a big deal made about Nathan being half-Korean, half-white; he just is.  It’s refreshing to see such an ethnically varied cast of characters without someone being the token Asian, the token black guy, etc.

Sal herself is an interesting character; since the book is written in first person, you’re immediately in her head, and since she’s basically a blank slate with her own writing scrawled on it, you have to put yourself into that blank slate position.  It made me immediately suspicious of everyone around her, but that’s probably because I’m naturally more paranoid than Sal, heh.  The old Sally was impulsive and hot-tempered and probably a bitch to be around.  The new Sal is trying to make her relationship with her family work, is learning how to interact with people while maintaining social norms and niceties.  She’s also slowly losing her tolerance for bullshit and being kept in the dark, and I appreciated that after a while, she started refusing to roll over, to take no for an answer.

Admittedly, she seems a bit slow to make the connection that I made about halfway through the book, but then again she has a good reason to balk away from that thought.  She has to be, partly because of the pace of the narrative and partly because she just doesn’t want to believe.  It also serves to increase the sense of dread you have about when the big reveal does happen.  I hope that’s vague enough to not spoil anyone but gives enough of an explanation that you should be patient with Sal.

To me, one of the most effective parts of the book was Sal’s explanation of her dreams, the hot warm dark filled with drumbeats that envelops her when she sleeps.  It’s a great womb metaphor, but it’s also more than that, something that’s comforting while at the same time kindling a sense of dread in the back of your mind as a reader.  It made my own pounding heart while climbing the stairs too quickly seem creepy as all hell.

If you’re really squeamish (and I mean really), you might want to give this book a pass.  It’s never specifically gory in its descriptions of the modified tapeworm, but just the idea of it is enough to give me the willies.  But it’s a really effectively written thriller that completely sucked me in.  Fair warning: it is the beginning of a series, so don’t expect a grand sense of closure at the end of the novel.  It does end on a cliffhanger, but man, it’s a good one.  If you’re a fan of horror and/or near-future science fiction, definitely give this book a shot when it’s released.