Author: M R Carey
Publisher: Orbit
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This novel is the one you wait for while biding your time reading all the dreck. It grabbed me from the very start, and it kept grabbing with each chapter. This is a brilliant novel.
It begins, "Her name is Melanie. It means 'the black girl', from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair so she thinks maybe it's not such a good name for her. She likes the name Pandora a whole lot, but you don't get to choose." Hold on to that Pandora reference.
Melanie's story is unfolded so easily, so carefully, and so intriguingly that it takes a while to realize that this girl who appears to be having such a good time is not in a boarding school, not in a convent, not even in a psychiatric hospital. She's not even a convict. Like Johnny Test, she's a lab rat.
Slowly, but not too slowly, we discover that she's committed no crime, yet is feared by everyone around her. When she's let out of her cell, she has to be restrained as though she's Hannibal Lecter: she must be in her wheelchair, strapped-down tightly, with a muzzle on her face, because Melanie is infected with a fungus, specifically a mutated form of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis which has evolved to parasitize Homo sapiens instead of its usual host, Camponotus leonardi, a species of Carpenter ant resident in South America.
Melanie is not alone in her disease. There is a dozen or so other kids, being held on a military base where the doctors are slowly cutting up these non-kids ("They're dead already!" everyone says) to find out why they are so different from the overwhelming majority of others who are infected, and who don't talk or communicate anything other than their manifest desire to literally eat you alive. There's a very good reason why they're different.
Melanie has an ally however, and it's at a doubly-crucial moment that Helen Justineau, one of the school teachers and also a psychologist, hooks up with Melanie as their joint world goes all to hell. The Hungries, as the uncontrollable wild forms are known, break into the camp for reasons unspecified - apparently working in concert with the Junkers, who are uninfected humans and even more dangerous than the Hungries. Melanie is neither of these extremes, but no one knows why, and suddenly, and for the first time in her life, she's outside. Yes, she's on the run with Justineau, the nasty Sergeant Parks, Caldwell, the cold well of a pathologist, and with a raw military recruit, but she's outside and can see the things she's only ever heard about or seen in picture books.
But how in hell are these few people going to make it?
I am not a fan of zombie apocalypse stories or movies. Indeed, had I known this was akin to those stories, I would never have picked it up, but then I would have made a huge mistake. Yes, it's akin to those stories, but it isn't one of them. In terms of Victorian England, this is the upstairs, whereas all those others are the downstairs! This novel is brilliant, and it deserves every success it has coming its way. I thoroughly recommend it. This is one of the novels which we reviewers live to find!
