Infected

Scott Sigler

Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)

Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families.

Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips criss-crosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common - they’ve been contaminated by a bioengineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science.

Meanwhile Perry Dawsey - a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey - awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices... he is infected.

The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder.
m.

'Gripping, pacy and often stomach-churningly violent...hard to put down .'

Review by Annett Grosser-Rogoff (301113) Rating (8/10)

Review by Annett Grosser-Rogoff
Rating 8/10
Scott Sigler is certainly an interesting writer and his book Infected is full of surprises. When I read the book I had never heard of Sigler and didn’t know he was a Sci-Fi/Horror novelist. This means I judged the story entirely by its title and was completely mistaken. I didn’t expect a Sci-fi story and I probably would not have read it if I would have known the novel belongs to this genre, but how lucky I was for not knowing.

The story starts staying true to its title with the strange infection of a couple of people who develop a rash which turns into a growth. They start to hear voices and eventually change their personality. Soon after they turn into violent, paranoid killers who have no control over themselves. Normal people who have no connection as it seems at first suffer from this unknown illness and the government races against time to stop this from spreading. To find out what caused the infection is made harder by the fact that the bodies waste away in a very short time, which leaves the doctors working on the case just a couple of hours to check them. Of course the idea of aliens taking over the human body is not new, however, Infected manages to make it exciting and unusual.

A lot of people seem to compare Sigler with Stephen King. Based on this book it’s understandable, however, King is a horror writer with occasional trips into the Sci-Fi genre. Sigler seems to have found his home in Sci-Fi. After I read Infected I started to dig a bit deeper into Sigler’s courier and found out a bit about the way he made it as a writer. Interestingly enough he went a way a lot of people probably thought about but never followed. After he couldn’t get his book published the usual way, he read out a few passages as MP3s and gave them away for free. That way he got the attention of some publishers. Quite a clever way if you ask me. His sense of humour has been mentioned a couple of times, however, I couldn’t find too much of the 'laugh-out-loud'- stuff in Infected. It’s more the 'Grinch-and-look-away' sort of way. Overall this is a very good book to read with surprising elements - a real page turner.
Annett Grosser-Rogoff (30th November 2013)