Infected
by Scott Sigler
Hodder and Stoughton, £6.99
Sigler enjoys a massive following thanks to the podcast download of his
novels EarthCore and Ancestor, with fans accessing over three million files. Infected, billed as "new horror", is his first UK novel. A mysterious alien seed falls to Earth and infects citizens, who develop irritating rashes and the urge to kill themselves messily.
The novel follows ageing CIA grunt Dew Phillips, who feels responsible for the death of a young colleague in the line of duty; Margaret Montoya, a fortysomething biologist working against the clock to understand the plague; and ex-pro-footballer Perry Dawsey, not only washed-up but infected with the contagion. Told from multiple viewpoints, this is fast fiction at its most glib, with short chapters ending in portentous cliff-hangers and one-dimensional characters we've seen before in a hundred bad movies.
Infected, for all its pre-publication hype, fails to transcend its deadening clichés.
·Eric Brown's latest novel is Kéthani (Solaris)