I have read some very good books just this year alone. Tee Morris’ Morevi, Anne Bishop’s Tangled Webs, some Nora Roberts and Stephen King. Hands down, I think I just finished reading one of the best books I’ve read in years. Years.  I would normally save this post to post in the morning, but the word must get out about Infected!

I jumped on the bandwagon. I’ve been shamelessly using the blog as an advertisement for Scott Sigler’s Infected and I hadn’t even read the book yet. I did it on the sole fact that this… podcast novelist… is being published by Crown Books. He has broken into big publishing and its time to teach them that publishing podcasters is a good thing.

I devoured Infected in five hours, not counting interruptions. It’s creepy and I was scratching my arms by the time chapter three came to a close. I will never, ever, EVER have a pair of chicken scissors in my house again.

Part of me wants to give you snipits from the pdf (avaliable until 31 March) that was released into the wild and part of me is sitting here, “It’s on bookshelves on April 1st, go out and buy the bloody thing!” And I can say that because I’ll be doing so. Yes, I read the pdf, every word of it like a dripping iv of scifi horror buried in my skin and I’m still looking forward to having my hardback with it’s sinister cover signed by the Future Dark Overlord when I see him in Houston on April 11th.

Gushing and praise, that seems to be all I write anymore, but the stuff I’ve been reading has been worth it and this piece… I can see why Crown took the risk because I think this will be FLYING off the bookshelves. Here’s the synopsis, you can decide for yourself:

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 crisscrosses 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 bio-engineered parasite, shaped with 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 — awakes 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 now wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder.

At times this infection is almost as cute as it is scary, (Here’s hoping Sigler doesn’t smite me for that one.) and I confess that I found myself giggling in places that I probably shouldn’t have. For all that saying that might sound bad, there are bits of dark humor that tickle the funny bone and it lends a kind of sadistic charm to the book!

Sigler has made if very easy to see through the eyes of not only the novels human characters but through the infection as well. I couldn’t stop turning the pages and the writing simply leapt out at me. Fans of Stephen King, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz should not let this novel pass by them. It is simply fascinating and let me in an oddly euphoric state when I finished reading it.

I’m looking forward to the next installment and now that I’ve read it, I think I’ll be following the podcast, just to hear the chilling voice of the Future Dark Overlord bring this tale further to life.

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