Books › Infected
Infected
A Novel
384 pages
A relentless, skin-crawling descent into biological terror and visceral paranoia that refuses to let you look away.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being strapped into a centrifuge of escalating dread and visceral body horror. It operates at a breakneck, propulsive pace, dragging you through a gritty, paranoid nightmare where the greatest threat is lurking beneath your own skin. The prose is cinematic and unflinchingly graphic, seamlessly blending clinical scientific detail with raw, pulse-pounding action. You are plunged into an atmosphere of claustrophobic terror, feeling the protagonist's creeping madness and desperate fight for bodily autonomy in every agonizingly tense chapter. It is a deeply unsettling, adrenaline-fueled experience designed for readers with strong stomachs who crave the intersection of hard science fiction and grotesque, bloody survival horror.
- Mood
- dread-soaked
- paranoid
- claustrophobic
- grotesque
- adrenaline-fueled
- Tone
- gritty
- urgent
- visceral
- clinical
- intense
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- loss of bodily autonomy · descent into madness · biological invasion · survival at all costs
- The writing
- Cinematic, punchy, and unflinchingly graphic, the writing seamlessly blends hard scientific jargon with raw, hard-hitting action.
- The arc
- The journey begins with creeping, skin-prickling unease that rapidly accelerates into sheer visceral terror and a desperate, bloody fight for survival.
- Who it's for
- Readers with strong stomachs who crave fast-paced, science-grounded thrillers heavily laced with extreme body horror.
Content notes
- extreme body horror
- graphic violence
- self-mutilation
- gore
- paranoia
- murder
About the book
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 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. Infected is the first major print release from Internet phenom Scott Sigler, whose podcast-only audiobooks have drawn an immense cult following, with more than three million individual episodes downloaded. Now Sigler storms the bookstore shelves with this cinematic, relentlessly paced novel that mixes and matches genres, combining horror, technothriller, and suspense in a heady mix that is equal parts Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King. Infected will crawl beneath your skin and leave fresh blood on every page.From the Hardcover edition.
Description from Open Library.
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