Horror novel, written by Lucy A. Snyder (better known to us Everythingians as Lucy-S) and published by Tor Nightfire in 2023. The book was inspired by Snyder's own Bram Stoker Award-winning short story "Magdala Amygdala."
So you guys heard about the latest pandemic? PVG, or Polymorphic Viral Gastroencephalitis, is the worst thing to hit health care in years, right? Cases range from no symptoms at all to hemorrhaging horrifically to death. And the survivors run the gamut, too. Maybe you'll be fine. Maybe you'll end up with a serious sensitivity to sunlight, a digestive system stripped of its ability to process many foods, and a need to drink blood to get certain proteins into your body. And maybe you get all that, a hair-trigger temper, a deteriorating mental state, and a constant craving for the proteins found in brains instead of blood.
Erin, one of our main characters, gets that last one. She's not happy about that, she's not happy about losing her entire family while she was in a coma, she's not happy about the distrust she faces from almost everyone she meets, and she's not happy about the police state that's sprung up to keep PVG survivors under control.
And then Erin meets and falls head-over-everything for Betty, a fellow PVG survivor, and they start secretly dating -- because PVG survivors are encouraged not to meet or interact with -- and definitely don't have sex with -- other PVG survivors, due to the dangers of strange mutations. And once the predicted strange mutations start piling up, their relationship is driven further underground, and the stress on Erin gets worse and worse and worse until -- well, things break and break badly.
But Erin isn't our only main character. There's also Savannah, a beautiful woman working as a professional sex worker. (Yes, near-future society is progressive enough to legalize sex work. Yay, near-future society! Too bad about the apocalypse, though.) Savannah's exposure to PVG completely bypasses any adverse symptoms and turns her into a straight-up murder addict with an in-brain hotline to the new gods planning on terraforming the Earth and extinguishing the human race. And there's Mareva, one of Erin's coworkers, who gets kidnapped by Savannah while the apocalypse is going down, confined to a dead billionaire's mansion, and tasked with leading the terraforming of Earth, whether she wants to or not.
Is there any hope for our heroes to save the Earth? Will they be able to escape with their lives, sanity, and/or genetic structure intact?
If you're a horror fan, this is a book that's going to bring you a lot of joy. It's multiple different kinds of horror all crammed together into one book -- pandemic horror, cosmic horror, psychological horror, skins full of body horror, and numerous blood bags of good old fashioned gore. And they all end up working together really well, even blending together, one to the next to the next. A good horror novel is a feat of engineering, and Snyder assembles these different pieces -- some of them extremely squishy and oozy -- together into a wonderful, terrifying book.
As always, characterization is one of Snyder's greatest strengths. Erin carries the bulk of the novel, and it's through her eyes that we see the world that's coming. Her relationship with her boyfriend has been going on for years, mostly out of inertia, and once the shock of her infection and near-death hits, they quickly grow apart, especially when Erin meets the tantalizing and irresistible Betty. In a lot of ways, she's a victim of the biology of PVG, which affects her wants, her desires, her hungers, and gradually unravels her mind and body. But even after she's seemingly lost to alien DNA, she's still able to wrap her fist around the core of her humanity and drag it out into the light.
Mareva ends up being possibly the last sane person on Earth, and though she's often acted upon by other people, other monsters, and other forces, she's also always thinking, always working out ways to try to escape from the horrible situation she finds herself in. And when she's finally able to make her move, she takes on responsibilities she never wanted, because taking responsibility is one of the things she does best.
And possibly the best villain of the year -- Savannah, bombshell serial killer. Smart, witty, funny, wildly clever and inventive, and the most terrifying monster in the book. You will learn to dread every casual lie and betrayal she drops, every messy murder she commits, every gory, sloppy brain she tears out of someone's skull and crams down her gullet. And you still won't be able to keep yourself from admiring the smart, stylish way she does almost everything.
You love great characters, right? You love all kinds of different horror, right? Well, you're going to love this book. This is the kind of novel that digs deep down into your brain. This is the kind of novel you're never going to be able to forget.