The First 100 Pages – Infected by
Scott Sigler
Judging by what I had been reading
lately I was excited to start this book.
Most of the books I’ve been reading are part of a series or something I
had prior knowledge about and had wanted to read for a long time. Most often I’ve been pleasantly surprised by
these books but I felt like reading something from someone I was wholly
unfamiliar with. “Infected” was recommended
to me while I was shopping for books on Barnes & Noble’s online store and I
gotta say after reading the first 100 pages all the hype and praise by
customers was unfounded. I can’t
remember the last time I read a book that was written so bland and so
poorly. I’m making an exception for
“Mission Earth: The Invaders Plan” because I knew it was going to be bad and
had no expectations for it. But
“Infected” garnered almost unanimous praise from its readers. At Amazon it has a 4 and a half star review
from 392 users. With such good praise I
should have known I’d be one of a handful of people that didn’t like it.
The book starts off with one of the
most cryptic useless prologues I’ve ever read.
I hate prologues to begin with but it gets worse when they’re
pretentious or confusing and most of them are.
The first time I started sighing in contempt and rolling my eyes is when
a potential carrier of this virus is located and they go in to apprehend
him. It is revealed by the CIA agents
going in their orders are shoot to kill but not in the head. When they get in the house they find
everyone in there except the plague carrier dead and the house soaked in
gasoline. The suspect is armed with a
hand axe and a lighter. Rather than
subduing this one lone guy(or at the very least shooting him) they let him
ramble insanities after which he cuts his own damn legs off. Geez this part just really irritated me. They were supposed to kill this guy but
rather than do that they stand around and gawk at him giving him every chance
in the world to kill himself and burn the damn house down. WHICH HE FREAKIN DOES! As a result of their incompetency one of the
agents gets cleaved in the stomach. The
next scene takes place in a hospital waiting room where the other agent calls
his superior to report the “SNAFU”. Forget the fact that even the agent that
wasn’t harmed was within close enough proximity to the infected suspect that he
would need to be quarantined immediately his dialogue with his boss is
downright unprofessional. When asked if
he wants to stay at the hospital he says, “You couldn’t drag me away with a
team of mules tied to my balls, sir.”
The last time I read dialogue this bad was when I was reading Mission
Earth. Occasionally we’re given
information about the virus from the perspective of the virus. In a good book this information would have
been exposited by the doctors or scientists.
Doing it this way leaves no room for tension or discovery and is about
as entertaining as reading a grocery list.
The characters are pretty obnoxious too.
Two sets of characters have a smartass sidekick who tell the same jokes
and are barely distinguishable from one another.
Infected is poorly written, poorly conceived,
poorly constructed, and just plain dull.
The main character lacks anything even remotely resembling common
fucking sense. One day he wakes up with
itchy sores covering half his body which only get worse and worse until he
wakes up covered in blood and not until he pulls strange foreign growths out of
his own body does going to the damn doctor even occur to him. If you want to read a good book about a
contagion pick up Richard Preston’s Cobra Event instead or anything by Robin
Cook. At least these men were qualified
to tell these stories. The Cobra Event
was well written and well researched not to mention it had intelligent and
realistic characters. Robin Cook has a
background in both the military and medicine and has no doubt witnessed
infectious diseases and has knowledge of them.
Scott Sigler’s research on the other hand is as half assed as his
writing. As bad as this book is and the
fact that I’ve only read a third of it I almost feel it unnecessary to rate but
I give it a 20/100 just in case I don’t feel compelled to finish it. While it does suck there’s just enough to
keep you wanting to read more but I really can’t give it any more credit than
that.
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