From the Editor: Why I love Hugo Award-nominated PARASITE
There are few books that unsettle me like a Mira Grant novel, but no other books give me the chills as much while also drawing me in with raw humanity. In PARASITE you’re taken to a world where the inexorable march of corporate progress and medical advancement has designed a cure for the ailments that haunt all of us. Oh, and this miracle cure is tapeworms surgically implanted into our digestive system. But this remedy is revealing itself to have hidden and profound side effects.
In the era of “too big to fail” and the devastating effects we’re having on our environment it’s not difficult for me to imagine massive companies having devastating results, consequences we are all complicit in, but the author’s intelligence, in-depth research, and uncanny ability to raise suspense make the nightmare of this book all too believable.
But what makes the horror fully real is the main character Sal. In Sal I found the perfect protagonist to draw me into this world and behind the curtain of SymboGen, the corporation claiming to be our savior. Waking up from an accident Sal has to learn to start all over again. Walking, speaking, and everything else is new to her. She is a child, but not a child, and her raw innocence made me fully share in the same sense of defenselessness she feels as she learns the dark secrets of the world and finds monsters everywhere. Reading Parasite terrifyingly brought me back to the days when I looked for creatures under the bed, but this story shows that monsters are within us and all around.
PARASITE is currently available for $1.99 in the US and £1.99 in the UK for a limited time. Read an excerpt here.