CHIMERA

Grant's tapeworm trilogy concludes with an all-out war.

In the two previous books (Parasite, 2013; Symbiont, 2014), readers were introduced to Sally Mitchell, a woman rendered brain dead in an accident and brought back to life by a sentient tapeworm created by Dr. Shanti Cale. A global company distributed the tapeworms as personal medical devices, designed to control insulin, blood pressure, and other health issues. But instead of simply acting as a control, the worms burrowed into the skulls of their hosts and took them over. Sal, the tapeworm, took over the body of Col. Mitchell’s daughter Sally, and now the colonel is fighting the tapeworms while his other daughter, Joyce, is also brain dead. Sal hopes to save Joyce but also wants to get back to her fiance, Nathan, Dr. Cale’s son, a normal human who knows the woman he loves is a chimera. When Dr. Mitchell has Sal relocated to a quarantine unit in Pleasanton, she and another woman, Carrie, escape and find their way back to Dr. Cale’s lab, where Sal is reunited with the Mitchell family and Carrie is imprisoned. Eventually an evil chimera comes for them, and Dr. Cale’s faction works to find a way to defeat him and make the world safe for tapeworms masquerading as people. This third volume comes in much too long and contains page upon page of mundanely written internal monologue as Sal whines about her situation, justifies her existence, and explains the twisted science that went into making her. Sal is legions away from a sympathetic heroine, and the constant self-reflection acts as filler for a wafer-thin story.

Readers will feel brain-dead themselves after slogging through this deadly dull saga.