Crawlers
A Novel
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
In a secret government lab somewhere in Nevada, a young scientist cowers in darkness–waiting, listening, and calculating his chances of surviving the unspeakable carnage that has left him trapped and alone. Or almost alone.
Soon after, a covert military operation “cleanses” all traces of a top-secret project gone horrifically wrong.
Three years later, it begins again–when the quiet of a warm autumn night in a sleepy California town is shattered by a streak of light across the sky, the thunder of impact, and the unleashing of something insidious. Spreading, multiplying, and transforming everything in its path, this diabolical intelligence will not be denied until the townsfolk–and eventually, all living things–are conquered. Until they are all crawling. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Shirley's frightening new novel, he extends the smart work he did in Demons (2002), investing a fierce genre tale with spiritual import. Here Shirley reaches back to the classic pulp scenario of a small town beset by an alien invasion. In this case, though the townspeople of Quiebra, Calif., initially assume that the capsule that crashes originated in space, it's actually a satellite put into orbit by a hush-hush military research outfit fearful of the out-of-control nanotechnology experiment it contains. The experiment involves nanoparticles that have evolved into a kind of group mind (as in Michael Crichton's Prey), taking over human (and animal) hosts and, by incorporating pieces of hardware, refashioning those hosts into an amalgam of human and machine ("Deputy Sprague's neck was gone, replaced with a metal stalk..."). Humans differ as to their vulnerability to takeover, with some adults more resistant than others, and younger people quite resistant; this allows Shirley to use teenagers a likely readership for the book as the novel's heroes, and his understanding of teen ways and patterns of speech is deep and exact. This tack also allows for some profound emotion, as kids particularly Adair and Waylon Leverton, whose father is the first person taken over in Quiebra witness the soul-destruction and/or death of their parents. The novel's depiction of humans devolving into group-mind controlled machines proves an excellent metaphor for Shirley's take here on the human condition, which posits that some of us are already machinelike and others more "awake"; but the narrative does slide slightly into didacticism as it elaborates these understandings. Overall, though, this is an exciting novel of ideas wrapped in red-hot pulp.
