Applies electrodes to moribund thread... lightning crackles... oversized switches are thrown.. the thing that goes zzzt! zzzt! zzzt! goes zzzt! zzzt! zzzt! I raise a hand to the heavens while clutching an enormous lever.... "Live! live! LIVE!"
I suspect I am currently reading the worst SF book ever written. At least it's the worst I have encountered. (And I have encountered some real dross in my time.)
Remember that episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace where everyone turned into monkeys? Well take that image and reimagine it as a zero-budget, straight to Free to Air obscure streaming channel movie made by people who got fired by the Asylum for incompetence. (The Asylum are the makers of the Sharknado movies.) This books reads like the novelisation of that movie written by the producer's kid brother to keep him off the set and out of the way.
The plot so far (I'm only about half way through* - people all over the world are turning into hyper-aggressive Neanderthal / Sapiens hybrids and no one knows why. Society is falling apart - though Ubers still turn up on time when the plot requires them to. We know people are turning into hyper-aggressive Neanderthal / Sapiens hybrids and society is falling apart because our cast members constantly tell each other that people are turning into hyper-aggressive Neanderthal / Sapiens hybrids and watch TV news anchormen sat on ergonomically designed couches sombrely telling them the world is going to hell in a handbasket. There is an awful lot of telling in this book including exciting scenes of ultra-violence and excitement; like the moment where the first recorded case wakes up from his induced coma and goes on the rampage: smashing bulletproof glass with his bare hands, killing another patient, and ripping the testicles off a security guard before finally being shot eight times and killed. All of this doesn't happen on the page. It happens between chapters and then people tell each other about it for a bit.
From time to time the writer does remember to do some showing as well so he has excruciatingly boring scenes (full of needless details) of people going somewhere to meet someone to tell them what the readers have already been told three or four times before.
The oddness starts before the book has even started.
For one thing the author forgot to put his name on the spine. It's on the cover. It's on the back cover. It's in the indicia - twice once for 'Editing and proofreading' and once for 'Layout and Formatting' (the fact that there is a typo just below the word 'proofreading' is the funniest joke in the book). But not the spine.
The copyright date at the front is 2017 but an author's intro / dedication talks about a friend who died in 2020 and then the book is full of references to the Covid-19 pandemic. A quick Googling shows that what I have is a rewritten / revised edition. So the bits of this book that were rewritten aren't copyright? I'm not going to go look but I would guess that in the earlier version (or an earlier draft) one of the central families had a different nationality and have gone from being American to British; the wife's mother is called 'Mom', their car has a trunk and a hood rather than boot and bonnet.
The book is riddled with inconsistencies and 'what the fuckery' that comes at you from all directions. The woman of the family works in a hospital on a ward. Her job title is not given nor is it clear what she does but, at the start of her shift (and the start of a chapter) she is diligently "catching up with the status of the patients she would have charge of for duration of her shift" before having a snack. She is then told two pages later by a superior that the unusual patient that had arrived yesterday and whom she saw fit to name and tell her husband about (serious breach of medical ethics there and almost certainly a sacking offence) had been moved to a different ward... without her noticing?
I'm reading this book with a pencil in one hand and there's hardly a page that I haven't marked up a typo or an inconsistency. Things like the breakfast cereal Cocoa Pops being capitalised (as it should be; it's a proper brand name) only to be written 'Cocoa pops' a few lines later on the same page and then 'Cornflakes' having a capitol when it doesn't need it. And some seriously dreadful writing:
"Lynne pulled the door shut and the Prius pulled away. Jeff watched them leave until they had turned the corner and disappeared. Wiping the tears from his eyes he'd tried so hard to hide from them both.." It's so hard hiding your eyes from your family.
"...those who had only just managed to keep their heads above water financially and figuratively speaking..."
Crews of ships at sea are not immune: "Those that had begun turning into hybrids were left wondering the empty hulks."
"Claire realized just how small a fish she really was in the huge pool of what was happening."
"Only crews that underwent the strictest medical examinations before each flight was allowed to fly..."
"She moved back slowly, and as calmly as she was able with her body pumping huge amounts of adrenalin around her." - leaving puddles of the stuff on the floor presumably.
This is awful.
* I say 'about' because, other than measuring the pages read against the pages unread with a ruler, there is no way of telling because, for some inexplicable reason, there is no pagination. I've never encountered a novel without page numbers before. Their absence is oddly disconcerting.
I finished it. Then went to lie down for a couple of days. In the interests of fairness I should report that the author does get round to doing some showing after all his telling. Towards the end of the book our heroine scientist Doctor Joceline Mercer
"Josceline is a tall slim woman and is very much single and unattached from anyone other than her work."
"As usual, she was a picture of tranquillity and logic, never seeing the need to be flustered or lose her composure. She was calm and somewhat of a loose cannon at times. "
Anyhoo... our super French scientist sexy lady partitions the mainframe of the World Health Organization's computer. (And it is the World Health Organization's, not the WHO's, computer. Just about every other organisation in this book gets shortened - sometimes with full stops between the letters, sometimes not -COMBRA, FEMA, UK, US, NFL etc., the World Health Organization is always spelled out in full. (PIN, as in 'Personal Identification Number', got autocorrected to 'pin' at least once. Proofreading my arse! )
I digress.
Having partitioned the mainframe Doctor Joceline Mercer runs simulations and models of her own despite being expressly told not to do so - even on half a computer (What a rebel!) and comes up with 50 pages of printout that confirm her theory. (We never get to see any of this data.)
Her Theory:
"... ahem. My theory, by sexy slim French lady... ahem. This is my theory what is mine... My theory is. That is my theory not anyone else's theory... Ahem. AHEM!. My theory by Joceline Mercer (Doctor) Ahemmmmm!"
She then spends several pages telling people that James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis is correct and the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have triggered a unexpressed gene which has turned everyone into
apemen to stop them poisoning the Earth. Because... erm... well it happened before anyway and here are some dodgy examples of pre-Adamism evidence pulled from the interweb or the pages of the Fortean Times. Basically we're all doomed and there's nothing we can do about it. The end.
Except it isn't the end because the author still has all these other pesky 'characters' running about - so he goes the whole Garth Marenghi, cranks up the showing to 11, and has a character race from Scotland to the Lake District just in time to have his mother-in-law's severed head thrown at his car, before racing back across country to a USAF base where he gets a lift across the Atlantic in a cargo plane - the last flight out of the UK - that
just happens to have a Hummer on board for no other reason than the plane is landing at New York and he has to get to Washington where his wife and child are holed up in the World Health Organization's research base. While he is en-route some of the hybrids get loose in the research base. Heads are stomped flat. Hummer guy's son turns into a hybrid and stabs his mom to death. He in turn is stabbed to death by sexy French lady scientist (that's the way I want to go by the way) who then takes a shower and then goes out to get beaten to death by hybrids while she is 'still human'. Hummer Guy arrives. Looks about a bit, goes a bit sad, and wanders off into the sunset. The end.
This magnificent piece of work is called
Devolution of a Species by M.E. Ellington
I'm going to read some Perry Rhodan books next to bring me back to normality. Like a literary decompression chamber. Take it slowly. I don't want to get the bends. If I tried to read something by a halfway decent writer straight after that I may get the brain cramps.