#and this person has frankly been a complete piece of shit and outright endangered me multiple times

[exmeowstic]

good lord

[kvotheunkvothe]

What the Fuck Am I Reading: Parasite

I just finished Parasite, by Mira Grant (which is nothing like the anime, Parasyte, btw). It’s about a young woman, Sal Mitchell, who was in a bad car accident and she wakes up from what was apparent brain death and basically starts her life over. She has ZERO memories, and needs to be retaught literally everything--including how to speak and read--but we skip over all that and cut to 6 years later. The book is set in near-future 2020s, and most people have a genetically modified intestinal parasite that basically manages all of their medication needs, regulates against allergens, and acts like a little hospital, essentially. The company that makes the parasite seems to think it was responsible for Sal’s recovery, so she lets them run tests on her in exchange for pretty much free medical care. She doesn’t do much else with her time except work part-time for an animal shelter. Her dad is a military doctor of some sort, and her sister works on the base as a civilian scientist. Sal’s boyfriend, Dr. Kim, is a parasitologist. So virtually everyone in the book knows more than Sal about everything, which is actually helpful because it gives a vehicle to explain things to the reader. Pretty soon, there’s also a “mysterious” illness to contend with, where people suddenly seem to be almost sleep-walking and empty husks who attack others (very zombie-like).

There were things about this book that I liked. Besides the basic premise, the book wasn’t completely annoying from a scientific perspective. And I didn’t mind Sal, although I thought her relationship with her therapist was pretty juvenile, and I thought she should have done a better job explaining herself at various points. I actually liked Dr. Kim a fair bit: he was solid, loyal, intelligent, and very patient. He absolutely did not deserve being stuck in the middle of the rest of the crap that happened in this book. I was either ambivalent or vaguely disliked most of the rest of the cast, but they really were’t around that much to care. For instance, early on Sal makes a point of saying she liked one young Dr. Sherman and randomly hugs him, but it seemed like the author was just trying to make us care when shortly thereafter he seems endangered and then disappears from the narrative. And frankly I detested both Dr. Cale and Tansy. I hated how blase Dr. Cale was, and didn’t seem to give a shit either about humans in general or her family in particular. And Tansy was fucking obnoxious, always going on about dismembering people or whatever like, what, am I supposed to be impressed? The book also had a VERY obvious “twist,” and then another and final twist that just felt cheap, but more on that in the spoiler section. The relationship with the family was also quite frustrating most of the time, what with the lack of communication and completely unreasonable and borderline-abusive lockdown that eventually occurs. Also, I’m sorry, Sal’s outright obsession with dogs was kind of creepy.

SPOILERS. So, given the premise and the fact the main character was brain-damaged and then “woke up,” I was pretty sure pretty much right away that what had actually woken up was a parasite. And midway through the book, it was pretty much confirmed. And then? It took Sal the entire rest of the book to figure this out? Maybe she was being willfully ignorant, but come the fuck on. Did she need it spoonfed? I will admit I didn’t see Sherman being a parasite, but that’s because I think this was just very poorly handled. He shows up, we barely have any interaction with him, and then he’s gone. Only to show up in like the last pages all “HELLO, PET.” Like, there was nothing for us to piece this together with besides a mention of there having been other experiments. It just felt like the author didn’t actually know how to write a mystery, so she made her main character an idiot and then threw in a last-minute SURPRISE villain. Like, okay book, I guess ya got me there. Here I thought you emphasized how blah blah sad it was he’d died after barely existing in the book at the beginning because I thought you were lazily trying to pull on my heartstrings, but it turned out it was because he was coming back and was a literal worm. Okay. Great. And also, as long as I’m complaining in the spoilers section, holy shit was the dad on my shit list by the end. All the lockdowns and drugging and tying her up--Jesus. Like, yeah, he probably also knew she was a parasite, but this made my blood boil and also made me exceedingly uncomfortable. Ugh, and then there’s Dr. Cale. That bitch. I hope she’s fucking happy. Although she actually seems happy as a fucking clam, all “I’m gonna waste 30 minutes of your life telling my story my way, and you can sit there and take it.” And I don’t care what bullshit she spews, her philosophy sucks. Okay, have a braindead patient, I guess I don’t care if the parasite takes over. But they don’t have “just as much a right” to a conscious person’s body: the parasite can still live a full and complete life just living in the guts. It’s not being harmed, there. A person who loses brain function--not so fucking much. END SPOILERS.

So. Long story short: ultimately, this book was okay, not a terrible read. But I don’t know if I’ll bother with the sequels.