Books

A growing fear is infecting Middle Americans. In the form of micro-organisms it floats down from the sky, penetrating their pores. A constant itch drives them to hyperactivity and self-abuse. Eerie voices emanate from their nervous systems. They soon become enslaved to paranoia, alienation and murderous intentions.

The fear, actually an unearthly parasitic seedling, grows under their skin and they hate it and want to kill it and yet have an affection for it as it grows as if it were an unborn baby. It eventually propels them toward a strange quasi-religious totem in the Michigan forest and a confrontation with the military.

Once inside the host, it develops into blue protoplasmic triangles that have three eyes and long spiny tails with sharp sawblade teeth on the ends that anchor to the host's muscles and organs. These develop a consciousness and communicate with other triangles inside other hosts. Survival is everything. They get frantic when they hear Columbo on TV, associate him with the police and soldiers, whom they greatly fear. When they want to eat, they badger the host, chanting "WE HUNGRY."

Read Infected and you'll never listen to Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin" the same way again. And you may understand why Scott Sigler fans offered big money for advance copies on the Internet.

It's powerfully written with dynamic descriptions and an unforgettable central character, "Scary" Perry Dawsey, a Samsonesque former football player. It's funny, even lyrical in the way that Sam Peckinpah's violent Westerns are said to be. But it might be torture, so to speak, for those who like to don a fluffy robe and read while curled on a veranda, caressing a mug of hot herbal tea. Scott Sigler is no Jane Austen.

Dawsey was trained by a sadistic alcoholic father. He played hurt at the University of Michigan and is inured to pain. He carries seven of these malevolent mutating triangles of blue cellulose in his massive, powerful body. In creative, horrendous ways, a description of which would disturb readers of a family newspaper, Dawsey wages outrageous masochistic war on them.

But even he succumbs to the paranoia of the triangles and does a bad, bad thing. This brings him to the attention of surly, vindictive CIA agent Dew Phillips, working reluctantly with epidemiologist Margaret Montoya of the Cincinnati CDC. They've been quietly investigating these strange murder cases. They're experts but in the process of defusing the crisis deliver some groan-inducing dialogue.

A small matter in light of the book's redeeming wit, shockingly expressive exposition and underlying warning. And that warning is: Even the greatest army in the world can't defeat "them," meaning the unknown fears that are inherent in hysteria and paranoia.

NPR commentator Tom Dodge, www.tomdodge books.com, lives in Midlothian.

Scott Sigler

(Crown, $24.95)

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