DNF
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Chimera is the final book in the Parasitology Trilogy by Mira Grant. Having reviewed the first two books, Parasite and Symbiont, I felt obligated to read and review the conclusion.
Technically, this review is a DNF because I read the first 70 pages, threw a fit, and then skipped around to get the feel of the rest of the book. I read large chunks of the middle as well as the last eighty pages, but I never read the entire book cover to cover. This book was such a disappointment, not just because it was bad, but also because Mira Grant’s other writing has been so, so good – seriously, please read the Newsflesh Trilogy and leave the Parasitology Trilogy alone.
The trilogy got off to a good start with Parasite. Redheadedgirl gave it an A- and I gave it an A+. It had its awkward bits, but it was well crafted and creepy, and the awkward bits could be explained by the fact that the first book in a series has a lot of heavy lifting to do.
However, I was not as thrilled with Symbiont. I gave it a B-, which frankly, now that time has passed, I realized was too generous. It was more of a C+ book. In hindsight, I approached it like one might approach a date with the guy you had a crush on in high school – you remember him as the best thing ever, and now is your shot to finally go out with him, so when he yells at the waiter you make excuses for him (maybe he has a migraine?) and figure he’ll improve with time. When I asked Redheadedgirl what she had thought of Symbiont, her reply was, “I don’t remember and I don’t care that I don’t remember.” So there you have it.
Book One, Parasite, established the premise. In the near future, people started taking genetically modified tapeworms medicinally and all human travails were ended by magical tapeworm medicine. This sounds more nonsensical than it is – Grant really did her homework regarding both science and regarding advertising, so by the end of Parasite the reader does in fact believe that people would voluntarily become tapeworm hosts. The tapeworms have been drastically genetically engineered and eventually they start to kill their hosts. Right before death, their hosts become “sleepwalkers” who sometimes go into violent fits. So, you know – tapeworm zombies. The huge reveal at the end of Parasite is that:
In Book Two, Symbiont, Sal is captured a lot by various factions and tortured repeatedly and she spends a lot of time unconscious. That’s the whole book, basically. It’s a lot of filler and a little plot.
When Chimera opens, Sal has been captured by the military. The tapeworm zombies are taking over and San Francisco is essentially lost. What matters most about this entire disaster? Sal, our special tapeworm snowflake. Her father wants her because he thinks she’s still his daughter and that she can save her sister. Her mad scientist creator wants her for mad science reasons. Crazy Chimera Sherman wants her because he’s obsessed with her and he thinks they belong together. Lots of people want to kill her. Sal has to save the world by making humans and the chimera who already exist to get along, and by eliminating the spread of the tapeworms since they destroy their human hosts (even when the bodies survive, as in the case of chimeras, the consciousness is taken over by the tapeworm).
This book is destroyed by its relentless use of filler. Writers fill their books with extra stuff all the time for excellent reasons. Maybe the character has a thought digression or an experience because it reveals something about the character. Maybe there’s background because we need to know what’s happening with the setting and the story. But Chimera is the conclusion to the series. If Sal’s characters, and the place and story concept, are not clear, then we are in real trouble. This book is full of digressions and passages of over-explaining that tell the reader absolutely nothing new.
In lieu of “Show, don’t tell,” Grant shows something, carefully explains what we just saw, and then sometimes shows it one more time just in case we missed it. There is some form of unnecessary exposition on literally every single page that I read, and much of it has no storytelling purpose. It’s just there. In her previous work, Grant has done wonderful world-building and damn, she knows her science, but what we get in Chimera isn’t good world-building: it’s just blather. It slows the pace to a crawl and frankly I think it insults the intelligence of the reader.
Let me give you a couple of examples (just to show how relentless this is, these examples happen with two pages of each other). Both of these excerpts are from a bit where Sal is in the back of a truck being transported to a prison with other captives.
USAMRIID wasn’t using dogs. I wondered why not, and whether they had even realized how useful dogs could be when it came to catching the early stages of a tapeworm takeover of their host body. I decided just as quickly that I wasn’t going to tell them. If they were really reacting to all outbreaks and escape attempts with deadly force, regardless of the situation, I didn’t want to give them any more ammunition than I already had to. Dogs could be used to capture more humans and ferret out more sleepwalkers who weren’t hurting anyone. And I didn’t trust them to take care of their dogs. I wasn’t going to be responsible for opening a new avenue of animal abuse.
And none of this mattered.
Let’s pause. If none of that matters, then SHUT UP. Do not drag the pace of the book to a standstill to talk about things that don’t matter, especially if WE ALREADY KNOW. Book One had tons of stuff about dogs, and what they could do. It was great. I loved it. But I don’t need to read about it over and over again, especially since, surprise, dogs are never used for any of these purposes in Chimera by anybody. We should be done explaining dogs and moving on to actual plot, not rehashing old and now irrelevant material.
If this were a one-time incident, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But honest to God this exact kind of thing happens on every page. In fact, immediately prior to the dog thing, (on the same page, in fact) Sal notes that a woman in the truck has a kid with her. This exchange happens:
“Bang fucking bang, Gloria,” said one of the men she’d been captured with.
She shot him a poisonous glare. “Not in front of the kid,” she snapped.
The little girl wasn’t originally hers, then. That explained the differences in their appearance – the child was at least three shades darker than the woman, which could have been a matter of paternity, adoption, or recessive genes, but was more likely, under the circumstances, to mean the woman was taking care of a child whose parents had been killed.
Seriously. We are, and I realize I’m harping on this, on the final book in a series that is marketed as a thriller. We have now devoted a paragraph to Sal’s crack detective work about people who are completely irrelevant to the plot. Even if they were relevant, it would be irrelevant that the kid is not the woman’s biological child, and even if THAT were relevant, half a page later, the man says, “She doesn’t care if I cuss. Her own mom tried to chew her face off and left her stuck with the babysitter.” So basically, Grant chooses to use this time to have Sal figure out something that doesn’t matter and that is spelled out for us explicitly half a page later anyway.
Sal is a fine person, but she’s just not so compelling that I enjoyed spending three books inside her head while everything and everyone revolves around her. The side characters stay relentlessly one-dimensional or just barely two-dimensional (for instance, both Sal’s biological father and science mom are portrayed as career-oriented, ruthless, and terrible parents, but they love their kids in their own way). The most interesting character in the third book is Fishy, who copes with trauma by pretending that he’s in a video game. None of the characters gets much chance to grow.
While this is a scathing review of Chimera, in it’s own weird way I think it’s also a glowing review of the Newsflesh Trilogy. The reason I was so frustrated, almost personally affronted, by the problems with the Parasitology trilogy is that I already know that Mira Grant can be an absolute game changer when it comes to horror because of her success with the Newsflesh trilogy (Feed, Deadline, and Blackout). It’s not every writer who can convince me to read a book about tapeworm zombies, but by golly, if Mira Grant writes it, I’m darn well going to read it.
The Parasite Trilogy was weird because it feels like a first-time book. If a new author wrote this, I’d say, “Well, this was loaded with horrible problems but there’s also some great stuff so this is an up and coming writer to watch.” But Grant isn’t a first time writer. I don’t want all her books to be the same (I’m not looking for a new version of Newsflesh) but I do feel like Grant set a high bar for herself, and this series falls way, way, way, way short.
It’s always hard to follow a big success. While the Parasitology Trilogy lacks the economy and compelling characters that made the Newsflesh trilogy so good, it has interesting ideas. Mira Grant remains an auto-buy for me, but with caution.
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Thanks!
Well, this doesn’t fill me with hope. I love Mira Grant – I’d call Feed the best book I’ve read in the last 5 years – but the 2nd book of this series made me deeply uncomfortable, and not in the good “this is making me think about things” sort of way. Mira/Seanan has made a big deal of saying that none of her books will ever contain rape, but Sal’s torture in book 2 came too close to a sexual assault for my taste. And there wasn’t enough good in the rest of the book to overcome my discomfort with that section.
I was hoping the third book would change my overall feelings. It still might – I have it on my Kindle, waiting to be read over the weekend. We’ll see.
I loved the Newsflesh series, but found it a little frustrating that some of the plot devices repeated from book to book, so I’m sad but not entirely surprised to see the next work is not as good as it could have been. Sounds like this one needed an editor with a strong red pen.
I adored “Feed” and liked its sequels and barely made it through “Parasite”, so I think I will follow your advice and skip the rest of the series.
I haven’t tried the Mira Grant titles, but I did try the Incryptid series under the Seanan McGuire name because the premise sounded fantastic and I saw it in the library one day. It suffered from the exact same sort of writing issues as this book apparently does. However, the premise was so much my catnip, and I wanted to like it so badly, that I went ahead and borrowed the second book, just to see if it improved. Unfortunately, the writing issues were even worse in the second book, so much so, that I ended up skimming it and rated it a DNF. At least they were library books, so I wasn’t out any money. I guess her style just isn’t for me. Thank you for articulating what the issue was – I couldn’t describe it, I just knew that I didn’t like it.
I’m disappointed, but not entirely surprised Carrie DNFed this one. I’m a bigger fan of the books she writes as Seanan than as Mira (I adore the Toby books, liked but didn’t love the Newsflesh trilogy) and was only so-so on the first two Parasitology books. I was able to hand them off to my dad, who loved them, which I haven’t been able to do with the Toby books (he’s not wild about UF). Buying them wasn’t a total loss, but it looks like I’ll be borrowing Chimera from the library instead of purchasing. I am invested enough that I’d like to see how she wraps things up. There just might be a lot of skimming involved.
I must be the only human being that didn’t like Feed and now I know not to bother with this trilogy dispute the fact that tapeworms turning people into zombies would normally be right up my alley.
Thanks for the review
While that makes me so sad as I thoroughly enjoyed books 1 and 2 in this series, I’ll still read it eventually but probably get it from the library.
I went looking for this review because I could barely get half-way through the audiobook. I loved the Feed series, but this book especially seemed so poorly written I almost screamed. Spot on review, Carrie. Sometimes I can get past the bad writing if the plot is going somewhere, but OMG this was torture. I finally feel vindicated in giving up.
Chiming in in 2023 to report that, sadly, “Rolling in the Deep” and “Into the Drowning Deep” suffer from similar problems.