Paul Elard Cooley's THE BLACK: A DEEP SEA THRILLER

I like to see an author stretch himself, and stretching is what Paul Elard Cooley* is doing with his latest novel, his deep sea thriller The Black. On the surface an ocean-borne monster tale that has been described as Peter Benchley meets H.P. Lovecraft, The Black has more going on than just watching well-constructed characters getting et by a monster.

For starters, The Black has rather a unique setting -- a deep sea petroleum exploration platform, where roughnecks spend months at a time working hard and getting smelly, far from their families or anything like civilization. This particular platform is a locus of unusual excitement even before the horror elements set in: it's potentially on top of an oil find so big that it might allow the U.S. to tell the Middle East to pound sand.

Enter a crew of specialists, experts in fields like robotics and petroleum geology and ways to use the former to improve our understanding of the latter. They fit in poorly on the rig (even the ones who are not -- gasp -- women), and the tension between them and the roughnecks gives the novel a greater depth and substance than people usually go looking for in monster stories. Some readers have apparently complained of this a bit, but I find it only makes me care about the characters all the more when the excrement hits the air conditioning, as it does.

Oh, it does.

Cooley has also gone to the extraordinary trouble of creating a wholly new monster. I joked on twitter early on that oh, no, the robots were about to shave Cthulhu, but I was dead wrong. As it were. Actually, I'm still trying to sort out what matter of entity is disturbed to the characters' peril. It's not just big and black and aquatic; its biology is utterly alien (especially if I'm correctly understanding that what is causing most of the trouble in the exciting second half of the novel is pretty much just the entity's blood? lymph? anyway, some kind of body fluid), as is its level of sentience. And, spoiler alert, the mystery is maintained to the very end, but not without satisfying the reader's need for, you know, an ending.

I look forward most eagerly to its sequel, which promises to broaden the greater story's scope and threat, just as Cooley's pal (and mine) Scott Sigler's Infected trilogy did. Yowza. I just can't wait to find out what the Snape this entity/creature/thing IS!!!

*Reviewer's note: Cooley is a personal friend, so, you know, bias alert. But if I don't like a friend's books, I don't write about them. And if you haven't noticed by now, I'm a pretty demanding reader so, you know, don't let the bias alert scare you off, mmmkay?

Scott Sigler's PANDEMIC

What if Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitors found us back when we lived on just the one planet, and instead of harnessing the destructive power of stellar physics to destroy us, were masters of biotechnology instead and just hijacked our own brains and bodies into doing it?

Such is the malevolent force Scott Sigler has created for his Infected series, my fondness for which I have covered elsewhere. The machines working to wreak apocalyptic havoc on humanity refer to them as The Creators, but we could really maybe call them Space Republicans, for their knee-jerk reaction to the idea that the universe might contain sentient life other than themselves is to seek to destroy that life utterly before it evolves to the point of developing space travel and the ability to destroy The Creators. See also Douglas Adams' Crikketers.

The result is a combination of first rate body horror and disaster porn, rather than space opera, but the comparison stands. As Reynolds draws on a prior career as a professional astronomer, Sigler draws on the expertise of his rabid fanbase (known as "Junkies" the ranks of whom include the likes of Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, who gets a hilarious cameo-tweet mid-story) and his own formidable attention to scientific detail, again almost to a fault. Reynolds' books occasionally threaten to drift into becoming astronomy primers; this series of Sigler's has passages that might stand up in a college biology textbook -- but it's all the service of selling the story. And lots of people are buying, including your humble blogger.

Pandemic, the third and final volume in the series takes all of the bio-medical creepiness, apocalyptic threat and heroic angst of Infected and Contagious, turns the volume up to 11, and rips off the knob. With each novel, the Creators' semi-sentient minions have learned more about human biology on both the individual and the social levels and have exploited that knowledge to nearly destroy humanity, only to be barely thwarted by the combined efforts of a team of scientists, soldiers and politicians who contain the threats posed in the nick of time, and through the individual bravery of a few early victims like washed-up football hero Perry Dawson, patient zero in the first novel, who still looms larger than life after death in this third one.*

Dr. Margaret Montoya, the woman who failed to save Perry, but who saved a lot of other people at great cost, is more or less the hero of this one, or at least she's supposed to be, but once again, despite her scientific brilliance, her strength, her crippling guilt and her marital problems, she's the least interesting character in the book. But this isn't because she's a badly drawn or boring character; she's just got a lot of competition, not the least of which from the disease itself, whose "point of view" Sigler relates in several interludes of frightening plausibility and maximum grossness (seriously, trigger warning for you germophobes out there. If someone blowing his/her nose in your presence squicks you out, if you're one of those people whose hands are constantly drenched in hand sanitizer, this is maybe not the book for you). And the other characters, including Ancestor's Dr. Tim Feely, still yucking it up even as he fights to save the world again. And the plot. And the colossal world-wide scope of the problem she faces, a plot so apocalyptically epic that the most vivid and compelling character in the world would pretty much get lost in it.

The fact that she doesn't, nor do the new characters introduced in this novel, says everything about Sigler as a writer; he achieves a near-flawless balance between character moments, dire exposition and insane-to-the-point-of-thigh-slapping ACKSHUN. The result is a compelling and ickily plausible read even before the climactic hijinks.

I expected nothing less.

*As well he should. He and his chicken scissors are unforgettable.