It all started with an itch... Arriving home to Los Angeles from a weeklong business trip to Japan, Brian Pace contracts the deadly Shinjuku X virus. Six months later and lucky to survive he wakes up in a hospital bed surrounded by death with one thing on his mind: his wife Veronica and his five-year-old son Jackson. Brian sets out to reconnect with his family and is tested again and again, ultimately forcing him to redraw the rules of what he considers right and wrong, struggling to stay inside them. In a world where the only law is survival some rules are meant to be broken. And they will be.
It was strange to read this during the quarantine period. I mean, a virus from Asia that is bombarding society. Isn't it familiar? This part put a smile on my face. The story was quite episodic as if I had read a script for a TV series. First the apartment, the cannibal community, then the satanist ritual of the Hunter, the hospital and the desert. The sudden jumps from the loose dialogues to mutilations and selected tortures were quite unexpected. I didn’t expect it to be such a morbid book. I’ve always found psychological horror interesting and one of my favourite genres ever, but I’m not always prepared for such random gores, especially not now because I thought it was just a simple post-apocalyptic dystopia. Boy, I was wrong... not that I'm upset about it. At first, it seemed that the book would focus more on mental and emotional development and regression, and then suddenly the mutation line appeared out of nowhere. I basically like the way the virus affects aggression and how much different it affects a child than an adult. I'll take a little break then follow up with the sequel. I'm curious what the doctor's story will be.