Parasite Pig

Interstellar Pig #2

by William Sleator

Barney's stuck at a boring after-school job, earning money to repay his parents after their beach house is destroyed in a battle with aliens.  Of course, they don't believe that aliens did the damage.  No one, in fact, realizes that sixteen-year-old Barney saved the world by outsmarting the visitors at their violent game, saved the world by outsmarting the visitors at their violent game, Interstellar Pig.  No one but the aliens-and for them the game is far from over.  Barney is about to become the unwilling partner of a chatty intestinal parasite; the potential snack of giant, man-eating crabs; and the competitor of a stinger-happy seven-foot wasp woman.  Life just got a lot more interesting...

Genres: Young Adult, Science Fiction, Fiction, Aliens, Fantasy, Humor

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

William Warner Sleator III was born in Havre de Grace, Maryland on February 13, 1945, and moved to St. Louis, MO when he was three. He graduated from University City High School in 1963, from Harvard in 1967 with BAs in music and English.

For more than thirty years, William Sleator thrilled readers with his inventive books. His House of Stairs was named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by the Young Adult Library Services Association.

William Sleator died in early August 2011 at his home in Thailand.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recently read Interstellar Pig, the first of Sleator's fantasy novels about a very unusual board game that is all too real. And oddly enough, I found this second book at my favorite online used bookseller just when I decided I simply HAD to place an order for a different book recommended to me by a GR friend.

So as soon as I could I read this story about Barney and what happened to him after we last saw him. He had more adventures, of course. He played another round of the game, and got into all sorts of more trouble, but this time he had a girlfriend with him. A girl he met while at his after school job where he worked to pay off the damages his game had caused to the summer rental house on the beach.

But I was not as enchanted by this book, I'm afraid. Poor Barney spent most of the time preparing for dinner. Not to eat it, either. To be it. Can he figure out a way to escape and save not only his own skin but his girlfriend's too? And what can he do about that Piggy?!

Still fast-paced, and with a few chuckles, but just not as brilliant as the first one, in my opinion.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Interstellar Pig, and read it over and over as a pre-teen and teenager, along with a handful of other William Sleator books, many of which held up to scrutiny on later re-reads. When I found this at a bookstore the other day I grabbed it, excited to discover a sequel that I hadn't known existed.
Sadly, it didn't impress. I didn't buy the premise from the start. Barney was a smart kid. Would he really keep playing the game?
Interstellar Pig was mildly funny, but also serious and scary to a kid reading it for the first time. Parasite Pig has an absurdist edge that I found pandering. It features a narrative that alternates between Barney's perspective and that of Madame Gondii, a parasite living in a cyst in his brain. There's also an intestinal parasite that seems to talk with an Australian accent for no reason whatsoever. The whole thing comes across as farce. And ok, some of the farcical elements are funny: I appreciate the concept that not everything in space is surgically sterile, and I found the crabs entertaining.
In an author's note at the end, Sleator says he wrote it because there had been some interest in turning Interstellar Pig into a movie, and he thought it might be a good time for a sequel. It might have been, but not this one.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Months after Barney has fought off an attack by three vicious extra-terrestrials at his family’s beach house, he’s approached in the library by a strange character who wants to play the board game Interstellar Pig with Barney and his friends. Even though this is the very game that drew the aliens to earth and nearly killed him Barney unexpectedly invites the stranger to play. Barney also has a very strange desire to visit the planet J’koot, a very earthlike planet inhabited by giant crabs whose favorite gourmet meal is slow-roasted human.

This is a very different space adventure from its predecessor Interstellar Pig. The game and the characters from that book are present, but instead of the spooky and slowly building suspense that made it such a delightfully chilling read, within a few dozen pages its sequel whisks the reader right off the planet and into the clutches of a giant unsanitary dinosaur infected with an intelligent parasite, a huge killer wasp and carnivorous crabs. Parasite Pig is non-stop action as Barney and his new girlfriend Katie escape from one perilous predicament into another, out of the fire and into the crabs’ marinating pool.

[Anonymole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freakin' bizarre! Fun though!

[maysri??? · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was different and got me wondering...This game may never end.

[Robin Gane-McCalla · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sequel which is mainly independent and thematically different from the original. It's an adventure story without much character development. Some of the characters are aliens, and some of the aliens are parasites (and the motivations and methods of control for the parasites are explored in detail). a relatively easy read but certain details that may seem irrelevant become relevant later in the story.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. The second Interstellar book wasn't as inviting and action packed as its first installation, but it expanded on different ideas. Girls, new aliens, new planets, and the aftermath of Barney's frightening encounter the previous summer. Hoping for a third book! Will definitely read more of William Sleator.

[Dale Wicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked "Interstellar Pig" a lot. This one is just okay. Same basic premise as the first one, but it's missing a few things that made the first book sing. For example, there's no real mystery or intersection of human and alien life (beyond the first couple pages, anyway). I'm glad that it exists and I enjoyed reading it, though I did like the ending to the first book better.

[Garrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as the original, but still pretty fun. And it has some great ties to the original's ending during its own.

[Zu Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars! I liked this slightly less than the first novel in the series, but it fit the world well. It made me emotionally attached to tapeworms in a way I never thought possible.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because it's a direct sequel to Interstellar Pig. It was reasonably entertaining, but not as engaging as the original.

[Micaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5*

[Julia Carr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as Interstellar Pig, but my boys enjoyed hearing it aloud at bedtimes.

[Yelizar · Rating 4 out of 5]

nothing like having an intelligent alien tapeworm suppository for the climax

yummy earwax and hair

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published 20 years after the original, this sequel may seem like a has-been author's desperate grab at reclaiming the magic of his best seller, and I was trying hard not to see it that way. The beginning didn't help; it's supposedly set less than a year after the original, but it feels like more time has passed. Technology has jumped to include cell phones and the Internet, and the main character is somehow in college. Okay, Barney's age in the original was never specified, and in this he's a high school student who happens to work at a library at Harvard, so technically it could be only a year later (like 14 - 15). It just doesn't feel that way. Also, Barney makes some very deliberately poor decisions at the beginning that really don't match his character.

There's actually a valid reason for those decisions which is revealed later, but the beginning could have been written better to foreshadow it. Maybe going meta, where Barney kind of knows he's making weirdly bad decisions and he knows better, but somehow they just feel like the thing to do. Anyway, the story picks up quite a bit, and goes where a sequel should: Barney goes on an adventure and this time makes it into space. His life is even more endangered than in the first and the situation is complicated enough to be interesting but still makes sense. Many of the original characters make an appearance, and the sequel concentrates on some even weirder aliens.

It's a bit funny to read the author's note at the end, which describes how he came to be a little obsessed with parasites right before he wrote this story. He doesn't say this, but I imagine that his willingness to kill off characters and exile the Pig means he's not wanting to write any further sequel.

[Julie Decker · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the previous book, Interstellar Pig, Barney dueled with aliens and saved the world, but his parents are ticked that he destroyed their beach house. Amusing himself playing the board game version of Interstellar Pig with friends as he works his summer job, he finds himself scooped up in an interplanetary adventure again when some of his game-mates are again not human. Barney ends up host to a parasitic creature that tries to control him, and is threatened by a giant wasp and gross space crabs that want to fatten and eat him and his friend Katie (at least she turned out to be human). More and more complications heap upon Barney as he has less and less he can do about it. But if there's one thing aliens should have learned in the previous book that they apparently didn't, it's that you shouldn't mess with an Earth boy!

This book couldn't really decide whether to be horrifying or silly sometimes--and occasionally it just settles for gross--but it's got some really memorable scenes and some heart-stopping situations for poor Barney and Katie. I like the diversity of the aliens and the parasitic aspect, and though I pretty much never like the "villains fatten up victims so they can eat them, giving them time to plot escape" concept, the rest of the ideas for trapping and challenging the characters felt a little more original.

[Julie S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Interstellar Pig, I was happy to get Parasite Pig as my next book.

I was excited to see more of Barney. In this book, he has a parasite that he had gotten from the lichen immunity pill. Now with the aliens gone, he is playing the game with some people, including this nice girl Katie. But one of these people is an alien in disguise who kidnaps Barney to get the pig back from the lichen. Katie is kidnapped by another alien, and they end up on a planet with human-eating crabs. Barney's parasite wants him to get eaten so she can have her children in a crab host. However, Barney and Katie manage to escape with some cleverness, courage, and some help from Julian the alein.

Woo, that was a good book. I was happy to see Barney again and even happier to be introduced to Katie as a new character.

I find the concept of these books so fascinating. A little pig statue is rumored to be the only way to stop one's planet from blowing up at the end of the "game." So all of the planets fight for it. However, the game is a lie. The pig statue is a recorder, programed to "learn" about the different species and planets. Then, of course, the ending in which the pig was thrown into space complicated this.

[Vel Veeter]

A not very good sequel to one of my favorite books of all time. For one, some of the allure and fun is stripped away. The cleverness of the first book just doesn't exist here. One of the fun features of the first book is how tied up the story was in the weird beach house and coastal town. It added a layer of depth and complication to the story and made the first half of that novel a mystery. Here, all that is stripped away straight to plot. There's one element that keeps this book a little clever, which is that Barney is being controlled by a toxoplasmosis type parasite and so he makes irrational decisions that even he doesn't understand. In the first book the aliens in disguise use incredibly weird language, and it's really well down, and here the aliens are boring.

The second thing is that there's both no suspense, and too much plot. Lastly, the aliens brought in here just as fun and inventive and scary as in the original.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a big fan of the original, I was surprised I hadn't discovered this sequel yet, though I wish I had left it alone. Barney was never the strongest character, but moving the action to the crab planet, and spending most of the book in captivity exploring the boring-ass crab planet, didn't help his cause. The most interesting character, the parasite in Barney's brain, is wasted on a series of monologues that reveal way too little over way too much time - her thoughts are like a Lost episode, stuff we already knew mixed with intricate ways to not explain anything.

Just, bleh. Overall very bland. And they only play one weak-ass game of Interstellar Pig! That's part of what I loved about the original, was the slow dissolution of the enemy alien's disguises around the gameplay. I love gameplay!

[Leena · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Interstellar Pig" deserved a great sequel and the way things were left at the end staged an easy setting for one. The players were all still in the game, and the prize, the Piggy, very much out there. Unfortunately, this book is not worthy. When I re-read "Interstellar Pig" as an adult, I thoroughly enjoyed it. This afterthought of a book comes across tired and childish. Instead of the smart, subtle menace of the original, Sleator loads this book with situations meant to gross the reader out. The new villains, the crabs, are boring and one-dimensional. The plot is a simple plight-and-rescue. So much of the book also revolves around eating I started to wonder if Sleator was on a diet while writing this. Next title in the series: Barney finds a book by Geneen Roth and learns to love himself instead of eating so much.

[Bryan Murdock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Almost as good as the first (how many sequels get that review?). Seems like he spent a little too much time in the beginning on just trying to gross us out (which is probably perfect for the intended audience, I'm just getting old). Later the story developed a bit more of the makes-you-think kind of sci-fi that I like. If you liked Interstellar Pig then you should read this sequel. Like the first it is short, will creep you out just enough to make it fun, and will give you something to think about for a few days after finishing it.

[Swankivy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the prequel of this, Interstellar Pig, when I was a li'l one, and it was one of my favorites from this author. Naturally I was surprised when, about fifteen years later, I discovered that the book had acquired a sequel. I bought it instantly and read it sometime later. It was just as good, and less predictable.

[Grant Ansert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not as good as Interstellar Pig, there is enough here to easily entertain. I read Interstellar Pig to my students every year and they always have the same question- what happens next? This book is a nice sequel and leaves you feeling a bit better at the end.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the sequel to Interstellar Pig.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sick and twisted and wonderful. Avoid if you fear parasites.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this book as much as Interstellar Pig, but it was still a fun read.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sequel! Those aliens never learn. Well, ok, one of them does.

[Lovely Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love love love Interstellar Pig, and didn't realize there was a sequel. It was cleverly plotted but I didn't love it as much as the original.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as the first and a good deal darker, but still a fascinating mind-f*ck.

[Michaela Hayes · Rating 1 out of 5]

i havent read this book but my brother has it and it looks stupid.