In the Blood

Lauren Wright Douglas

Completed 3/12/2020, Reviewed 3/12/2020

3 stars

This book was a hot mess.  The writing was okay at best and the science was a little difficult to swallow.  I kept on thinking that this shouldn’t have gotten the nomination for a Lambda Literary Award in 1990.  I felt like it needed a really good editor to help the author with sentence building and continuity.  But for some reason, in the end, I realized I enjoyed it.  The plot is about a virus that sends the US into a nearly barbaric state.  The trope was most famously done by Stephen King in “The Stand” and has been done many times since.  However, it was probably a pretty novel approach to a book where women dominate the cast and feature a lesbian relationship. 

A virus probably made for biological warfare is released over the US.  It quickly spreads, infecting mostly men, but spreading to women through sexual contact.  The US breaks apart into pieces, with California, being ground zero, seceding first and closing its borders.  The state starts the Biostrike Force to stop the spread of the virus.  Enter Sandoval, a captain for the Force.  She and her militia of women, have orders to escort an invited Dr. Jean Ashe to California with an experimental but effective vaccine Ashe has created.  However, Sandoval’s lieutenant Valentin seems to have different, secret orders.  Once Ashe and her assistants are retrieved, the journey back to California becomes one of survival: from the elements, from the barbaric bands of men roaming the countryside, and from treachery within.

The story is told in chapters alternating in POV between Sandoval and solar-tech Hart, a woman working at the facility in Arizona where Dr. Ashe has been doing her research.  At the beginning of the book, the chapters were very choppy.  They included a lot of exposition about the beginning of the virus and the setup of Biostrike Force, as well as background stories of the two characters.  It was pretty heavy, as if the author was bogged down by her own world-building.  But once Sandoval and her team arrived in Arizona to pick up Ashe and her crew (including Hart), the storytelling became a little more cohesive, exciting, and easier to read.

The characterization isn’t great.  Many of the characters are rather wooden.  Neither Sandoval nor Hart seem particularly likeable, but as the story became more cohesive, so did they.  They both have perspective changing experiences as they struggle to survive the calamity and treachery that befalls the group.  And Hart finds herself falling in love with one of Sandoval’s soldiers despite having built a wall around herself at the start of the pandemic when she was only fourteen years old.  

Perhaps the greatest reason I enjoyed this book is because at the time of this writing, we are in the middle of a real pandemic, the Corona Virus.  People are panicking, the stock market is crashing, and schools and businesses are shutting down.  Conspiracy theories abound and our government is failing to act.  So the reading of this book was very synchronistic. 

Overall, it’s not a great book, but it caught me at the right time.  And it is interesting to read a book from the latter part of the beginnings of the subgenre.  I give the book three stars out of five.  I toyed with giving it two stars, but I did find it enjoyable and actually exciting despite its flaws.  By the way, that’s the definition of a hot mess:  based on all its faulty parts, it shouldn’t have worked, but it did.