What do You think about Stranger (2003)?
Like "Blood Crazy," the other Simon Clark book I've read, this has an interesting premise ruined by lame execution and writing. In brief: America (and the world) are invaded by a horde of immigrants from South America, who (surprise!) are infected by a sort of time-delay plague which causes them to become crazed murderers, which (surprise!) then turns out to be just Phase One of an even weirder and grosser transformation.It sounds cool, but when you actually read it, it's a drag and doesn't make much sense. Like "Blood Crazy", in terms of mood, this isn't so much a horror novel as a postapocalyptic survival novel. (In other words, it's more about survival and heroism than about being scary.) Also as in "Blood Crazy", cruelly cynical scenes of human-on-human violence (particularly in the first 1/3rd in the paranoid survivalist town of Sullivan) outnumber scenes of human-vs-the-infected, or zombies or hornets or whatever they're called. The main character's 'condition' (his ability to detect the infected, followed by the uncontrollable urge to kill them) is an interesting antiheroic superpower, but ultimately the author doesn't use it very much. The dialogue and the first-person narration is frequently cheesy and/or overexplains what the characters are thinking and feeling; it's dumb writing. (Incidentally, Clark also mostly ignores, or is uninterested in, the racial implications of an army of crazed Latino immigrants invading & massacring North America. In one paragraph he offhandedly mentions "There was a race issue to all this"; no shit, Sherlock. But after that paragraph it's never mentioned again, nor are there any non-insane Latino characters, unless the hero with his vaguely Latino name counts, but "Greg Valdiva"'s ethnicity is never specified.) Most annoyingly, unlike "Blood Crazy", where Clark overexplains the apocalypse and eventually makes it ridiculous, here he errs in the opposite direction and never explains what's going on -- for instance (view spoiler)[how the 'hornets' create or relate to the 'hives', how the 'hives' function, exactly what the hell the 'hives' produce, the origin of the whole plague, etc. (hide spoiler)]
—Jason Bradley Thompson
Stranger, as of May 2011, is probably my second-least-favorite novel of all time. It holds the silver medal and will remain forever in the shadow of Sephera Giron’s Borrowed Flesh. My least favorite book ever isn’t a novel but a collection by John Shirley, but that isn’t important. I hated Stranger. As usual, I went into it with no knowledge of what it was about. I only knew it was horror and that is what I love. This is another apocalyptic, human race on the brink of extinction, people quaranteening areas and fighting for survival and Greg Valdiva is the Stranger who will save it all. That’s my horrible take on the book anyway. I didn’t really get much of it. The clearest memory I have is of Greg and a girl (can’t even remember her name) popping popcorn together. That is the only scene that made an impression and stuck with me and I don’t even know why. Perhaps this book was a victim of outside sources ruining it for me or distracting me, but I don’t think so. I read all 418 pages and was overjoyed to finish and move onto something different, and hopefully better.
—Adam Wilson
