Alien Invasion story. Basically enjoyable, but the author uses way too much deus ex machina and the more you think about it, the worse it gets.
Girl’s brother and his wife disappear on a drive west to take a new job in Albuquerque, so a month or so later she convinces her friends to take a road trip to Vegas, with the hidden agenda of finding them. West of Amarillo on I-40 they break down just by coincidence near the same town her brother happens to be holed up in. While this wouldn’t be too bad if it were just Texas (there are precisely 2 towns with a double digit number of people or more between Amarillo and the New Mexico border), that’s less than a quarter the distance to Albuquerque, and there are considerably more towns in New Mexico.
They find the town deserted except for something that attacks the trucker who gave them a lift into town. Of course, there’s a barrier preventing exit and no cell phone or wireless or landline connectivity, and nobody has a radio that can reach so much as the trucker traffic on I-40, and nobody came to read the meters or deliver the groceries to the store the town has or anything else in all this time so the world outside is somehow clueless. Yes, my suspension of disbelief was getting tenuous.
The four millenials are so driven by social media that even in the midst of all this, they’re still concentrating on that. My kids are social media millenials, and they’d change their priorities well before that point.
Then after they meet up with aliens who appear human and are on their way to be taken into custody, the clueless alien just happens to escort them past the stronghold of the last resistor in town and for some reason they decide to go in and ask him if he’s got any Grey Poupon or something, and voila, it’s the lost brother.
Brother has managed to hold out solo for six weeks or so despite being infected by alien DNA through using UV light to treat the infection, despite the fact UV light doesn’t penetrate skin. Then of course there are the obligatory scenery chewing stupidities through which the author manipulates the plot. Well, so does any book, but when people won’t consider obvious issues that any reasonable rational person would, that’s going too far.
The aliens aren’t exactly all there in terms of their thinking either – and I’m going to leave it there because I don’t want to go in-depth on all of that nonsense.
Basically, if you’re looking for a mindless read, might be fun for you. If you expect some sort of intelligence on the part of the characters, not so much.
I’ll give it five of ten – by Amazon standards, a three star book.
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