Richard Lewis - Parasite

[dem bones]

Richard Lewis - Parasite (Hamlyn 1980)

from the blurb:

Chaos ... insanity ... death

When Peter Braddock planned the perfect crime, he never imagined the horror he was about to unleash on Britain. The circumstances were bizarre - the abandoned cruiser he had spotted in the English Channel .... the fearfully mutilated body in one of the cabins ... the blood. But how could he ever guess what happened when he boarded it?

The stricken boat held a gruesome secret. Clinging to it and travelling with it were the tiny carriers of a fearsome disease ....

nightreader wrote on Sep 2nd, 2006

After the apocalyptic Prologue the story opens with a luxury cruiser adrift in the English Channel. On board is a dead girl bound by rope to her bunk...

While on holiday in Marbella Brit GP George Carson assists a young American boy who gets sick. He suspects he's been infected with the tropical disease Bilharzia. He's not wrong.

But this is a mutated strain of the virus and through a series of incidents the disease rapidly makes it's way to Britain...

This is really scary stuff. The Bilharzia virus is real, and although it's a mutated strain in this story it's very believable. Lewis uses climate change (milder, damper weather) to explain the movement of the virus to our shores. Written in 1980 the environmental concerns are as relevant as ever.

The disease is spread through snails. Larvae from the snails intestines attaches itself to a human host then burrows into the skin laying eggs which then hatch and spread through the body. Death is guaranteed, and it's not pleasant.

This has been an unrelentingly grim read, and one which I'm quite relieved to have finished. This horror is a little to close to reality for comfort...

****

Fifty pages into this and it's already looking like another Lewis winner to me. Wonderful image: as Braddock is pocketing the jewels, a nimble team of infected snails cheekily slither along the rope linking his boat to the yacht. When he sets sail back to Lake Windermere, they hitch a lift which is catastrophic news for Britain. As to the parasites:

"Less than one millimetre long, worm-like in shape but flatter. Fork-tailed they were (as they say the Devil is) and almost transparent. And at the head, if the mass of entwined, twisted nerve fibres could be called a head, was a muscular sucker. this took up nearly one-third of the body, while at the other end was another sucker, smaller but equally effective."

The people of Manchester really don't know what's about to hit them.

[dem bones]

"Nature's biting back, old friend."
"Nonsense! You've been reading too much science fiction!"

Terrific. The very last words you want to see in a Richard Lewis novel. Now we know for certain that the world is dying of doom and I'm not so sure our hero, widower George Carson, GP and amateur tropical disease fan, can stop it, especially as the Government is already in cover up mode.

I thought I was only one novel (Spiders) short of a complete run of Lewis but, thanks to the invaluable Hal Astell site, I now know that ain't strictly the case and 'Richard Lewis' is the pseudonym of Alan Radnor whose books under his own name include The Force (Hamlyn, 1979), Possessed (MacDonald, 1982), Dick Barton Special Agent #3: The Case Of The Vanishing House (Star, 1978) and the non-fiction Paranormal Or Normal? (Lennard, 1989) - "Is New Age science proving the existence of the Paranormal by exposing the scientific prejudices of the past and the present?"

[H_P_Saucecraft]

Greatly enjoyed this one, it's typical Lewis & doesn't disappoint - right down to the usual sequel-baiting epilogue. Now, if Lewis & Hutson were to get together for Slugs vs Snails....

It's a pity Lewis never did a third spiders book. Once I'm near a scanner again, I'll post the alternative cover for this one.

[H_P_Saucecraft]

The Alternative Cover: