Why do people think the end of the world is such a difficult concept for a child to understand? Much of childhood is spent in fear of the unknown, in fear of creeping shadows and lurking monsters and things that promise a long, ugly, and painful death. A nuclear war was just one more boogeyman that threatened to take them all away. Only this boogeyman also scared her parents and all the other grown-ups, and the children tuned in to that frequency of fear as surely as they tuned in to Bugs Bunny. You could run from a monster, you could dodge the boogeyman, but the nuclear war was out there and out of their hands. It might come at any moment. Maybe when she was on the playground at recess. Maybe when she sat down to dinner. Maybe after she went to bed.

I received this book as a recommendation and omg it was a hard read. Trigger warning: book contains severe scenes of gore, self-mutilation, bodily fluids, murder, crucifixion, did I say self-immolation too? It was a horrific read and I had to take frequent breaks to still my rebelling stomach.

The premise of the book is good – an alien parasite infects humans and grows structural elements based on their body. It’s almost like a never-seen alien tapeworm.

“This is a revolutionary development, Margaret, don’t you see that? Think of the lowly tapeworm. It doesn’t have a digestive system. It doesn’t need one, because it lives in the host’s intestine. The host digests food, so the tapeworm doesn’t have to — it merely absorbs the nutrients surrounding it. Where do those nutrients go if the tapeworm doesn’t get them? They go into the bloodstream. Blood carries those nutrients, along with oxygen, to the body’s various tissues and then takes out waste materials and gases.” “And by tapping into the bloodstream, the triangle parasites get food and oxygen. They don’t need to eat or breathe.”

You have two camps: one infected host who is slowly exhibiting the starting signs of the disease and the CDC, CIA and FBI working super hard to trace the infected – as there are more than one and they turn murderous very quickly. They scan all comms for the words “triangle”, “bomb” and “murder”. They even set up a website showing the symptoms as they know them and allow people to look for help.

The good parts: let me just say that Perry- the infected host – is a tough former quarterback and would have been a beast in the field had he not injured his knee. His determination and sheer will are what’s keeping him alive. I mean any person faced with what he’s been seeing on his own body would have gone mental real quickly.

The flesh looked like an orange peel, not only in color but in texture as well. It smelled faintly of wet leaves. Tiny tears oozed watery blood. A chill of stabbing panic knifed through his body. If this had happened to his leg, had it also happened to…?

He reached down to his testicles and slowly lifted them to get a good look, hoping to God they would look normal. In effect, God told Perry to piss off.

It was the scariest thing he’d ever seen. Pale orange skin covered the left side of his scrotum. The area was mostly bald; only a few curly pubic hairs remained. He’d been nervous up till now, even heading into the wonderful world of pure dread, but these were his balls. His balls, for crying out loud! He sat, frozen, the toilet seat refusing to warm up, the drip under the sink suddenly so loud he wondered in amazement how he’d ever managed to sleep in the tiny apartment.

Let me just tell you what perry does to himself is absolute horror.

In through the nose, out through the mouth. One last, deep breath. Focus. Play through the pain. Perry reached up with his right hand and sank his fingers deep into the wound. He didn’t bother trying to control his screams of pain, he just hooked the fingers and scooped. Fingernails scraping hard against his open flesh, he yanked the Triangle’s squishy black corpse out of his body. The tail offered only minute resistance before it broke off, weakened by rot that had turned the body into little more than paste. Perry tossed the handful of gore into the sink, where it landed in the trails of puke and steaming water.
He scooped twice more, screaming anew each time, grabbing everything he could out of the wound. Blood again poured down his chest, running down his crotch, down his inner thighs to form small puddles on the floor.

Disgusting, I know. Yet I kept on reading.

He shook his head, he couldn’t do it. The doctors could cut it out, the doctors could fix it! The sink’s top was at waist level; he reached into his wet underwear to lift his scrotum and rest it on the counter, but when he touched it, his hand instinctively flinched as if he’d just unknowingly grabbed a rattlesnake. It hadn’t felt right. It hadn’t been soft and pliant; it had been hard, crusty, swollen, with solid bumps that didn’t belong.

[…]

The Triangle was huge. It was almost black under the skin of his scrotum. The center of the pyramid head pointed up as if his balls rested under a fleshy pup tent. Most of his pubic hair had fallen off, leaving his skin bald and unprotected. His left testicle was hidden somewhere under the Triangle. His right testicle was barely visible, the end of it pushing against the inside of his scrotum, stretching the skin. His dick jutted out at an odd angle — the Triangle had grown right underneath its base. There was little room left for the tissue that connected the penis to his body. It looked as if it were on the verge of falling off, severed at the bottom by the edges of the ever-growing Triangle. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Yep, he does some gruesome stuff…. I’m not going to spoil it but let’s just say that the book has a cliff-hanger ending.

The triangles are planning on constructing a portal to allow their fellow aliens to come in droves and invade earth. The FBI, CIA etc are super fast and manage to order a strike and kill off the portal but only afterwards they find out it was just one portal of many.