I was digging around my Kindle library to pick my next book and I saw this and I thought what the hell, I love that book. And halfway through I looked at my bookshelf and I remembered that I own this entire trilogy in hardcover, why the hell did I buy this ebook even if I’m sure I only spent a couple dollars on it.
Scott Sigler is a mid-list horror and SF author who does a lot of social media promotion and was an early adopter (possibly founder) of the method of putting out fiction as a podcast in order to grow an audience and get publishing deals. This is where I found him in the mid-aughts as a poor college student who wanted audiobooks and I’ve followed him ever since, even if not always closely. A lot of his books are really detail oriented and “scientific” as long as you understand that scientific is being used to mean the way science works in the world of the story. He’s generally good at it, I’ve listened to him on and off for 15 years or more and own multiple hardcopies. But his protagonists tend to be a little dry and often angry, because he’s a tiny white guy who was the son of a State level football coach and he has (admitted and dealt with) anger issues.
Alive is probably his best book. It’s a dystopian-horror YA novel about a young woman who wakes up in a stone box with a needle stabbing at her and she fights her way free and then goes on to lead the rest of the young people she finds to a massive victory over things that can’t be explained without massive spoilers. And no one has any memory of anything before the first words on the page and it’s full of self-doubt from the narrator and it’s just excellent. It’s written for a younger audience so it’s not full of profanity like some of his other books, but it doesn’t sacrifice anything for that and because no one in the protagonist group knows ANYTHING about what’s going on for most of the story he gets out of his own fucking way and doesn’t explain every little tidbit in extreme detail that he sometimes does in his more adult writing.
I remember listening to the podcast version back when it first came out and I mistimed it so I started before it was finished and I would have needed to wait a few weeks for the rest of the story but the book was out. I was like “Fuck that” and just bought the hardcover because it was so gripping. And it is. And I bought the sequels when they came out because I didn’t want to wait for the weekly podcast drops. This is his best book and his best series and I am incredibly sad that it didn’t sell well enough to really take off and he went back to writing more detail oriented horror-SF stuff. I highly recommend reading this book, it truly is excellent and the rest of the series is also very good but it does get more involved with his other novels as it goes.
What makes me sad is that while this book got a push from the publisher and was released at the tail end of the Hunger Games hype, it didn’t sell well enough for Scott to continue writing in this style. Or for him to continue experimenting with his writing. The books he’s sold since Alive have been pretty much what he was writing when he debuted. Better versions of that style, but still that style. He’s a good author and I like what he writes, but he has the potential to be so much better and I don’t blame him for it because it doesn’t make financial sense but I still want him to write something else.
by CallynDS