A non-stop roller-coaster of a read!
Subhuman begins by showing the seemingly disparate specialties of five scientists. Dr. Cade Evans is an archaeologist, who has just discovered a mass grave underneath an existing excavated Egyptian tomb. Within it, Evans finds a mass of animal and human bodies, one with an abnormally large skull. In Nigeria, forensic anthropologist Dr. Jade Liang studies the corpses from a recent massacre to obtain evidence for the UN International Criminal Court. Within the piles of the dead, she sees a young deceased girl with an unusually outsized head. Marvin Roche studies crop circles in the English countryside after an earlier career as a cryptanalyst at the US National Security Agency. Kelly Nolan predicts an earthquake in Oregon by reviewing sub-vocal sounds in the earth’s crust. Anya Fleming exhumes a big skulled man in Russia. All five agree to work for Richards, an enigmatic venture capitalist, who has set up a state-of-art base in Antarctica.
Subhuman is a rollicking read that is hard to stop reading. The first half uses existing pop culture alien theories, Nazi Germany myths, and real science to describe what Richards is researching at the base on Antarctica. The author does an excellent jobs merging these divergent sources into a coherent plot. The second half will seem familiar to viewers of some famous 1980s horror films. Still the novel is a compulsive page-turner anyway. Subhuman is recommended for thriller, hard science fiction and horror readers. I can’t wait for this book to be made into a movie! 4 stars.
Thanks to the publisher, Kensington Books, and netgalley for an advanced review copy.