Virus [Import] [Hardcover]

Sarah Langan (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Headline Book Publishing (April 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0755333721
• ISBN-13: 978-0755333721
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #673,475 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah grew on Long Island and went to college in Maine. She studied both fiction writing and environmental toxicology and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and floppy eared rabbit. It's a busy household and sadly, the plants are often fatally thirsty.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting and beautifully written, September 26, 2007

By 

Henry W. Wagner (Rockaway, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Missing (Mass Market Paperback)

The Missing is Sarah Langan's second novel, a follow up to her highly praised 2006 debut, The Keeper, which no less a light than Peter Straub described as combining "a genuinely poetic sensibility with a taste for horror's most bravura excesses." Happily, The Missing (called The Virus in its UK incarnation) shows those same qualities, resulting in a book that's memorable, heartbreaking and disturbing.

The Missing (inspired in part by Langan's personal experiences in New York in the days after the 9/11 attack, when the smells and dust emanating from ground zero permeated the air in the city) is a loose sequel to The Keeper. For instance, a character from that novel appears briefly, and the town of Bedford, where The Keeper was set, is mentioned. The key link between the two novels, however, is the explosion of Clott Paper Mill at the end of The Keeper.

Besides killing several people, the explosion and subsequent fire resulted in the release of deadly Hydrogen Sulfide gas into the air. That element comes to permeate the soil in the woods between Bedford and Corpus Christi, Maine, enabling a virus in the soil there to evolve into something deadly and malevolent, thus setting the stage for the events described in The Missing.

Langan's fictional horror is precipitated by, of all things, a fourth grade field trip, where a student gets lost. After being exposed to the virus, that student becomes a Typhoid Mary of sorts, spreading the virus by attacking and biting members of the local populace. Soon, the majority of the citizens of Corpus Christi are seized by madness, turning into aggressive, flesh-craving crazies, all intent on securing their next meal and spreading the virus to new hosts. They are led by the pregnant teacher, wallflower Lois Larkin, who, while searching for her student, felt compelled to ingest some of the tainted forest dirt. Due to the way she is introduced to the virus, she becomes the hub of the group mind that the virus fosters in its victims, coming to lead the infected against the remaining populace.

The Missing effectively combines small town horror with apocalyptic fiction, calling to mind several books and at least one film exploiting similar themes--King's Cell, Straub's Floating Dragon, and John Shirley's In Darkness Waiting are the novels, 28 Days Later the film--as people try to cope with a rapidly changing, infinitely more deadly world than the one they've become accustomed to. The two novels it consciously or unconsciously evokes most, however, are two classics, David Morrell's The Totem, and Chet Williamson's Ash Wednesday, the first because its posits a chillingly plausible explanation behind the legends of the werewolf, vampire and zombie, the second because, like Williamson, Langan knows that apocalypse is personal, choosing to generate emotional force from the trials and tribulations of a small cast of characters, rather than choosing a larger, global stage. Through thoroughly arresting prose, Langan creates an air of intimacy between her cast and her readers that she exploits to its fullest, demonstrating that small, everyday horrors--a friend's betrayal, a spouse's infidelity, the breakdown of a family unit, and the difficult choices daily life forces on us--can be more devastating to some than the literal end of the world.

Reading this novel should prove reassuring to horror's old(er) guard--although elements of the book will certainly feel familiar, it's not a mere rehash of prior works. Rather, it is a statement that it's perfectly legitimate to revisit what's come before, as long as writers come at the material from a slightly different angle, with a slightly different perspective. The old saw that "there are no new stories, only new ways of telling them" once again holds true, at once a concession to reality and a creative challenge. It's invigorating to see new talent like Langan handling that challenge so deftly.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Takes a while to get going...., December 20, 2007

By 

Deborah Wiley (Winter Haven, FL) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Missing (Mass Market Paperback)

A field trip leads to the awakening....

Despite the decimation from a fire in Bedford, the school board approves teacher Lois Larkin to take her fourth grade class on a field trip to the site. Lois is heartbroken over her the breakup of her engagement to Ronnie Koehler, so heartbroken that she doesn't notice when one of her students goes missing. The search is on for James Walker, but it is too late as he has awakened something, something dark and hungry that has only been biding its time in Bedford. Will anyone survive as this vicious plague spreads?

I almost didn't finish THE MISSING. Why in the world would a school board approve a field trip to a place like Bedford? The descriptions were positively terrifying, as Sarah Langan does an excellent job at building a suspenseful and horrifying atmosphere. But I couldn't grasp why a school board would say Lois could take her students to a place where birds would drop dead in mid flight and trees shriveled up and died.

I also struggled with Lois' character. Her sniffling over Ronnie should have been at least sad, but instead I found myself irritated by her refusal to develop a backbone or to reach out to the opportunities available to her. Lois initially seems as if she is determined to fail. However, Sarah Langan has some surprises in store for the reader as Lois is going to be a doormat no longer.

THE MISSING progresses into a decent horror novel once the story kicks in. The town of Corpus Christi, Maine, is about to know the true meaning of horror as the residents will have to face the horrendous consequences of this plague. In the midst of this devastation, several individuals struggle to survive. Readers will find themselves drawn into the subplots featuring Maddie Wintrob and her family, along with that of the Walker family and Danny Walker, as they are caught in this apocalyptic nightmare. Will they survive? Or is everyone doomed to die? Only the turn of the page will reveal what happens....

COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Pretty bad, but..., March 31, 2008

By 

Rolsch (Kansas City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Missing (Mass Market Paperback)

There are a few good blurbs in and on this book that interested me from a few good writers that interest me so I bought it (or rather, I Mooched it) and I read it. It was a pretty quick read and I have to say, it was quick because I didn't like it very much.

The story is pretty good. The characterizations are pretty bad. I felt like the author was trying to create internally tormented characters but the resulting characterizations were shallowly annoying and instead of coming across tormented to this reader, they came off the pages as ridiculously vacillating. Example: The main character, or family actually, was so full of conflicting emotions and mental attitudes toward each other that I started doubting if the author even realized what they were up to. Feelings toward other family members and "loved ones" flipped between love, hate, complete passion and absolute displeasure... all within the space of a paragraph... over and over and over. It was annoying and my suspension of reality (a necessary request by an author of any reader) was tested to the limits.

The book left me feeling like there was definitely something "Missing." What was missing was any kind of coherency. Don't get me wrong, I understand incoherent emotions and how they can play a role in a good story. There is nothing better than an incoherent person to add drama and suspense and even emotion (in the reader, either disdain or pity or even pleasure at such out-there thinking and actions) but when your main characters vacillate between such extremes it gets to be a big distraction.

I love my wife, I hate my wife, I love my husband, I hate my husband, I love my parents, I hate my parents, I love our life, I hate our life, I'm a good person, I'm evil, I hate everything, I love everything. This is how the book reads. Passion, either good or evil, is a great attribute. Trying to impose both at the same time can make for great and tormented characters delving into a slip of sanity. Or, it can make for a miserable roller coaster ride that detracts from the overall story. The latter is what we have here.

Never mind the fact that the premise of the book lies just past the reach of suspended reality to which readers are asked to submit. In this case, a teacher (another tormented, I hate/I love character) is given permission in upscale community of Corpus Christi, ME to take children on a field trip to a decimated, diseased, burned, polluted and dying neighboring town called Bedford (this was too convenient and I would propose would never have been allowed in the first place, thus my suspension of reality was tested early) where an evil is released by an annoying little schoolboy with a Jeffery Dahmer childhood. Never mind that, and the characterizations, and the book is still, well... pretty bad.

-=R=-