Review: Parasite by Darcy Coates

Title: Parasite

Author: Darcy Coates

Genre: Adult, sci-fi, horror

Publication date: August 2016

Published by: Black Owl Books

Source: Borrowed from library

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Synopsis: They're closer than you think...

A guard discovers an unusual lifeform on her remote moon outpost. She disregards protocol to investigate it, with catastrophic consequences.

The parasitic alien wears its victims' skins and adopts their personalities. It's a perfect disguise, and allows the creature to spread without being detected. By the time humanity realises it's facing extinction, a third of its six hundred space stations have already gone dark.

As the alien's ruthless progress collapses communication networks, wipes out defences, and leaves hundreds of stations to fend for themselves, a handful of remarkable individuals must find a way to battle the greatest threat the universe has ever encountered.

My rating: ★★★☆☆

...it looks like your roommate, your best friend, or even your child. It is a parasite; it doesn't kill its hosts—not completely, at least—but it absorbs them and becomes them. It can mimic their face, their speech, their expressions, and mannerisms. It even takes their memories. There could be one standing beside you this minute, and you wouldn't know...

This is my second book by Darcy Coates and I gotta say, I’m enjoying her books! I do wish this book was a little scarier than it was, but overall it satisfied my craving for sci-fi horror.

This book was interesting in that it didn’t follow one character throughout the book. It was almost like it was a bunch of short stories all revolving around this alien parasite, but all laid out linearly. I actually really enjoyed that because we got to follow different teams as they encountered these parasitic aliens and they all dealt with them in different ways. I do admit that I cared for some characters more than others—I really liked Kala and the badass Vivian from one story, and Maren and Saul from another were super cute!

I enjoyed the science of how these things operate—the way they assimilated and absorbed memories and knowledge from their hosts was very interesting. But like I said previously, I didn’t find this book to be that scary. The parasites were horrifying in general, but the descriptions of these things didn’t horrify me. Does that make sense? I just wished the descriptions were more... horrifyingly descriptive, I guess. Lol.

I really did enjoy this though! It had some really good tension and some of the action sequences were very exciting and stressful, which I loved. The creatures were interesting, the story (or stories) was good, and I actually liked a lot of the characters. It was a really solid sci-fi horror novel overall!

Have you read this book? If so, what did you think about it? If not, what do you think? Does it sound like something you might want to read? Leave me a link to your review or comment below! 😊