VERDE'S REVENGE

Coy presents an otherworldly SF thriller in three parts.

Former U.S. Marine Phil Lynch has a cabin in Kern County, California. Its remote location suits Phil’s lifestyle, although, as it happens, it also makes him an easy target for an alien abduction. After a struggle with a monstrous creature one night, Phil finds himself on a spaceship of untold horrors. These aliens have a system in which they inject insects into humans for reasons that only later become apparent. Still, Phil and some other hardy abductees refuse to give in. Despite the odds, one of the humans onboard thinks that he can strike a deal with the aliens, even if it means selling out most of humanity. In the novel’s second part, set several centuries later, humans have become adept at terraforming other planets. One such world is a vast green sphere called Verde’s Revenge, named by a bitter explorer who lost his wife there. As the name suggests, it is a hostile place of “oppressive, soggy heat,” and at night, the insects come to aggressive life; woe to anyone who ventures outdoors without a net suit, and that doesn’t even take into account what the native plants can do. Still, due to an indentured labor arrangement, humans keep coming to Verde’s Revenge in search of a path to a better life, even though it’s technically illegal to go there. In the third part of the novel, three of Verde’s Revenge’s inhabitants—nurse Rae Applegate, biologist Grade III Hazel Sanders, and pilot John Soledad—find themselves involved in a situation that’s much stranger and more violent than they could have imagined.

Over the course of the book, the author offers readers an extensive fictional world of aggressive creatures with descriptions that aren’t for the squeamish; for instance, at one point, a creature’s eggs “split open and dripped their viscous, squirming contents into the pool below.” At another juncture, a nasty parasite “released a drop of an alkaline chemical stronger than lye in a quick spurt.” The lengthy story, which weighs in at nearly 800 pages, covers a lot of ground—some of it a little too thoroughly. For example, Coy often informs readers of the inner thoughts of his characters, even when these musings are inconsequential, and it doesn’t seem necessary to point out when an obvious “shock of horror” passes through a character during a clearly horrific situation. That said, what the story lacks in these moments, it makes up for in its engaging action and surprises. Overall, the story is an indisputably suspenseful page-turner; just about anything that one can imagine might pop out of the jungles of Verde’s Revenge, and just about anyone could be their next victim. Traders, mercenaries, and religious fanatics all play roles in the story, as do a nuclear bomb and a particularly nasty centipede. And it seems unlikely that anyone who encounters this extensive work will ever look at a bug bite quite the same way again.

A fast-paced, intricate, and imaginative adventure.