NATIVE SPECIES

Shape-shifting lizards attempt to take over California in Albergo’s colorful SF adventure.

Hiding from dinosaurs and then humans, sentient reptilians—think big serpents with fangs and legs, or maybe giant talking Gila monsters—have hunkered down in a belowground colony near Los Angeles for eons. They’re hoping for a comeback, emboldened by their ability to swallow a live, whole human and change their form into that person’s fully human body, complete with their memories and speech patterns. Deploying this trick is Sesh, a high-ranking serpent who transforms into shipping magnate Sam Smith, and Shila Ghiss, a female serpent scientist who discovers a way to nonlethally transform into anthropologist Susan River by drinking a blood sample. They emerge into LA in 1928 to carry out a plan to surreptitiously dose civic leaders, police, and the public with a drug that makes humans obey serpent commands. Complicating things are engineering professor Horace Jennings and geologist Helen Parker, who have hired private eye Harry Raymond to help them locate Helen’s missing geologist boyfriend, Mateo Martinez. Horace and Helen bump into Shila/Susan at a serpent-controlled speakeasy where the drug is slipped into customers’ drinks; Shila, now influenced by Susan’s consciousness and opposed to Sesh’s plan, protects Horace from an attack by Sesh. Horace and Shila/Susan fall in love, and she helps him and Helen piece together the serpentine scheme and locate Mateo. Unfortunately, a thoroughly dosed Mateo has joined Sesh/Sam in hatching another plot, this one to start an earthquake by summoning giant worms from the Earth’s molten interior to the San Andreas fault. Can Horace, Helen, Harry, and Shila/Susan head off the seismic catastrophe? And will Horace still love Susan when he learns of her reptilian identity?

Albergo’s yarn features an intriguing remix of classic SF tropes, with motifs from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Dune (1965), and a dash of H. P. Lovecraft without the dudgeon, all given a fun, atmospheric spin as a lightly noirish LA mystery. (“This is Los Angeles,” grumbles the hardboiled Harry. “There are hucksters, whores, and gangsters here who would just as soon kill you as look at you.”) The author provides an arresting view of human nature through alien eyes, and the riveting action scenes move adroitly from evocative suspense to grisly horror: “Where the tentacles met, a mouth rose; and behind the mouth rose a titanic, muscular, slime-covered worm…. One [tentacle] wrapped about his neck, two about his waist. They flexed, and in an instant, they pulled off his head and ripped his body in half.” Albergo also writes in an entrancing lyrical vein in which otherness brings wonder instead of terror: “Through the human’s remarkable eyes, I can see the sandy floor of a canyon and a rushing river, green plants at its banks,” notes Shila on her first visit to Earth’s surface. “Above us is an endless ocean of blue light…for an instant I feel as if I will fall up, forever.” The result is a page-turner that both frightens and dazzles with its portrayal of cross-species encounters.

An entertaining SF thriller, elegantly written and imaginatively conceived.