Res's Reviews > The Devil's Alphabet

** spoiler alert ** The one where Paxton goes back to his hometown and it's like the people he grew up with are a whole different species. No, literally.

This was marketed as horror, but it seemed to me quite straightforward science fiction of the "environmental/scientific mystery" category.

Pax was in his teens when a mysterious disease swept through his town, and most of the people who survived were transformed into three "clades" -- argos, who are twelve feet tall and incredibly strong; betas, who have raspberry-colored skin and expressionless faces; and charlies, who are immensely fat. His two best friends, Deke and Jo Lynn, became an argo and a beta, but Pax didn't change.

Brought back to town by Jo Lynn's death, he discovers that his father, a charlie, is emitting some kind of chemical that other charlies are collecting, and that the betas seem to be getting pregnant spontaneously, sometimes even before puberty. Quite a lot of time is spent discovering things about the physiology of the clades.

So it was really disappointing to me that nothing was really resolved; no one ever discovered why this was happening or what it added up to. I was waiting, honestly, for a Childhood's End-style revelation that the three were actually the different forms of a single species, like worker and queen bees -- a pointed reference to naked mole rats seemed to be indicating this -- but it all went nowhere.

Pax's emotional journey was better drawn, but, you know, a good character arc is necessary but not sufficient; I read sci-fi for sci-fi.