I haven't read anything by Lucy Snyder before, but she's won five Bram Stoker Awards so clearly I'd benefit from catching up. One of those wins was for a 2012 short story called 'Magdala Amygdala', which she expanded into the first half of this novel, which then continues to build into something a lot bigger and more apocalyptic.

It's a topical novel, because it begins as a viral outbreak, this one called PVG, or Polymorphic viral gastroencephalitis, which I'm inappropriately happy about because that final word got me a 100% on Wordiply last week. Unlike COVID, which initially spread slowly and gave us some opportunity to prepare for it getting worse, even if it wasn't enough, PVG showed up everywhere at once, thus making it very difficult to address. We're in the undetermined near future, because governments fall back on protective measures they used for COVID, just out of instinct.

The back cover blurb promises that there are three primary characters, all women, and that's not a lie, but the novel is broken up between the three and it's Erin Holdaway's show for the first half. She's the focus of 'Magdala Amygdala' and she has quite the story arc here, which I'm not going to spoil and that's going to make it difficult to talk about the other two characters, Savannah, who's a sex worker, and Mareva Budici, who's afflicted by tumours. Once Erin's story is told, at least for the most part, we shift focus to Savannah and later to Mareva. There's crossover between them, most obviously later on as things get insane, but they're told from three different perspectives.

So, Erin. She starts the book out fine, still working during this new pandemic, which is a week into its devastation. She gets home to find that her boyfriend Gregory has set up a special anniversary dinner, with wine and sushi and cake and a ring because he's ready to propose. She says yes and it would all feel very different if she didn't then get sick. And I mean really sick. It comes on just nine pages into the book and, only a couple more, she's throwing up everything and passing out on the bathroom tiles.

She wakes up a few weeks later in hospital. Yes, it's PVG, of course, but she's one of those who are changed by the virus rather than killed outright. We soon learn more, but we don't remotely know everything because nobody does yet. We learn that there are different types of PVG survivor and we learn that in glorious fashion. I liked this book from the outset, but it was the scene where the doctors at Greenlawn have Erin try some samples of food and drink to determine what type she is that I knew I'd found a firm favourite. She's horrified to discover that what she assumed was beet juice is actually blood but then chows down on the brains like there's no tomorrow. She's a Type 3 and that's dangerous.

One of the wonderful things about this book is that it's very hard to classify. When you started to read this review, you probably and naturally categorised this as a pandemic novel and that's fair, because it is. Now you may be thinking it's a zombie novel, which it isn't, any more than it's also a vampire novel because there are indeed Type 2s who go for the blood in that test rather than the brains. If you're well-read in horror and are paying attention during the scenes at Greenlawn, you may start to wonder if it's also going to be cosmic horror, because there's some mysterious symbol built into the architecture that has meaning. Well, it is and it isn't, and it's also a lot more than all these things put together. How do you categorise that?

Another label you can slap onto it is LGBTQ, because not all these characters are straight and that has meaning here in a book where people change and evolve in a whole slew of ways. That test in which Erin discovered that she'd suddenly acquired an almost rabid fondness for brains is merely one way in which characters transform here, a relatively sedate one visually. By the time this book wraps up, the world as we know it doesn't remotely resemble the one we find ourselves in. So the fact that Erin, who starts out the book with a boyfriend she's planning to marry, finds a deep and magnetic attraction to Betty, the Type 2 who takes Erin home from Greenlawn in her taxi, is only one more hint that everything's changing.

By the way, this is a gloriously icky book. Either Snyder has a background in medicine or she's well-researched on medical matters, because she has a field day with those transformations and she's thoroughly able to describe them in ways that feel gutwrenchingly real, often delightfully deviant and yet never gratuitous in the pulp manner. We can almost see her grinning during writing some of these scenes at the sheer ickiness of where her imagination has taken her. My favourite has to be the utterly bizarre sex scene between Erin and Betty that does so much more than you expect from a pair of women. Remember that one's into blood and the other's into brains. Think about it.