We all know that the Twilight series sucks. If you’re reading this, and you don’t know it sucks, I have some names of trained specialists that you might want to talk to.
Authors everywhere wept when they read about Bella’s complete lack of personality traits, Edward’s sparkly, rock-hard skin, and the vampire baby from Hell. Editors everywhere laughed all the way to the bank when they failed to notice some pretty blatant grammatical errors and plot holes but still got paid for looking over the books, if they even did that. Check out one hilarious summary of the clusterfuck of failures the Twilight series has to offer.
So I never expected Stephanie Meyer to turn around and write something that’s actually good, but that’s exactly what she did.
The Host is a pretty long book, but it never once gets boring. If the title puts thoughts of parasites in your head, then give yourself a gold star – you nailed it! This book revolves around a race of alien parasites that think they’re just fucking better than everyone else, so they go to different planets and take over the inhabitants’ brains because they can so totally live their lives better. Think the Yerks from Animorphs, only cooler and not pursued by a repetitive plot that involves a bunch of kids turning into animals.
The book takes place on Earth, where the mind slug things have already pretty much taken over every human ever. Only a select few humans managed to resist the slimy worm invasion by hiding in some desert cave place. The main character from the book is a young woman, Melanie, who has been trying to evade slimy worm capture for years, but finally falls victim to the brain invasion at the beginning of the book. Through some bizarre plot twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan come, the brain worm can’t seem to get the pesky human out of her own head, so they’re forced to live together in one body. Along the way they learn stuff from each other, and they find one of these secret worm-resistance colonies.
Okay, so The Host sounds absurd. But so does a vampire, werewolf, human love triangle. And Stephanie Meyer is tricky; it’s like she was a good writer living in a bad writer’s body this whole time! This book is essentially a big “fuck you” to the world, I think, and she pulls it off.
~Rebecca Leviton
JERK 