prologue depicts an experiment gone horribly wrong: At a secret NSA/CIA/DOD facility designated Lab 23, we witness the deaths of an entire team of scientists working on a new form of synthetic life, partly organic, partly robotic. The creatures performing the murders are hardly glimpsed by us before the entire lab is incinerated after orders from remotely watching officials, including a major named Henri Stanner.
Three years later, in the small town of Quiebra, Calif., in the Bay Area, we meet the Leverton family, daughter Adair, son Cal and their parents. Although a large cast of characters will offer their viewpoints in the story that's unfolding, Adair remains our focus. Adair's tentative boyfriend Waylon; Adair's Aunt Lacey and her boyfriend Bert; a mentally disabled man named Vinegar Vinnie—all these folks and more will be swept up in the disaster that's about to unfold. One evening, a large NASA/DOD satellite crashes into the harbor of the town. Adair's dad, a salvage expert, is recruited by government types who rapidly show up, and he goes down to attach a grapple to the debris. It's at that point that the contents of the satellite claim their first victim. For inside the downed spacecraft lurk the same engineered organisms that infected Lab 23. (The experiment was transferred into space, we later learn, as a quarantine measure after that earlier outbreak.)
It is not immediately apparent that anything has gone wrong. When the Lab 23 entities possess a victim, they gain access to all the victim's memories, and so maintain a subterfuge of normality. And the physical changes they initiate are concealed also for a time. So Stanner—who has come on the scene—dares to hope that the organisms inside the satellite all perished. But the seething nanotech—the crawlers who form the group mind known as All of Us—are now inside Adair's folks, and soon they are replicating throughout the townspeople. Through the adults, anyway, as certain neural and chemical signatures in young people make colonization of youths harder.
Little by little, the suspicions of Adair and her peers begin to mount. Strange inventions are being built in basements. Uncanny chimeras are sighted in the woods. Banks and stores are emptied of their goods overnight. The police department and the postal service are co-opted. Then comes the roundup of the teens for a "blood test" at the high school. It's then that the lid is finally ripped off the deception, and survival becomes a matter of outwitting All of Us before they can convert or slaughter all the kids and the few remaining uninfected adults, and so spread into the world at large.
Cinematically vivid but literarily rich
John Shirley's capsule biography attached to this novel reminds us that he's spent much of his time in recent years writing for film and television, and that experience has clearly paid off when fed back into his novels. This newest book is cinematically vivid and streamlined, its characters instantly identifiable and sympathetic. (Heck, even the All of Us are just trying to reproduce and bring humanity some order and discipline.) Yet while not as weirdly, transgressively over-the-top as some of his earlier books—say, Silicon Embrace from 1996—Crawlers displays enough of Shirley's trademark off-kilter, anti-authoritarian worldview, hard-edged speculative force and novelistic chops to distinguish itself proudly from such mindless scripts-masquerading-as-books as Michael Crichton's Prey (2003). This is bona-fide SF first and foremost, and a bound-for-the-silver-screen thriller only secondarily.
To continue to view the book in cinematic terms: Shirley has taken two classic SF/horror films—Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Blob (1958)—with their paranoia and fear of bodily contamination and generation-gap themes, and updated them brilliantly for the new century. His detailing of how the government could support a project as potentially deadly as the crawlers out of the best of motives, and how a basically righteous man like Stanner could get rooked in rings absolutely true. The way in which the government lets Quiebra stay infested too long, so as to gauge the potential of the crawlers, is likewise all too plausible.
And Shirley's depiction of that town rings so authentically, as do the lives of its citizens, that we immediately feel for all the victims and have no problem visualizing any of the action. His town is America in microcosmic terms. And the rogue tech inflicted on the citizens is superbly imagined and described, whether it's infected citizens rotating their heads 360 degrees, or weird bluejays rolling up like "pillbugs" and zipping off. Shirley provides plenty of stimulating images and suspenseful moments right up till the final climax.
But what's neatest about this book is its subtext—just as the swell thing about those '50s movies that serve as his models was their anti-Communist, anti-conformist subtext. All the families in Quiebra are totally dysfunctional, wracked by divorce, drugs, abuse and other social ills. When the All of Us take over the various parents, however, family life actually improves. The mechanistic sense of anti-entropy replaces the all-too-human entropy that makes the lives of Adair and the other kids so miserable. Yet ultimately, that entropic quality is what distinguishes us as humans, not machines, and can't be traded away for some sterile utopia.
In the book's epilogue, the surviving characters are depicted as having formed their own spontaneous family unit in the face of all the death and destruction. Shirley seems to be telling us that the only bonds that matter are the ones we consciously form, or that are tested by fire. Family is something you make, not what you are simply born into. And the human family has qualities an artificial tribe will never duplicate.
