Chuck Wendig Returns with a Techno-Thriller That Will Invade Your Dreams

That’s not all. Last year Wendig unveiled Zeroes, an apocalyptic techno-thriller centered around an group of oddball hackers recruited against their will by the U.S. government. Their mission required them to work together (trust me: harder than it sounds!) to put a stop to a top secret NSA program known as Typhon—think Skynet-on-steroids, a real end-of-the-world threat.
With the companion novel Invasive, set in the same modern day universe as Zeroes and utilizing a couple of secondary characters as casual narrative tethers, Wendig offers up another nightmare for the modern era, while setting the stage for an as-yet-unannounced (but I sure wouldn’t complain) future installment bringing the main players from both novels together for a climactic surely-we’re-all-going-to-die-this-time caper. (I can dream, can’t I?).
Wendig has his own special brand of frog-in-a-blender pacing—his stories move fast. Very fast. Invasive begins at a run and quickly goes careening down an icy mountain road in a truck full of dynamite. With no brakes. He augments that breathless punch with a plot that channels the technology-run-amok spirit of Michael Crichton operating in peak form: in this high-body-count, white-knuckle adventure (with shades of  Jurassic Park—remote tropical island research facility, check!), hordes of super-smart genetically modified ants are loosed upon the planet with global domination on their collective brains. The fact that the insects have mastered the art of killing everything in their way means the outlook for humanity is, well, pretty darn grim.
Instead of Zeroes‘ ragtag team of bickering hackers, our heroic lead is FBI special consultant Hannah Stander, a forward-thinking “futurist” whose job it is to imagine the worst-case scenarios for left-of-center cutting-edge technology that could somehow pose a national threat. It’s a soul crushingly tough job, one that generates all sorts of emotional and mental barricades. Hannah’s personal mantra is “the future is a door,” and it’s what might eventually come through that door that really scares her.

As Hannah finds herself leading the charge against the crawling antpocalypse, she must come to terms with an upbringing that has taught her to expect the worst, and prepare for the unimaginably worse-than-that. Raised by doomsday prepper parents, young Hannah was raised in a cloud of fear, and has spent her life living just outside that door to the end of everything. It’s a constant weight bearing down on her—not an “if,” but a “when.” When “when” becomes “Now,” she’s not sure she has what it takes to deal. Stander doesn’t quite have the rough social edges of the hacker crew in Zeroes, but she’s toting around her own heavy emotional baggage (though we’re still well to the right of Miriam Black territory).
Don’t expect creepy crawlies like the humongous B-movie ants that tormented Los Angeles in 1954’s Gordon Douglas-directed classic Them! While Invasive‘s segmented villains are the stuff of genetic tinkering, they’re still…ant-sized. There’s just a whole hell of a lot of them, and they’re a hell of a lot smarter than they should be. That mundanity somehow makes the deadly threat all the more nightmarish—while there’s no question than an at the size of a runaway bread truck would spoil any picnic, there’s something even scarier about the ideas of perishing at the…legs of a regular-sized one. The next time one of them scurries across your desk, think before you squish, won’t you?
Invasive is available August 16.