The Darwin Variant

A comet the size of Mount Everest is on a collision course with Earth, but that’s the least of the planet’s problems in this ponderous novel. The comet is successfully exploded in space, but fragments of it land in Ashton, Ga., seeding the landscape with an alien influence that interacts with the surrounding vegetation and turns anyone who ingests it into a smarter and more aggressive person. As the infected begin working in concert to secretly manipulate the rest of the nation to their advantage, it’s left to fugitive CDC epidemiologist Susan Perry; her sister, Lilly, a stereotyped “savant” whose autism interacts in unusual ways with the alien virus; and 14-year-old whistle-blower Katie McLane to find a way to neutralize the threat of the infected. Johnson’s tale assumes the familiar contours of a 1950s B-movie, and despite relating it in the form of a multiperson oral history, all of the narrators sound almost the same. The participation of both the infected and the uninfected in the telling foreordains a happy ending that robs this tale of suspense, giving readers little reason to stick with it. (June)