A "Contagion" of Adverbs

I got enough time last month to read Contagion by Erin Bowman, so to kick off March, here's my review of the book. But let me get one thing straight before I get started here: I hate criticizing books. I'd rather praise a book to the skies than tear it a new one.

Now that I've said that, I can feel you all bracing for the start of my ranting. Well, de-brace yourselves. Contagion is actually a pretty OK book. I think I ruined it for myself.

Here's the one-sentence synopsis: a skeleton crew gets sent to investigate a distress signal on a desolate planet, uncovering a horrible force that threatens everyone--all throughout the universe. There are two main characters: Thea, a scientist's intern, and Nova, a young pilot. FYI, they're both girls; Nova also has lesbian tendencies, if that sweetens the pot for anyone. The reason I say that I ruined this book for myself is simple: I've watched the 1979 movie Alien and played the game
System Shock 2. It was hard to feel surprised when I've seen it all happen before, and Contagion didn't deviate a whole lot from the (minor spoiler alert) alien zombies in space sci-fi theme.

Even so, I have to say the book felt pretty well paced. Unlike a lot of stories I've observed lately, it has a solid beginning, middle, and climactic end. I contrast this plot arc with the movie Alita: Battle Angel; I saw it recently, and while I believe it is an excellent, kick@$$ movie that succeeds where Scarlett Johansson's Ghost in the Shell failed, I also have to admit I couldn't tell where the climax was supposed to be. The edge of one's seat is a terrible thing to waste, and I don't commit to the hallowed seat-edge until I know that everything I've seen has been leading up to this point and $#!* is about to go down.

Contagion does better in that regard. I can legitimately say I was compelled to keep turning pages when the discernable final act reared its head. However...

(Yep, the ripping-a-new-one is about to begin...)

...I wasn't turning pages because I was concerned about anyone.

Maybe I'm just a cold-hearted, envious sociopath, but I didn't click with anyone on the main or secondary character roster. The skeleton crew was composed of the two main characters, a secretive scientist, an a-hole military captain, and three guys. That's about all you can say about them. I felt no concern when (another minor spoiler alert) the three guys started dropping off the radar--even though there was one who had a family back on his planet of origin. I swear nobody cracked a good joke, even a nervous one. They had but the faintest of personality traits that never really shone. The military person--a woman, for what it's worth--was so much of a hardheaded a-hole that I couldn't give her credit when she displayed the occasional sign of character development.

The main characters? If it weren't for their backstories, their personalities were interchangeable--and they reeked of the stereotypical Strong Female Lead. Alita, in the movie that bears her name, at least has some childlike innocence and growth to back up the bad@$$ery. Thea and Nova just have a case of mild determination. People who are after a strong lesbian lead will want to look elsewhere, too; it seemed like Nova's sexual inclination was more thrown in there to uncork the drool taps in agents' and publishers' mouths. I've had this concern that the "Please please send us LGBTQ+ manuscripts" in publishers' wishlists has led to a lack of just scrutiny on their part, and Contagion hasn't really weakened that theory.

On that note, we come to the writing. To be honest, it's Stephen King's worst nightmare, if he has those. We're told as writers to avoid the adverb--especially in Stephen King's book On Writing--but in Contagion, they were...um...contagious. The subject-verb-adverb chain was all over the place ("...he ran quickly...", "...she said spontaneously...", "...it roared incoherently..."), and once, on page 188, I hit a double adverb: "...the ride was momentarily blessedly smooth." There were also a horde of writer sin words: "began", "started", "suddenly", "now", and so on. They were all over the place. I can remember another area where I remember such other horrors occurring:

My writing. Specifically, my writing when I was first learning to write fiction well.

I used those words all the time, and I expended a lot of energy over my years-of-my-manuscripts-not-being-published to smooth out those warps. I'm still coming across them as I edit for the umpteenth time (and believe me, I erased/replaced/reworded a bunch of them while doing some edits this morning). At least I have the "I'm a new-ish writer" excuse, but Bowman has no such defense. She'd had other books published before, and I'm not so sure I want to read another--even the eventual sequel to Contagion. Oh, and another spoiler alert: it ends on a sort-of cliffhanger.

Ultimately, I believe Contagion is a good story; I like both Alien and System Shock 2, after all. The things that trip it up the most are the nondescript characters and the fact that it reads like a manuscript that was edited once, maybe twice, before the publisher thrust it onto the shelves. I would read this book again if Bowman sat on it some more, reworked it, and dear heaven please removed those bales of adverbs and filter words.

It's the universe's only hope.