Isabella's Reviews > Bloodchild

Rating: ?? stars

This book is strange. Very strange. And gross, too. Very, very gross. Yes, there was probably great commentary on something, but I was too distracted by all the strangeness and grossness to pay any attention.

Basically, Bloodchild is set in this community where humans live alongside these giant bug aliens (I kept picturing them looking like the Empress of the Racnoss, that big red spider-like lady from the first Doctor Who episode with Donna). These aliens take a page out of Ridley Scott's book and do a human egg implantation, à la Xenomorph from Alien. But there's several John Hurts. And the hosts know the day is coming so have to spend their life waiting to become a walking egg sac. As I said, it's strange.

We follow Gan, this young boy who was personally selected to be a John Hurt (lucky him) by his family's resident bug alien. To prepare his body this alien keeps feeding him her raw unfertilised eggs to strengthen and prepare his body to take on her young (I mean, this guy really hit the jackpot). As I said, it's gross. Then, one day, Gan has to urgently participate in the delivery of alien babies from another host. This involves watching his alien "friend" slicing the poor screaming man open from sternum to anus to extract the parasitic larvae quickly, before placing them in a large animal Gan shot earlier to stop them from eating the human host (who is alive, just barely) instead. As I said, it's very, very gross.

I have no idea how to rate weird books. Yes, there is usually a reason for all the weirdness, but I often can't look past all the odd stuff to see what that reason is. I didn't dislike Bloodchild as much as, say, Stranger in a Strange Land, but I think that is because the latter is exactly 21x the length of Octavia E. Butler's novelette, so the strangeness is constant and unrelenting. Bloodchild has the weirdness of classic sci fi but in bite-size form. You can read it, cringe at it, but then it ends and you don't have to put up with hundreds of pages of discomfort (looking at you, Heinlein).