The Host.

Meyer, Stephenie (author).

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You might assume that Meyer’s best-selling Twilight series (published for YAs), about the intense love between a human teen and a vampire, takes the interspecies relationship thing about as far as it can go. There’s where you’d be wrong. Meyer’s ingenious adult-market debut, heavily but not tediously indebted to Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, imagines the tangled web of attachments between an alien parasite and the colony of humans to which the alien’s host body once belonged. Meyer boldly chooses to narrate from the perspective of the invading alien, a 1,000-year-old female “soul” named Wanderer, and it is a tribute to the author’s skill that Wanderer is a sympathetic protagonist despite the fact that she tells her tale while clinging to the cerebellum of a human victim, 17-year-old Melanie. As Melanie’s unusually resistant consciousness begins to seep into Wanderer’s own identity, she finds herself seeking out one of the last outposts of human civilization to reunite with the people her body once loved. Some readers will find the opening scenes too hurried and contrived, and the unusually large number of humans willing to fraternize with the enemies seems idealized. But the view of the apocalypse from the vantage point of one of its horsemen makes for propulsive reading, laden with unforgettable, unsettling scenes that raise fascinating questions about distinctions between essential human identity and its physical vessel. Consider buying duplicate sets of Meyer’s ouevre, one for adults and one for YAs, since this entertaining, somewhat soft-focus sf saga will only serve to broaden the penumbra of Meyer’s fame.