Review – Terminus by Adam Baker
The third book in Adam Baker’s stunning sci-fi horror series, Terminus is a brutal and truly apocalyptic work of fiction. A tale of survival against all odds, it’s grim, vicious and absolutely gripping.
Set after the events of Juggernaut , with the terrible infection having spread across the globe, Terminus feels like the endgame. Mere hours before a tactical nuclear bomb is to be dropped on New York, three convicts are set free. Handcuffed and kept in a basement as part of a desperate scientific experiment to try and understand the terrible virus ravaging the planet, the prisoners are lab rats. But, with the end of times upon them, one guard decides to let them go. Lupe, a hardened gangbanger, runs only to get picked up days after the detonation. Her new captors, a ragtag band of military diehards with a mission to find the New York scientists, recruit Lupe to help them. She’s one of the only people to know where they might have hidden and, it seems, they’ve found a cure.
Along with a rescue team of firefighters, Lupe and her guard are helicoptered into the city. Saturated in radiation and swarming with infected, New York is a devastated hellscape. Their military escort crash before they even get to the landing zone leaving the rescue crew alone and, essentially, unprotected. Making it down to a disused subway station, deep beneath the streets, the team set about finding the lead scientist. It’s not long before things go bad. But, with the hope that a cure is out there – something that could save humanity from total extinction – the firefighters stay on mission. Lupe, however, knows that the man who held her captive is a monster and that his claim of a cure is another egomaniacal power trip.
As radiation takes its toll, the cat and mouse game between Lupe and her guard are disrupted when her fellow escapees show up and sway the balance in her favour. Whilst the rescue team are surveying a way to reach the scientist, it’s clear everything is against them. Before long, lives are lost to accidents and attacks by the infected. Played out in flooded tunnels under New York streets and within the mothballed station, the action is desperate and barbaric. Claustrophobic and terrifying, the fight to survive is a tooth and nail battle of despair.
Brilliant characters and another inspired setting, Terminus reeks of hopelessness and terror as the true horror of the infection becomes apparent. Trapped underground and battling the fallout, it’s a grim backdrop to events. What’s even more disturbing is how the virus has evolved, the details revealing an alien intelligence working in awful ways. So gut-wrenching it’s as if only madness can perceive it.
Fantastic, cinematic prose and breathtakingly action packed, Terminus is intense, ferocious and totally immersive. This is sci-fi horror at its best.
My copy
Published by Hodder
