The outbreak has spread, tearing apart the foundations of society, as implanted tapeworms have turned their human hosts into a seemingly mindless mob.

Sal and her family are trapped between bad and worse, and must find a way to compromise between the two sides of their nature before the battle becomes large enough to destroy humanity, and everything that humanity has built…including the chimera.

The broken doors are closing. Can Sal make it home? Well, goddamn, look at me. Finishing a trilogy instead of starting a new one!

*lightly pats self on back*

*thinks of dozens of new trilogies to start soon*

Wait, what.

Anyway, so ends the Parasitology trilogy by Mira Grant. Whether it’s completely the end of the whole story remains to be seen, as Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire has said on Twitter (more than a few times) that there’s always more stories to tell in the worlds she creates.

So it’s book three. Feel free to bail out here if you haven’t read the first two books (and plan to) because there may be some spoilers for those books!!!

Chimera picks up pretty closely after the events in Symbiont, and I honestly think the first half of this book contains some of my favorite scenes in the whole trilogy. Sal really comes into her own here, and with no options left on the table, she becomes a hardcore leader & survivor. She’s got to navigate her way through Grant’s hellscape version of San Francisco, fighting her way back to her family.

Like the previous two books, there are some seriously squirmy action sequences in Chimera, including one in an abandoned department store. Fucking yikes. For real, there is no shortage of tension across all three Parasitology books.

There’s also some great exploration of some of the secondary characters, which I really appreciated. Especially where Fishy was concerned. While it’s sort of hard to fully wrap my head around a guy who is convinced that he’s actually living through a video game, Grant really humanizes Fishy in this one. You see how truly damaged he is. And that he knows he’s truly damaged. His defense mechanism, while unusual & troubling at times, is his brain’s way of dealing with the world, and processing his own grief. He comes off as this fearless & self-assured guy, but there’s a lot more going on behind his eyes.

I really enjoyed this trilogy as a whole. From poking around a handful of reviews for the trilogy, I gather that a good amount of fans tend to prefer the Newsflesh series, so I’m increasingly eager to get started on those books! But Parasitology grabbed my attention quickly & kept me pretty engrossed the whole time. There’s a quality to Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire’s writing that, no matter how gruesome the story may be, is just intensely comforting to me. Even when I’m holding my breath while Sal goes through one horrific (and/or claustrophobic) ordeal after another, there’s just something about her books that feels like home.

I think this is my thirteenth or fourteenth Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire book, and I’ve still got so many to go!! She’s just an amazing storyteller, and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with for us next (as I continue to work my way through her extensive back catalogue)!!