I think the word “tosh” may have been created specifically so that one day I could use it to describe this book.  I wasn’t a fan of the X-Files when it was on TV and this book, based on the series, has done nothing to make me reassess my opinions.  The premise of the story is that Mad Scientists have found a way to create nanotechnology that goes in your blood and cures your cells if you have a disease like cancer.  Of course this goes hideously wrong in the prototype and of course the person infected escapes to infect the world.  The descriptions of this are nauseating.  There are only so many times in my life that I want to read the word “mucus” and I fear this book has brought me perilously close to the limit.  Some of it is just gross:

the man’s hand jerked and jittered like a frog on a dissection table, and his skin squirmed as if alive from the inside, the home of a colony of swarming cockroaches.  Patches of his exposed skin glistened, wet and gelatinous…like the mucus Scully had found in her autopsy.

That would have been bad enough but then, in addition, there is this awfully trite subplot about a boy and his dog that just dolloped saccharine sentiment on top of an already nauseated reader.  It is a miracle I made it through without losing my lunch.