Lex Thomas

As I have said in my previous reviews for the first three books in the QUARANTINE series, I am more than a few years past the target audience for this YA series, but I am a fan of a good story, especially a good riff on LORD OF THE FLIES. The earlier books centered around plague ravaged McKinley High in Colorado, where an escapee from a government facility unleashed a virus that infected teenagers while causing anyone post puberty to puke up their lungs and die an awful death. With all the teachers dead, and the school quarantined from the rest of the world, the kids are on their own, and if you’ve read the other books, then you know how bad that went. Those volumes centered around brothers David and Will, and Lucy, the girl to whom both are attracted. The third book in the series, THE BURNOUTS, wrapped up their story; the fourth book, THE GIANT, takes a minor character from earlier in the series, and tells his story.

That title character being Gonzalo, a hulking giant of kid who helped David and Will in a tight spot in a confrontation with a rival gang, but who later “graduated” from McKinley to the outside world. This book tells his story in two parallel time lines, one set in the post McKinley present, the other in the past, which begins with Gonzalo as a very small for his age sixteen year old on his own after the virus is unleashed. He falls in with a gang called the Mice, who travel about the school in the overhead air vents, stealing what they can from other gangs. Here Gonzalo meets Sasha, the girl he falls in love with, and Baxter, the runty little creep who leads the Mice. Baxter is jealous of the attention Sasha is giving Gonzalo, and separates him from the gang just as Gonzalo experiences a sudden growth spurt, making it impossible for him to go back into the vents in search of the girl he loves. The upside is that his new size makes him a object of fear, and forcing the other gangs leave him alone. The present day sections of the book chronicle Gonzalo’s search through plague ravaged, and quarantined off, Colorado for Sasha, who, along with the rest of the infected student body, has fled McKinley, and is now in hiding from roving adults, determined to hunt down and shoot on sight the virus carrying teens.

The authors, a duo who goes by the pen name Lex Thomas, do have their particular teen dystopia formula down pat, especially when it comes to creating characters worth getting invested with. I empathized with Gonzalo from the start, and understood his immediate attraction to Sasha, who seems like a great girlfriend, but they leave us with enough doubt that her feelings for Gonzalo might not be as deep as his for her. This creates more than a little tension as we follow him on his odyssey across Colorado searching for her. And the authors’ penchant for ending each chapter on a cliff hanger is in full use here, which helped draw me more into the story. There’s not as much gore as in the earlier books, which I thought excessive at times, but enough to satisfy the fans, and I thought THE GIANT had much less of a sexual content than those earlier books as well. Still, there is plenty of profanity, and what I call the “ick” factor, where the authors go for the gross out. Also, as everyone who has read the first three books know, the writers are not wedded to happy endings, even to characters we have come to love. This too, helps create tension as Gonzalo gets closer to finding his lost love. The themes of cruelty and sheer meanness that have run through the entire series also on display in the fourth book, as one generation attempts to destroy another, while gangs and cliques made up of different members of the social hierarchy turn upon one another as well. The entire QUARANTINE series has turned on the notion that when it all hits the fan, the utter worst in people will come out.

By putting out a fourth book, I feared that Lex Thomas might be going to the well one time too many, as there has been a glut of YA fiction teen dystopias in the past decade, and frankly, after THE BURNOUTS, I thought the story had all been told. What I liked best about THE GIANT was that I cared about the Gonzalo and Sasha, and wanted to see what the finale of their story would be, and it was enough to carry me to the final page. Moving most of the tale’s action outside of the walls of McKinley dilutes some of the built in suspense inherent in the earlier book, and the writing gets annoyingly repetitive at times; why do we constantly need to be reminded that Baxter has a “handsome” face? At the present there seems to be no more books in THE QUARANTINE series to read, and I don’t know if Lex Thomas have any plans to continue with it, but it is worth noting that they leave things at a point where there are many more survivors’ stories to be told, and many more sequels could be written.… (más)

Picking up and reading QUARANTINE: THE BURNOUTS, the third book in the series, is a different experience now than it would have been a few months ago. A novel where a deadly virus and a quarantine figure prominently in the plot resonates strongly in the middle of real life global pandemic where such terms are mentioned on every news broadcast 24 hours a day, not to mention the ways it has impacted the daily life of everyone. For me, it made the plight of the characters real in a way that was absent when I read the first two books, their fear and despair more palpable. Of course the parallel between real life and the dystopian world depicted in this YA series is tenuous at best, but there is no denying that reading the third book was a unique experience compared to the first two.

The QUARANTINE series is one of those teen dystopia epics where a group of kids are isolated from the rest of the world without adult supervision, and forced to fend for themselves. The results are THE LORD OF THE FLIES on steroids. In this series, the catalyst is one of those pesky laboratory manufactured viruses that exists solely in fiction, one which gets loose and infects the student population of a suburban Colorado high school, said virus being deadly to anyone who has passed puberty. The school is sealed off from the outside world, and the kids are on their own. The social hierarchy of high school, so hallowed in pop culture for decades, becomes a dictatorship, as cliques become gangs that prey upon one another, and bullies terrorize those perceived as weak. The books center around a few “nice” kids who want to do nothing more than stay alive until they “graduate.”


The third book in the series, subtitled THE BURNOUTS, picks up right where the second book left off, with brothers Will and David reunited outside the school after Will was forced to leave or succumb to the virus, which makes its victims cough their lungs out. Lucy, the girl both boys love, is still trapped within the halls of McKinley High, and is now an outcast. Through a plot complication, both brothers don gas masks and re-enter the school to rescue Lucy, risking instant death if they should breathe the same air as any of the infected students. Meanwhile, Hillary, an uber Mean Girl and David’s former girlfriend, has taken control of the school and she wants revenge on Lucy for a past humiliation. The plot is derivative, and many of the characters are nothing more than “types” found in any teen drama, but I found myself invested in Will, David, and Lucy, and their plight, and cared what happened to them. About half way through, I had a hunch as to where the story was going, and I was proven right. There is a bittersweet resolution that might leave some in tears, but it felt earned. Some readers are surely going to be disappointed at the ending, but this has been a series that has not been afraid to go dark, reveling in it at times, and I felt the finale was true to what came before, even if it is very cruel to a character most readers have come to love. This third book has slightly less gore than the second, and that is not a bad thing. But there are a couple of gross scenes that will make readers wince. The author, Lex Thomas, is the pen name for two collaborators, and they have done a good job in giving us one the better Teen Dystopias, a subgenre that includes THE HUNGER GAMES, and my favorite, the GONE, series by Michael Grant. They’ve wisely wrapped up the story of McKinley High with the third book, as this particular arc has used up all the gas in its tank, although there is a fourth book taking up the story of a supporting character.

I wonder how “viral apocalypse” stories, like the QUARANTINE series, will fare in a world where we have come uncomfortably close to the real thing. Are they no longer the escapist fiction we once craved, or are they a way to deal with very real fears? Time will tell, but I am thinking about picking up that unabridged copy of Stephen King’s THE STAND that has been on my book shelf for too long.… (más)