Clay's Ark - Octavia E. Butler

Clay’s Ark (The Patternist #3) – Octavia E. Butler

In a frightening near future, an alien disease is poised to become a devastating global epidemic—unless someone can stop it

Blake Maslin and his two daughters are driving to Flagstaff when bandits swarm their car. At gunpoint, the marauders kidnap one of Blake’s children, promising to keep her safe in return for medical care. Warily, the doctor goes with them, not realizing that he has just taken the first step down a terrifying path that will consume his life.

The gunmen take him deep into the desert, to a colony of people infected with a gruesome alien disease. It causes weakness, sallow skin, and birth defects so horrible that the children who suffer them cannot rightly be called human. The victims have quarantined themselves in the desert lest their illness spread and doom mankind. But as their willingness to accept isolation falters, Blake becomes the last hope for the survival of an uncontaminated Earth.

An innocent familiy, carjacked on a desolate highway, is abducted to a bizarre new world. A world being born in the Californian desert.

They discover Earth has been invaded by an alien microorganism. The deadly entity attacks like a virus, but survivors of the disease genetically bond with it, developing amazing powers, near-immortality, unnatural desires – and a need to spread the contagion and create a secret colony of the transformed. Now the meaning of “survival” changes. For the babies born in the colony are clearly, undeniably, not human…

My Review of Clay’s Ark

Alright.. I am three books down now of Octavia Butler’s now. And I am enthralled with her writing! I am also three books into this series now and I absolutely love it!

Bleak, desperate, depressing but so utterly UTTERLY readable! Clay’s Ark is the third installment in the Patternist series, This read is not for the faint-hearted. It starts off being compelling, but by the end – it is violent, aggressive, and had some events that if I had known about it before I started reading – would have turned me completely off reading the book. But Butler was a master at her craft. She made the cringe-worthy topics totally, captivatingly part of the story. They weren’t in there just to shock, although they did shock. She reached a line that she never quite crossed and showcased her brilliant storytelling.

An alien invasion. In the not-so-distant future, a family is abducted from a stretch of highway and taken to an isolated community. The people are acting really strangely, they seem to have super-human strength and abilities, and their children are far from human.

I listened to the audio version of this and he was a fantastic narrator. While the first two books of this series (chronologically, not in publication order) dealt with female protagonists, this one was a mix.

I just could not turn this one-off. From the first chapter, you get taken away into the story and its interesting characters, with a bit of horror-filled tension slowly allowing the story to unravel and the truth to be revealed.

I don’t want to go much further into analysing this one. I liked it a lot more than the second one, Mind of My Mind, but I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as I did Wild Seed.

Overall though, a fantastic series so far. I can’t wait to see what the last one is like!

(4.5 / 5)