Wow. Just no. I'm not even going to bother mentioning my affection for J-horror, because this book does not deserve it. It takes a killer premise, that our symbiotic relationship with mitochondria could also be our species' downfall, and stomps on it with all the fury of an enraged bull elephant.

Avert your eyes from the next two paragraphs if you care about spoilers.

Those mitochondria, the maternal ones y'see, have hatched a plan to enslave their host organism, but due to an error in judgment and an inability to resist the evolutionary dominance of paternal mitochondria when cross-species breeding is concerned, that plan falls apart. Basically, those devious female mitochondria fail in their quest for world domination because they're female. No, really. From page 291: "They did not give sufficient consideration to it [the world domination plan] because they were female."

That's it. The big plan, BILLIONS OF YEARS in the making and hinging on SCIENTIST SPERM, fails because FEMALE LOGIC. Ooops. Let's not even inquire into why or how the mitochondria would be either male or female, and why they would even have any notions of gender or gender politics.

Not that everything leading up to that was particularly horrific, clever or well-written. It was mostly just laughable in its eagerness to shock, and pathetic in its inability to deliver on the strength of the premise.

I want the two afternoons I spent on this claptrap back. The game, which borrowed only the premise, is vastly superior.