Indeed it relies on several familiar tropes that are standard – the perfect little town, the citizens that are a little too friendly, contact with any one outside of the actual town cut off for whatever reason. then the basic plotline of Pines will not seem new. If you are familiar with the “survival horror” genre, whether it be via video games, novels, etc. There were times I had to set it down and walk away to take care of one thing or another but I just as quickly returned because I simply had to know what happens next. It has been some time since a book has held my attention so fully that I read it in one evening. Oh my goodness dear reader, I am so glad I did. As a fan of the “survival horror” type video games (ie Silent Hill and Resident Evil) I was especially intrigued and added the title to my queue. Blake Crouch is an author I have reviewed before on here and when looking at some of the other titles he’s written the Wayward Pines series stood out.

Such is what happened with Pines, the first novel in the Wayward Pines series.

Or maybe something in the blurb just piques my interest. Maybe something on the cover catches my eye. Maybe I’ve read something from the author before, maybe I haven’t. As the book opens, Logan is exposed to something in a lab he's raiding, wakes up in a hospital, and suspects that he's been exposed to some sort of a gene-editing package that is about to change his body and his mind spectacularly.Often times when I am looking for books to add to To Read list I will add titles that just sound interesting. We come into this world where her son Logan is trying to make amends, and he works for the Gene Protection Agency, which was created as a reaction to what his mom did, to stamp out illegal gene editing.

The Gene Protection Act came in in the wake of the Great Starvation and essentially ended all gene-editing research, because people said, we can't ever have this happen again. Instead of fixing this one thing, she ends up plunging us into what came to be known as the Great Starvation.

'Twenty-some years prior to the events of the book, his mom, Miriam, who was a world-renowned geneticist, was in China with this wild gene-modifying tool she created, trying to edit this rice blight out of a crop. 'The protagonist is a guy named Logan Ramsey,' says Crouch, whose previous books include 2016's Dark Matter, and 2019's Recursion.

Crouch wayward pines