Timothy F Connolly, $0.99, ISBN 978-0463033104
Horror, 2018

Timothy F Connolly’s Jessica’s Monster is shelved under horror, but it’s more of an action-adventure caper with some horror elements.

Dr Jessica McCallum is a scientist that has been given the power to ask big pharmaceutical corporations for whatever she wants, and they will be stabbing one another to get it for her, because she has found a way to combine animal and plant DNA to produce a drug that can treat ischemia reperfusion injuries after an organ transplant.

Okay, let me see whether I still remember my medical terms. “Ischemia” is easy, it’s a term to describe oxygen shortage in the environment inside our body. “Reperfusion” is one of those words that most medical people don’t really know the meaning of, they only know of it because it’s coupled to “ischemia” in their textbooks and lectures. What “ischaemia reperfusion” is, therefore, is the occurrence of cell death or worsening of the rate of cell death that is already existing in a tissue when, paradoxically enough to most people, oxygen supply is restored to the tissue after a period of low or zero oxygen.

There are many theories as to why this can happen, ranging from reactive oxygen species damaging tissues to the presence of nitric oxide to probably some other things that I really can’t recall and don’t want to try because it’s not like I’m being tested on this and will receive a medal or something for my effort.

So, TL; DR: ischemic reperfusion bad, so Jessica’s drug Tambustin good. Although, I’m really not sure about the name. It sounds vaguely racist against hobbits or something.

Unfortunately, her Big Pharma mentor has authorized, behind her back, the use of a modified version of the drug (again, modified without her knowledge) on a corpse, and as a result, things are bustin’ indeed when the dead young lady is brought back to life with dietary habits that are, shall we say, not exactly kosher with the rest of population. Can Jessica and her boyfriend-or-maybe-ex-oh-it’s-complicated Luke Beauchamp come together and put a stop to all this nonsense before everyone realizes that her drug sucks the world is destroyed by pure evil?

This story is something. One of the first victims of Miss Not Dead Now gives her a profuse oral servicing before, intoxicated by her special flavors, inadvertently pushes his whole head into her you-know-what and ends up being decapitated. Talking about losing one’s head to a woman. This is awesome—and I’m not saying this in a facetious manner.

Unfortunately, there is nothing here that can match that moment. The author has played his best hand too early, and the rest of the story feels anticlimactic in comparison.

Then there is Jessica. Seriously, why is she shocked when a biotech corporation seeks to weaponize her drug? She’s a researcher that supposedly has been around for a bit—how can she not know of the close ties between the military and the big pharmaceutical companies of her country? She has the naïveté of an undergrad rather than a researcher long out of university—other readers may be fine with her as their placeholder, but I find this rather immersion-breaking as I’ve been part of that scene far longer than I’d have liked.

In the end, this story doesn’t say anything new. The FDA is a “whorehouse”? Well, here’s the thing: all these drug regulation entities in every country are run by politicians and corporate types, and more often than not, the actual medical people only “advise” the people that sign off the approvals in these entities. Big Pharma sucks? Well, I’m inclined to agree, in the sense that I feel that medicines and good healthcare should be a basic human right, not a luxury available to only those that can pay the exorbitant costs of biologics and other types of newer drugs that are available these days.

I still get news these days, of amazing new drugs that can supposedly extend the life of women with late stage breast cancer that has spread all over their body. Sounds good, until I read the fine print and learn that each dose costs far more than an average person earns in a year, and even after all that financial ruination, life is extended only by three to six months. One may as well pay that much money to some center in Switzerland to serve up the best euthanasia a terminally ill sod can ask for.

However, that issue, I feel, is far more complex than just “Big Pharma sucks”. Until we find a way to balance ethical research and testing of drugs, which is ludicrously expensive to do, and the need for cost-effective affordable drugs, it’s hard to change the current situation. Making new medications is way too expensive, period, and can only be afforded by those companies that treat health as a profit-making enterprise, so it’s a vicious downward spiral. Why else do you think Bill Gates mentions, on tape to boot, that he is so “sad” that the COVID-19 variants are becoming milder over time, hence possibly one day rendering obsolete the vaccines produced by the company that he is a board member of? As people get better, he has to settle for buying 20 yachts for his year-end treat instead of 50.

What’s the solution, though, I don’t know. Maybe we should just say screw ethics and go back to the days when Edward Jenner happily tested his smallpox vaccine prototype on a boy, without even telling the kid what he was doing, so that everyone and anyone can produce new drugs after fundraising on Kickstarter or something. Sure, buyers beware, and take them at one’s own risk, but at least it sure beats mortgaging and prostituting everything dear in one’s life to finance billionaires’ year-end bonuses in exchange for just a few more months of misery.

Oh, and before anyone says it, I’m someone that believes in science and the usual what-not. I just don’t have faith that the current distribution of healthcare and medications will benefit anyone other than the wealthy elites in this world.

Yes, yes, back to this story. It’s alright. The pacing is fine, and the story moves at a good speed that hammers home the urgency felt by Jessica and friends very well. When the story zooms to Miss Not Dead, there’s a nice body horror tale waiting to be unleashed there.

However, it’s not really the party I am hoping for. I feel that there is tad too much focus on the boring good guys and not enough on the Miss Not Dead happily killing everyone in her path.

This one is like The Fly when the thing referred to in the title has only half the screen time that it had in the original movie. While it’s a perfectly serviceable read, it doesn’t push far or stretch wide enough to be truly memorable. More bad guys and horror, and less boring goody-two-shoes please.