I liked this unusual entry in the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it genre just about to the end, where it all really fell apart on me. Until then, I was enjoying the account of a manmade virus, engineered as a “humane” weapon, that renders human communication impossible and is unexpectedly let loose on the populace. The virus’s designers and the story’s narrator, a rather self-pitying, forlorn geneticist hired to find a cure, survive in an underground bunker. But the novel doesn’t fulfill its early promise. There are unexpected effects of the virus, to be sure, but they are not fully explored or explained. And the end peters out, as if the author had painted himself into a corner—which, considering that his first-person narrator had contracted the virus himself and was no longer able to write a coherent story that we could read, he had.