And Another Thing...

Before I can quite let go of the viral rage, I wanted to mention the clever way that virals work. By selecting men who were condemned to execution as the experimental subjects, the Army scientists create virals who were already embedded with rage and hatred and in a few cases, sheer lunacy. So when the virals stage a revolution against their captors, they work by invading the subconscious thoughts of the humans in close proximity. Humans begin having the dreams that the virals determine, largely reliving the crime that sent their human selves to death row in the first place. Now the reason that this matters so much, this unification with the will of the viral, is in its mirroring of religious devotion. Cronin makes the virals godlike and seems to question the very nature of conscious choice. Now that's a lot for a book about vampires gone wild.