Hiding fandom in the underwear drawer since 1977

In the grim future year of 2021, safety is found only in certain walled communities, while lawlessness prevails in outlying areas. While driving through the California desert to visit family, a doctor and his twin teenaged daughters are captured by members of an isolated cultlike group whose founder was the sole survivor of a deep space mission to Proxima Centauri. The prisoners expect to be killed if they don't escape, but it might be even worse—the former astronaut and his followers carry an alien pathogen that gives them strange powers and bizarre compulsions, and they want to infect their three captives.

This was the last-published book in the Patternist series, but the third one I've read, as I'm following the suggested chronological reading order. I was warned that in this reading order it's totally opaque how this book relates to the others, which certainly is the case! The only apparent connection is Clay Dana, a minor character from Mind of My Mind who is said in this book to have invented interstellar travel using his psionic abilities. But the other characters don't seem to be aware of the telepathic Patternists as a group, so it seems that in the intervening decades they've managed to continue influencing society without fully revealing themselves.

Reading it basically as a stand-alone, the book seems to be about what it means to be human. It questions the dichotomy of human and monster, as the "ordinary" humans of the lawless desert prove more brutal and violent than the infected half-aliens are. The characters assume that allowing the pathogen to spread across Earth would be a bad thing, but when you see what human society is becoming, you wonder if altering more people's nature might be an improvement.

I felt that the book was too long, which is surprising at just over 200 pages. The characters are strongly written (as expected from Butler) but I think there might be too many of them, and sometimes the same events are needlessly reiterated from multiple POVs. I also had trouble with the level of violence. I didn't think it was gratuitous since it seemed necessary for the book to make its thematic points as I understood them; violence is just hard for me to read and there's a lot of it here, including rape and the constant threat of rape.

It'll be interesting to see how my perspective changes once I've read the whole series and seen what readers knew of the Patternist universe when these prequels were published. Worth noting that I will indeed be reading Survivor, a book in the series that's been out of print for ages because Butler apparently hated it. Very curious about that one.