Mother Nature can be a scary bitch. Forget horror movies; if you ever want to see some truly messed up, freaky bone-chilling stuff, look no further than your BBC nature documentary. Case in point: the “Jungles” episode of Planet Earth. After so many years, that infamous scene of the killer parasitic fungus bursting forth from the back of a dead ant’s head like some kind of grotesque alien worm still gives me the heebie-jeebies—and clearly, I’m not the only one who feels this way. From The Last of Us to The Girl with All the Gifts, a great number of books, movies, and video games have come out in recent years to show us just how screwed humanity would be if we ever went to war with Kingdom Fungi. Which was why, when I first found out about the premise of The Genius Plague by David Walton, I was immediately intrigued. After all, like in most of the examples I mentioned above, being infected with a fungal plague usually meant very bad things—like turning into a mindless, slavering zombie, for one. Yet in this case, the fungus actually made you…smarter? This was definitely a new angle for me, and I…
