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Book Review: Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Del Rey, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-399-18210-5

Availability: hardcover, audiobook, ebook

 

It’s inevitable that any 782 page magnum opus about the end of the world like Wanderers will get compared to the two titans of the apocalyptic pantheon, Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song.  Wendig’s tome compares fairly well. The prose is excellent, character development is strong, and the plot has plenty of surprises.  Wanderers might have been able to join the other two at the top of the mountain, but it does have a couple of faults.  The story sputters to a muddled conclusion at the finish line, and the author’s insertion of his own political beliefs into the stories detracts from the strength of some of the characters, reducing them to stereotypical cardboard cutouts.

 

14 year old Nessie one day starts walking down the driveway in an unresponsive trance, leaving the home she shares with her older sister Shana and her father. Others with the same symptoms soon join her, and soon there is a pseudo-parade of walkers and supporters marching across the country, although no one knows where they are going.  The real focus of the story, however, isn’t the walkers themselves, it’s the reaction of the rest of the country to them.  Are the walkers carriers of a new disease?  A sign from God?  Messengers of the devil?  They become national news in an election year, and reactions vary from solidarity with the walkers to outright violence against the “devil’s parade”.   It becomes a race for medical professionals to find the cause of the trance-walking, set against the backdrop of a country on edge due to its own political beliefs about the walkers.

 

There isn’t much to dislike in the book.  The author writes extremely well in a tight-but-loose fashion, the story peppered with numerous asides and pop culture references that give the book a unique feel.   This is truly a character-driven story.  It’s not so much about what the characters do: how they think, feel and respond to their own lives, and the world falling apart around them is what keeps the story flowing.  Summing up the actual actions of the first 500 pages could be done in a few sentences, but that would miss out on the richness of the characters’ thoughts and emotions.  The plot itself is an unusually complex take on the “end of the world” scenario, as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology play a part.  It is partially a detective story, and it’s not an easy puzzle to figure out, especially with the final twist inserted in the last few pages.

 

The drawbacks to Wanderers are minor, but they prevent a good story from becoming a great one.  As noted, the final showdown between good and evil was a bit convoluted and didn’t really fit the rest of the story.  The real problem is the author’s use of stereotypes when it comes to his antagonists from the conservative side of the political spectrum.  These make the villains far too predictable in their actions and reasons.  Author Wendig also has a bad habit of inserting his own liberal beliefs into the story as narration asides, not as part of the character development.  That damages the narrative, when it is written from the author’s point of view to make a political case, and not to further the story.

 

Overall, Wanderers is a well-written, epic saga of the end of the world, and well worth the time investment to read its almost 800 pages.  However, conservative readers will have to put aside their own feelings and viewpoints to enjoy reading this.  Otherwise, they will probably get mad and quit within the first 100 pages.  Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, mild gore, racial slurs, rape

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Editor’s note: Wanderers was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Novel.

Posted on April 10, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Choking Back the Devil: Poems by Donna Lynch

Choking Back the Devil: Poems by Donna Lynch

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-947879-12-6

Available: Paperback, Kindle

 

In the Afterword to Choking Back the Devil: Poems, Donna Lynch describes how the reader’s “immersion” in horror poetry can be “an ax right to the torso” and more intense than the horror fiction which she also writes. This poetry proves her right. Lynch has created nightmarish psychological landscapes full of emotional pain and torture and menacing nameless and faceless figures that are humans, monsters, and witches. Her words reveal monstrous truths like the real life horrors that are so bad we might want to believe they could only be fictional.

The central poems in this collection focus on capturing the trauma of torment in terrifying emotional detail. The poet keeps the spotlight on feelings rather than actions. There is despair here and a loss of faith, even in God, as well as symbolic images of mutilated internal organs and “hollowed” victims running in terror. In the most ghastly of these poems, the title poem, a body is invaded by the devil. As if that is not enough, Lynch does not spare the reader from imagining being the random victim of a callous human monster in the aptly named poem “It Just Wasn’t Your Night” and contemplating the chilling fate of each child in “Sacrifice” who is “chosen” to suffer in place of the rest. But, neither does she leave out those who turn their horrific memories into weapons, anger, and even a sisterhood of sorts as is the case in “Legend” and “Honey.”

Other poems move in different directions while maintaining the same emotional content. “If You Love Me” uses terrifying thoughts that a rational person might only think but never seriously enact to show how it feels when a victim of a manipulative love turns what should be doubt in someone else into self-doubt.  A clever little poem, “Wreckage,” uses a mirroring word effect in two stanzas to show alternative perspectives in a relationship, and “My Incomplete Children” makes one think of Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” with Lynch’s poems being the horror version since her poems, as she says, “have teeth.” And, indeed, they do. Highly Recommended

Contains: body horror, posssession, violence.

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Editor’s note: Choking Back the Devil: Poems was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection.

Posted on April 9, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

Self published, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-797875-7-12

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

There are a lot of horrors in modern reality that don’t require monsters and boogeymen.   When combined, child abduction and fear of the unknown are two of the most effective ones.  In Gemma Amor’s quick 120 page novella, she uses them well.  This is a fast story with no drag between the pages, although the minimalist style she writes with may be off-putting to readers who prefer heavily developed stories.   Those who get squeamish about child abduction and murder in their fiction may want to look elsewhere, although there are no gory details.

 

Laura is a 14-year-old girl, who has the misfortune to leave her best friend and first boyfriend, Bobby,  alone at the bus stop for five minutes.  She returns to see him violating the #1 rule for kids: don’t ever get in a van with a stranger.  The van leaves, and that’s the last anyone ever hears from Bobby.  It’s not the last Laura hears, though.  On her birthday, she receives her first letter from ‘X,’ who claims to have taken Bobby.   Thus begins a bizarre game of quid pro quo, where X reveals a little more of Bobby’s fate with each yearly letter, as long as Laura leaves a personal object he requests at a specified location.  Some of the objects are mundane, and some require a personal and painful sacrifice of a physical nature from Laura.  This continues for decades, until the story resolves in the final few pages.

 

The story is told in the third person, and only from the point of view of the protagonist, it never shifts away from Laura.  The narration throughout Dear Laura is a very stripped-down, bare bones type of writing.  There is little time given to description in this book, and the backstory to the characters is essentially non-existent.  Dialogue?  Forget about it, there’s only ~10-15 lines of dialogue scattered throughout Dear Laura‘s 117 pages.  This is very straightforward writing: it tells what is happening, and doesn’t elaborate on anything.  Does the simplistic style weaken the writing?  No, it doesn’t.  Considering the bleakness of the subject matter, the basic style that author Amor uses lends to the curiously odd appeal.   People always seem to want answers to everything in life, and when people read books, they don’t want to just know what the villain did; they want to know WHY he did it.  Amor doesn’t waste time elaborating on such niceties, as they would get in the way and slow down the story.  That’s why her sparse writing style really shines with the novella’s subject matter. Sure the reader will have more questions than answers at the end of the story, but often, that’s what life is like anyhow.  Considering how often people in this world do evil things for no particular reason, the overall lack of explanation for actions of certain characters in Dear Laura make it all the more interesting…and realistic.

 

For readers that want an interesting, quick-paced story with no wasted time, Dear Laura should land right in their wheelhouse.  Most readers should find this appealing, the only exceptions being people who require densely layered stories and no plot holes.  Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, child abduction

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

 

Editor’s note: Dear Laura was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

 

Posted on April 7, 2020 by , Reply
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