New Arrival: The Hungry Earth by Nicholas Kaufman

 It’s easy to make fun of the Sharknado series of movies. Even ignoring the ludicrous idea of a weather phenomenon that turns sharks into projectile weapons, there’s the stilted dialogue, one-dimensional characters, and acting that tells the audience the actor just wants the paycheck. However, that series is arguably satirizing the disaster movie genre that spawned them, and many of those disaster movies that came before were trying to be serious, using alien invasions and science run amok to explore what humans could and actually do in the face of an apocalyptic event.  This fertile ground for horror is where Nicholaus Kaufman digs deep, unearthing some ripe, fruiting bodies in his tale of mushrooms-gone-malevolent The Hungry Earth.

The small town of Sakima, New York is in a state of flux. Not only is a company planning to tear up its popular community garden to put up condos, but there is something deadly growing in that garden. The citizens of Sakima soon exhibit odd behavior, muttering dreamily about a god in the garden and blowing spores into others’ faces, making more and more people like them. It’s up to a small group of people, including the town doctor and a botanist-turned-teacher, to stop this mad mushroom before it spreads its influence across the world.

The premise of the book has some silly elements, but really it’s no more silly than a blob devouring a city or clones of people bursting out of seed pods. Kaufman knows that the drama, the horror, in these stories lies in the effects it has on the representatives of humanity who are either consumed by the alien threat or who must rise up and stop it. The relationship between town doctor Laura and her scientist love interest Booker are one of the linchpins of this book, not just a will-they-or-won’t-they vibe, but whether or not they’ll survive long enough to make it work. There’s the town oddball Victor, whose resourcefulness helps those battling this invasive fungus. There’s even Seth, who not only represents the company that wants to put up condos but the spoiler of the group’s plans, thereby creating drama. Add to this some copious body horror of mushrooms doing traumatic things to the human body and this becomes a novel that follows a well-known formula of saving a small town from invasion, but one that stands out from all the Body Snatchers and Blob clones out there. And, of course, it definitely stands out from Sharknado.