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.

 

Have You Read This? August's Eyes by Glenn Rolfe

 Ghosts can haunt us, but so do memories. These ghosts of memory haunt us with the joys we can never again know as well as the regrets that make us second-guess ourselves. Sometimes, these memories can be patient. They can wait a long time, emerging years later, clawing their way out of our psyches where we buried them. Such is the fate of the protagonist in Glenn Rolfe’s supernatural thriller August’s Eyes.

When John Colby was a boy, he saw something he shouldn’t have. He saw a young friend get kidnapped by a killer the press called the Ghoul of Wisconsin. John buried this event deep in his mind until years later, when an adult John, now married and a social worker, is tormented by dreams where he is a boy and trapped in a place called Graveyard Land, and there is a Ghoul in that graveyard that he doesn’t want to find him. John thought that it was just a dream but that dream is intruding on the waking world, terrorizing his family and friends. The Ghoul is also very real, and he wants little Johnny to come with him to Graveyard Land and stay there forever.

Rolfe’s work is very reminiscent of Stephen King with its developed characters, slow-building tension, and epic, otherworldly confrontations. However, there’s a little bit of Jack Ketchum creeping in, or at least an extreme sensibility that shows Rolfe doesn’t mind exploring the subject of child abduction and assault. The book does indeed get dark, but it never feels exploitative. Rolfe does this by populating his book with characters that are more than one-dimensional hostages, characters that the reader can get to know, love, and cheer for as they fight their way through the story’s darkness. From wife Sarah, who is supportive of her husband while having her own interests, to Patrick, a hard-working teenager who gets a chance to put his true crime knowledge to use. Finally, there’s John Colby himself, who has his flaws, but he is still a likable protagonist and ultimately demonstrates the strength of character needed to fight back against the Ghoul and his minions. The book left a few gaps in the overall mythology, placing the main villain too deeply into the shadows at times, while the plot also moved too quickly, zipping quickly between chapters and storylines, but August’s Eyes  is still a great read for people who wish Stephen King would really cut loose. The book was still an enjoyable stroll through Graveyard Land even with some serious darkness always nipping at my heels.

Screen to Scream: Lake Mungo to Come With Me

 Perhaps the biggest idea that humanity fears is its ultimate end, specifically the physical death of the individual. The question of what happens to one’s consciousness when the body dies doesn’t generate as much emotion as what happens to those friends and family a departed person leaves behind. Death, by its very nature, creates an absence, an absence that many who are still among the living struggle to fill. Many ghost stories are not just about the ghosts that haunt them; rather, they follow those who are looking for a purpose that will help fill the absence that haunts them. Two examples of this kind of ghost story are the movie Lake Mungo and Ronald Malfi’s latest Come With Me.

Lake Mungo is a movie that uses a documentary format to tell the spine-tingling tale of Alice Palmer, a teenager who drowns in Lake Mungo and her family, who believe she is haunting them. It seems odd that this movie came out in 2009 because it accurately captures the feel of a Netflix documentary, including the testimonials of family members as they notice strange images in recordings set up to capture the ghostly phenomenon. Lake Mungo is the kind of movie that forces you to pay attention, even as its story peels back layer after layer, revealing more about Alice Palmer that even her family didn’t know. Ultimately, what haunts the Palmer family is how much they don’t know about their daughter, and their journey to find the truth is a harrowing one that leaves them with little closure and very few answers.

Come With Me, Malfi’s latest and his best so far, tells a similar story of only discovering who someone is after they’ve died. The story follows Aaron Decker, a young man who had just lost his wife Allison in a senseless shooting. As he tries to process his grief over losing the love of his life, Aaron discovers that his wife had been keeping secrets. Aaron’s journey begins with the discovery of a receipt from a motel hundreds of miles away. He soon discovers what Allison had been working on prior to her death, a project that becomes Aaron’s and one that threatens to destroy him. Malfi shows his skills at crafting mysteries, leaving an assortment of clues interspersed with red herrings, all while Aaron tries to discover not just the monster she’s been chasing but the past she’s been outrunning all her life. Malfi proves that his skills at storytelling are as precise as a watchmaker’s. One cog is Aaron, the grieving husband, who tells this story in a sort of confessional to his wife, opening a window into his emotional pain. Other smaller cogs include Malfi’s teasing of the supernatural with a level of restraint that bursts like a damn during the book’s ending. Fans of Lake Mungo will love the slow burn and harrowed protagonist of Come With Me and both movies should be taught in classes that teach writers how to create an unsettling miasma that consumes the reader.