Det Vicky Paterson is investigating a bizarre murder in her small town, and barely notices the massive number of cicadas until they’ve reached plague proportions and attack her child Sadie. Meanwhile, Will and Alicia are private investigators looking for a wealthy heiress who has joined a cult, and their investigation shows a link between the dangerous swarm and the cult itself. As the deaths pile up, various plot threads come together, and the mystery of who or what is behind the swarm becomes chillingly clear…
The book is quite chunky at about 500 pages, and while it’s mostly the stories of Vicky and her daughter, and then Alicia and Will, when we’re about a third of the way in, two other threads are added, giving us a tech baron and his new invention and Rebecca who works at the Body Farm. This book has been likened to The Birds meets Alien, which I can kind of see as it applies to the cicadas, rather than the plotting or writing style as a whole. Andy Marino also wrote It Rides A Pale Horse and The Seven Visitations of Sydney Burgess.
This story seems to be partly inspired by, or especially triggering to people who experienced, the recent wave of cicadas that emerged in 2024 in the US (this also happened in other parts of the world as well). At that time, two waves of mature cicada generations or broods emerged at once, and the noise was apparently deafening and some places were blanketed with the little guys. I can see how this would be overwhelming and a little frightening, especially depending on how you feel about insects or if you grew up with imagery of plagues of locusts. Some of the headlines in the US were pretty melodramatic about the whole affair. I haven’t met any of the US species of cicadas, but I do have a soft spot for the little guys. Growing up, I remember hot Summer evenings sleeping with the windows open to catch any tiny breeze possible and falling asleep to the song of these insects. They’re quite lovely really, with wings like fairies, and where I grew up, they had pretty cute little faces. They’re big, but very gentle. I have lovely memories of handling them as a small child and how loud they are up close. They also had beautiful colours and had romantic names like Black Prince and Green Grocer. That said, not all of them are little cuties, some have a more intimidating look and I don’t think I’d love to be surrounded by a huge wave of them blanketing every surface. Either way, that’s my relationship with this particular insect and it’s also just a point of context.
There are good and bad points about this book that for me are about in equal measure. Really, this book is fiction in the commercial sphere. It’s not literary fiction, or to put it another way, it’s not Rosemary’s Baby, it’s more like The Rats by James Herbert. There’s some really great 70’s and 80’s paperback horror that are like this, with a wave of killer creatures, like rats, crabs and even fog, and this book is sort of in that tradition. Because of that, the characters here are not fully developed and created with great depth. I actually think that’s fine for this genre or type of fiction. Her name is Vicky, she’s a single mom, detective. Got it. We don’t need more than that because we have killer bugs and body horror to keep us entertained… However, because the book is very long, we do need them to have more depth and realism for us to now invest in them for that many pages. We also have too many main characters. We have Vicky, and Alicia and Will, and then also part way in, we are now with Rebecca and now also Anton. These last two are added too late in the narrative and end up slowing the whole thing down. They really don’t add much and could have been left out entirely without us missing much at all. It makes this middle section very bloated and slow, and then the ending feels rushed by comparison. One thing that vintage horror got right was keeping this kind of thing very simple, usually just following one or two characters on a journey.
Speaking of that journey, the book really works when it’s being gruesome and horrible. There are some set pieces and scenes that are truly bloody and gross, and very crunchy and slimey and chilling. The cicada attacks, the cult scenes and the murder victims are really used well to create something really icky and eerie. This is all really great horror stuff. Just what you signed up for. I wanted to know more about the mystery aspect of why this was happening and how our main characters were going to survive this. However, this is competing with long scenes of unnecessary stuff. A few lines about Anton would have covered it, we don’t need him monologuing about his wardrobe changes or having a business meeting that’s not relevant to the plot. We don’t need scenes at The Body Farm, it has nothing to do with anything, and Rebecca’s interior life adds nothing and again is not really relevant or used in any way. Even Vicky, Will and Alicia could have been tightened up a lot. Into that, we also get a very indecisive throughline. At the start, we are given something about a cult, but rather than lean into and going with that, the author can’t seem to decide which horror cliche to use, so he uses all of them, meaning they’re all a bit of a vague mess. The only thing it isn’t is climate change. If you know the usual suspects behind any X Files conspiracy theory type episodes, they’re all here in this book and they’re all the big bad responsible. All of them. And not in a wild, over the top, fun way, but in a confused, unsatisfying, throw everything in at the ending kind of a way. That last page twist isn’t wild and clever, it’s just the one crazy thing that hadn’t already been used. The kitchen sink.
So for me, I’m of two minds about this one. I think it’s just too long and slows down too much in the middle, so it’s not a great book or even the level of quality and entertainment that it should have been with better editing. Horror is meant to be fun and page turning, not a slog to get through. But if you are a horror fan specifically, the visual and visceral imagery, the people spouting cult phrases, bugs burrowing, hair teeth and nails, death and panic, are all really good horror stuff. So, it’s got it’s problems, but I can see why Andy Marino also has loyal readers. There’s some good things in here.
Read It If: might please some horror fans, maybe Craig DiLouie readers. It’s overlong at times, with slow exposition and needless scenes and characters, but it’s also a chunky, slimey, six legged, sickening crunchy book, at others.
Thank you to HBG Canada for the copy of this book for review.
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