Description
From the author of The Howling, Gary Brandner…
In Milwaukee, a regular at Vic’s Tavern suddenly smashes a beer bottle and carves up the other customers.
In Manhattan, an easygoing cabdriver goes berserk and hurls his cab into a crowd of pedestrians.
In Seattle, a young bride slashes her husband in a busy restaurant, then flings herself through a plate-glass window.
At first, these shocking incidents appear unrelated. Then a disturbing pattern emerges – the agonizing headaches, the violent tantrums, the faces erupting with sickening lesions, then the final, fatal outburst.
The epidemic spreads. The nation panics. The Brain Eaters devour America.
Their hunger can never be satisfied.
Ryan Pascall –
This was a strange book for me because of 2 reasons. First, a probably foremost, is that I am listening to a story about what appears to be a killer flu and I’m sure the power of this fact isn’t lost on anyone.
The second point is that I rarely read all the blurb on books, as often they give more away than I’d like, and so I came into this story expecting something totally different than what I got and for that I am thankful (as I had expected a hokey zombie novel).
As for the story itself, I really enjoyed it!
I felt at times that this story would work excellently as a 50s sci-fi novel such as The Magnetic Monster as it carried a charmingly innocent feel of that era coupled with some truly horrific and tragic acts of violence.This isn’t to say the book is some gore-fest, far from it. I found the whole story very clinical and straight which added to that timeless feel and yet it wasn’t until the ‘credits’ at the end that I realised the book was written 35 years ago!
The narration meanwhile was exactly what I would expect from Sean Duregger as the man has the excellent ability to give a real sense of identity to each character and make them recognisable from scene to scene. Equally, while in some other narrations he has felt very relaxed and flippant, here there was a real sense of drama and gravitas that really worked to drive home the tragedy that was unfolding.
All in all we have a great story that, while quite limited in scope, has a real sense of threat but I would recommend against listing to it during our current Corvid-19 pandemic as it doesn’t help to alleviate any worries.