It's Going to Catch You

Sarah Langan, Virus, 2007
It's easy for book reviewers to compare new horror writers with Stephen King. Most have never read any horror before and think the genre owes everything to King's more popular novels or their big screen adaptations. Because the genre is so small (and disappearing so quickly from bookshops) publishers depend on those Stephen King comparisons or quotes to emblazon a front cover and hope for extra sales. This second novel by Sarah Langan is compared to early Stephen King by a reviewer of The Times. I can see that, if you think of Stephen King's early work as taut writing, fast action, tense mood, grim humour and expert depiction of small towns in Maine.

This novel seems to pick up from where Sarah Langan's first novel ended, though you can read both separately. Middle-class haven Corpus Christi is a few minutes away from ghost town Bedford. During a school bus trip to Bedford, one of Corpus Christi's children goes missing. When he returns, he brings inside of him something that he found in Bedford's surrounding woods. Very quickly, things degenerate in Corpus Christi, its smug citizens not knowing what hit them before it's too late.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this novel as much as I did when I picked it up at my local library. Definitely worth checking out if you enjoy horror page-turners.