I ran across this book while browsing the store for a new horror read for October and having read most of Bentley Little’s works (I blame this on his love for Arid Deserts and Adobe Towns), I felt in the mood for some more.

 Magdalena was a small town in southeastern Arizona, only a desert mountain range away from Mexico and closer to the New Mexico border than to Tucson

Trigger Warning: Rape, Sodomy, Animal Cruelty, Murder,

The story is pretty standard : guy is left jobless and in this economy, he found out he couldn’t get a new one fast and he was slowly heading towards bankruptcy. He moves in with his cousin on her farm in the middle of nowhere and after the New Year, strange things keep happening.

 Looking up at the adobe church at the end of the street and at the adobe building behind the pickup truck, Ross felt as though he was no longer in Arizona. He’d been born and raised in the state, but unlike California or New Mexico, which both had heavy Spanish influences, Arizona had always seemed to him very anglo, more cowboy-and-Indian than the rest of the Southwest, less Mexican. Magdalena, however, felt like it belonged south of the border. Even its name stood out from those of its more American neighbors: Willcox, Benson, Bisbee, Douglas, Tombstone… Magdalena. He had never felt farther from home.

[Spoiler]

Turns out the rednecks and the Mexicans, in their happy gun firing for the New Year celebration, they shot down a flying demon who looks like one but who they thought was an angel. And the ground becomes poisoned and a lot of things start changing.

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Why Castlevania you think? As I was reading this book, one image came back to me unbidden of the priests worshipping the demon tied down in a church (Season 3)

The difference is that, in the book, the demon is not crucified but dragged into a store house where it incubates in an egg-like shell, so that he can transform and rule the earth. And the people are protecting it and worshipping it while it stays in. They all think it’s an Angel and that they are blessed/cursed for bringing it to Earth from the Heavens.

She could tell that, instead of toning things down as the evening wore on, the faithful were going to end up reveling as hard as the heathens, although perhaps making up for it by being more contrite in their confessions the next day.

The book takes the prize in the most innovative use of chickens in a horror book. They “spy” on people. They lay eggs that are different sizes and thump when moved. The eggs hatch different lizzard creatures that try and kill you. The chicken are not the only creatures suffering mutations or behavioural changes.

On an intellectual level, he was fascinated by what he saw, but on a human level, he was repulsed and frightened in a way he had not been since childhood. Part of him wanted to stand here and observe, while part of him wanted to run away as fast as his feet would carry him.

The vet of the town picks up and moves away when he sees the monstrosities being unleashed:

a suddenly hairless German shepherd that had given birth to a macaw, a rabbit whose ears had fallen off and been replaced by horns.

They see a cow with no legs still moving:

Possessing no legs, it was pulling its bulk across the dirt by inching forward like a grossly overweight and wrongly shaped worm.

Good horror does that for you, you want to run away as quick as possible and as far away as possible but you’re somewhat enthralled with what’s going on and you want to stay and watch. “and then what happened?”

 He felt weird and ill-at-ease. It was daytime and his computer was on, but the ranch still seemed creepy. He was all alone here aside from the horse, the goat, the bees and those freaky chickens, and he was far enough away from town or the nearest house that, as the movie tagline said, no one could hear him scream. So if he tripped and conked his head on a rock, or if he choked on his food and suffocated, there’d be no one to rescue him.

With the writing comes a feeling of feeling trapped, locked in with this horror, of the potential (yet unrealized) of death waiting to happen. It just makes you think – when? how?

The Sex Scenes

I feel like I need to alert readers that there is a fair amount of talks about erections and sex. The main character dreams about sex with his cousin (apparently not induced by months of abstinence but by the nearby demon).

 “What are you doing?” he said, panicking. Smiling, she said nothing, striding across the room until her bare feet were on either side of his head. She squatted over his face. Her vagina was gorgeous—pink and perfectly formed, the delicate slit framed by roseblush labia—and she dipped lower, lightly brushing his mouth, her sweet juices dripping onto his lips. He awoke with a powerful erection, a tent-poler that raised the covers above him

Even when he meets his girl, Jill, he still has a hard-on.

He remembered seeing a Michael Palin travel show about the Himalayas, and in one tribal village, the girls would dance with the boys in a kind of public ceremony, and if a girl rubbed her finger on a boy’s palm, it meant she wanted sex. Jill was doing that right now to him, and the feeling was electric. It was as though the nerves in his hand connected directly with his penis, and he walked all the way back to her house with a very pleasurable erection.

And then, when it finally happens, the sexy description kinda makes me wish the author had watched a bit more chick flicks than just porn.

 He half-heartedly pushed her hands away. “You don’t have to…” “I want to,” she told him, and took out his growing penis, holding it in her hand and lowering her head to meet it. He closed his eyes as she teased him with her tongue, flicking it lightly around the tip before taking him all the way in. The soft warm wetness of her mouth engulfed him completely, and she began sucking greedily, hungrily, speeding up to bring him almost to the brink of climax, then slowing down or stopping when she sensed it was about to happen, allowing him to grow soft again before resuming her efforts. It was an excruciating tease, and it ended when, instead of slowing down, she sped up, and he came in her mouth, spurting jet after jet of semen down her throat. She held him there, waiting patiently until he was finished, then slid her mouth up and off, licking the last drop from the tip. “Wow,” he said breathlessly.

 After they were done, they took a shower together. Giggling, Jill peed on his hand as he washed her well-used vagina. She was as playful in the water as she was intense in bed, and he thought about how lucky he was to have found someone so fun and uninhibited with whom he could actually see himself having a long-term relationship

The Chickens

 The chickens were lined up in the yard, and they were whistling.

I must say this image stuck with me. Whistling chickens. Who would have known?

 Dave had told him that he and Lita had a hundred chickens on the ranch, and most, if not all of them, were standing next to each other, wing to wing, in rows that stretched back dozens deep, staring at his window and whistling in unison. The sight was not merely unnatural but genuinely frightening, and, instantly, Ross let the curtain drop, his heart pounding. The whistling continued unabated. It was a tune he thought he’d heard before, though he couldn’t say where, and while thankfully he could not see through the curtains, the image of the perfectly aligned hens remained imprinted on his mind. He could still see their stiff and unmoving necks, their partially open beaks, their eyes glittering in the moonlight.

Thanks dude, now I can never look at chicken the same way 🙂